Double Weighted

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Re: Double Weighted

Postby origami_itto on Mon Dec 31, 2018 12:06 pm

everything wrote:
Almost all sports do this. As I often say. Taijiquan grasp sparrow's tail basic exercise does seem to help. Here is a double weighting that I want to cause. No touch force!

Image


Sure, like I said this concept isn't the only path to the skill. This is just the one I know a tiny bit about.

That no-touch force there is exactly what I was talking about in a boxing context. If you can get them going left when they should be going right and position yourself so that it is very awkward and difficult for them to reach you, that's a kind of double-weighting that takes advantage of momentum. Stumbling, stuttering, apparent clumsiness, etc.

johnwang wrote:
oragami_itto wrote:It's hard to induce it in yourself because you really need some outside force to see/feel the effect.

If double weighted can only happen from your opponent's attack, should you spend your training time to learn how to counter his attack so he won't put you in such situation?


Why yes, that's a great idea. I call that Taijiquan. :D

The idea is that proper application of this theory in particular is both a counter attack and evasion.

If you consider the opponent's attacking hand or foot or shoulder or knee, etc, as a substantial body segment, then when it makes contact with your body, you should make that part insubstantial to prevent the force from affecting your body.

Whether that means moving it out the way through turning or stepping or bending, etc, or through more subtle internal adjustments that allow you to capture and redirect the force, it's still all part of the same principle.

And as mentioned above it doesn't only happen from an attack, you need outside force to feel it. Gravity is sufficient, but the greater the force the more obvious it becomes.

When your opponent's attack put you in double weighted (unable to change), it's not your double weighed problem, it's the problem that you can't counter your opponent's attack.


Yes the "problem" is obviously you can't counter or evade at that point. The error of double weighting might be one way to describe the CAUSE of that problem. Understanding it, detecting it, correcting it, and avoiding it are skills you develop.
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Re: Double Weighted

Postby Steve James on Mon Dec 31, 2018 12:42 pm

Well, you can't walk if you're double-weighted :)
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Re: Double Weighted

Postby johnwang on Mon Dec 31, 2018 1:10 pm

Is this double weighted?

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Re: Double Weighted

Postby origami_itto on Mon Dec 31, 2018 1:22 pm

Totally.
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Re: Double Weighted

Postby origami_itto on Mon Dec 31, 2018 1:29 pm

I honestly don't understand your obsession with it, frankly. It's not part of what you train. You seem to have done fine without it, best to just move on.
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Re: Double Weighted

Postby wiesiek on Tue Jan 01, 2019 1:08 am

johnwang wrote:Is this double weighted?



-bow-
thank you JW, excellent ex.

@ Origami, what do you mean by "totally"?
are they BOTH d. weighted?
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Re: Double Weighted

Postby origami_itto on Tue Jan 01, 2019 6:59 am

wiesiek wrote:
johnwang wrote:Is this double weighted?



-bow-
thank you JW, excellent ex.

@ Origami, what do you mean by "totally"?
are they BOTH d. weighted?


For a second, yeah. They both meet and try a throw, at first they can't get it off, that's the double weighted part. It resolved pretty quick though. The one who found the way through it picked up the other one.
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Re: Double Weighted

Postby Bao on Tue Jan 01, 2019 7:35 am

johnwang wrote:Is this double weighted?



Similar to what one of my tai chi teachers taught. Whatever throwing attempt, one of the methods was to follow the opponent's movement's and "sit" with the legs close to each other and counter from that position. Works very well.

But he believed that no matter what movement you did you cannot do it perfectly even, not even have 50/50 balance, because your body halves are different. If you work with the body in its own way that it wants to move, it's naturally not double weighted. So double weighted in this sense means forced and working against the body's nature.
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Re: Double Weighted

Postby everything on Tue Jan 01, 2019 10:10 am

I thought there is a moment of "substantial" vs. "substantial" and that is not a yin/yang balance. Imagine if the two contestants were not in the same weight class. Force vs. force, yang vs. yang, wouldn't work.
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Re: Double Weighted

Postby northerndevotee on Tue Jan 01, 2019 11:16 am

Regards the o.p. Nice.
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Re: Double Weighted

Postby johnwang on Tue Jan 01, 2019 11:19 am

everything wrote:I thought there is a moment of "substantial" vs. "substantial" and that is not a yin/yang balance. Imagine if the two contestants were not in the same weight class. Force vs. force, yang vs. yang, wouldn't work.

- Your opponent uses head lock to press your body downward.
- You press his leg to push him down.
- When your opponent resists against your downward pressing (he try to raise up), you borrow his resistance force, and lift him up.

If your opponent want to

- sink down, you help him to sink down further.
- raise up, you help him to raise up further.

It meets 100% the borrow force principle. The borrow force doesn't have to be horizontal. It can be vertical as well.
Last edited by johnwang on Tue Jan 01, 2019 11:20 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Double Weighted

Postby origami_itto on Tue Jan 01, 2019 1:14 pm

johnwang wrote:
everything wrote:I thought there is a moment of "substantial" vs. "substantial" and that is not a yin/yang balance. Imagine if the two contestants were not in the same weight class. Force vs. force, yang vs. yang, wouldn't work.

- Your opponent uses head lock to press your body downward.
- You press his leg to push him down.
- When your opponent resists against your downward pressing (he try to raise up), you borrow his resistance force, and lift him up.

If your opponent want to

- sink down, you help him to sink down further.
- raise up, you help him to raise up further.

