amor wrote:Bodywork wrote:My main point.
I talked about kua now in three threads. Graham has still offered nothing but quotes that he doesn't understand.
Wgen I said to try talking for himself. Try talking mechanics? He bailed.
Oh well.
Although I think I understand what you are saying about kua being about rotation and not about folding. Kua, to me, does encompass the folding bit or inguinal crease as its known in the online taichi world but it's also that part in the back between sacrum and hip bones on the pelvis , PSIS I think? Which when freed does bring about some rotation of the femur in the pelvis socket.
But how can this usage be used in a practical fighting application. Would you be able to explain this via one of the typical postures from say, the chen style form which probably has many examples of the figure-8 mechanism at play. I think most on here have probably guessed by now the theory of femur rotating in socket as representing kua and defines rotation more than folding but how does this relate to a real world example. I always learned things best by practical example and not always by blunt theory personally. So maybe try out a practical method?
You have to ask yourself a few questions:
Mechanically what would folding do to produce either stability, or power?
What would rotation do to enhance stability and power.
You yourself just noted that turning of the hip drags the knee. I would add that you can stretch and loosen and solve that problem, but without loosening the joints and re- training the legs/ pelvic floor/ and virtually all of the surrounding musculature, you would still just end up swimming your hips sideways like the vast majority of martial artists.
Next is the issue of creating a Dantien
Training it to use the power being offered by the legs and then directing it.... where? How?
How, does it come up when it used to spin..out?
What muscles are doing what to change?
What does "up" involve that isn't "out" anymore?
Powering
through the hips.
Is vastly different than powering
from the hips.
Powering through the hips is shown all over the place in high level guys (again, to stay on topic it is the OP video 0.20 and on)
Powering
from the hips? Watch the rest of the videos from this thread and a host of other guys claiming that they don't... until you watch them move.
Devlin. You really don't want to bring power from one leg to the other through the lower basin. It is terribly inefficient. Joining the dantien to them and joining the upper body to the lower body through a conditioned connection between the dantien(s) is the way to go.
To say it another way:
You can generate all the power your can muster from your legs....
Where is it going?
How did it get there?
For most TMAers I've met..
A percentage good out their knees.
A percentage out their hips
A percentage out their shoulders
And another dumping from one side to the other.
The very idea of whole body connection and rotations in the frame to make yin/yang is like talking a different language. It takes ten seconds to put hands on people who do it and you can feel the difference. The problwm isn't that. The problem is being willing to eat bitter and re-tool your body to do it.