It meets 100% the borrow force principle. The borrow force doesn't have to be horizontal. It can be vertical as well.


I agree and that's 100% valid in my opinion. You use the change from substantial to insubstantial and then substantial in the other direction.

Taijiquan as I understand it uses the same principle but seeks to avoid that moment it being bound up. Because it could potentially resolve either way it's best to just avoid it altogether.

I believe the idea and what makes taijiquan different and potentially effective is that most approaches to conflict involve that clashing together and resolution process. The effective taijiquan practitioner presents an apparent target for that, but never lets the opponent achieve it. They think they are getting it and chase it, but really they are gently coaxed into a bad position.

Ideally in that sort of situation I would put downward or sideways pressure then release and apply pressure in the other direction while they are still raising their force to resist the first pressure, vs binding then reversing. Both work but the first way is much stronger.
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Re: Double Weighted

Postby Appledog on Tue Jan 01, 2019 8:16 pm

Steve James wrote:Well, you can't walk if you're double-weighted :)


Sure you can. I do it all the time.

oragami_itto wrote:
johnwang wrote:
oragami_itto wrote:It's hard to induce it in yourself because you really need some outside force to see/feel the effect.

If double weighted can only happen from your opponent's attack, should you spend your training time to learn how to counter his attack so he won't put you in such situation?


Why yes, that's a great idea. I call that Taijiquan. :D


You seem to have done a 180. First you said that it's hard to induce it in yourself because you really need some outside force to get the effect, but then you buy into Johnwang's premise that it can only happen from an attack. This isn't true at all. There is a difference, of course, between being locked up and being sent off via a small push, and the entrance into such a situation. But the root cause is in and of itself double weightedness. Since Taijiquan enters along a curved line, the entire curved line itself may compress and expand on the fly, seeking out any sort of broken or frozen shape to exploit. The actuation of this to the point where the opponent can no longer plausibly change or resist is the lock or the push out. However, unless you can get to the root of the problem you won't be able to prevent this from happening in your own shape.

This is done, basically, by specialized qigong exercises designed to fast-track your personal body shape into the proper body shape for the form and/or to just do the form (which might take a bit longer but works just the same). You really can't say more other than to underline the necessity of doing the form first before push hands (for precisely the reason outlined above) or to give personalized instruction by examining the student's shape and then giving them specialized (not "secret", just personalized) exercises. This is why "Only I was taught these exercises by the master," because only you were making the specific mistakes you were making. Kind of ironic then, that all of those people who claim to have been taught what no one else was taught, really just are parading the fact that they were a low level student who needed to rely on crutches to approach the form. I jest, the crutches are just time saving devices (unless you couldn't get there with the form only, but in that case it becomes a different martial art as you rely on the qigongs versus the form itself to guide your progress in the long-term).

So as to what double weighted is and how to get rid of it, I just explained exactly what it is and how to get rid of it, but in order to understand you need to have extensive experience in the form to understand how your body changes and the things that you really need to know as you go into push hands. Which means you need to know what it is before you will understand my explanation. So allow me to give a quick layman's explanation. Double weight is the physical-mental inability to change in order to maintain your taijiquan shape during motion, which directly results from not moving from the one-point, but instead having more than one "local" point of force origin. For example when someone tenses their fist during a punch or if they step up onto their toes during a kick. Or for example throwing a sling but with a tiny weight attached to one of the strings; it doesn't work at speed but instead it breaks at speed, and you do it slowly to seek out and prevent such breakage (for example).
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Re: Double Weighted

Postby everything on Tue Jan 01, 2019 8:39 pm

oragami_itto wrote:
johnwang wrote:
everything wrote:I thought there is a moment of "substantial" vs. "substantial" and that is not a yin/yang balance. Imagine if the two contestants were not in the same weight class. Force vs. force, yang vs. yang, wouldn't work.

- Your opponent uses head lock to press your body downward.
- You press his leg to push him down.
- When your opponent resists against your downward pressing (he try to raise up), you borrow his resistance force, and lift him up.

If your opponent want to

- sink down, you help him to sink down further.
- raise up, you help him to raise up further.

It meets 100% the borrow force principle. The borrow force doesn't have to be horizontal. It can be vertical as well.


I agree and that's 100% valid in my opinion. You use the change from substantial to insubstantial and then substantial in the other direction.

Taijiquan as I understand it uses the same principle but seeks to avoid that moment it being bound up. Because it could potentially resolve either way it's best to just avoid it altogether.

I believe the idea and what makes taijiquan different and potentially effective is that most approaches to conflict involve that clashing together and resolution process. The effective taijiquan practitioner presents an apparent target for that, but never lets the opponent achieve it. They think they are getting it and chase it, but really they are gently coaxed into a bad position.

Ideally in that sort of situation I would put downward or sideways pressure then release and apply pressure in the other direction while they are still raising their force to resist the first pressure, vs binding then reversing. Both work but the first way is much stronger.


To me, taijiquan training is very idealistically seeking this yin/yang balance at all times. Grasp sparrow's tail cooperative exercise is about learning to seek that balance all the time. Lots of "soft" and grappling arts have this idea, but don't seem to go as crazy trying to emphasize it. You have to go through a period of learning by trial and error and using force against force until your body realizes that's not as efficient. In some ways that's probably a much better way than being idealistic from the start.
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Re: Double Weighted

Postby origami_itto on Wed Jan 02, 2019 7:09 am

In general I think we start too heavy and if we aren't careful we can get too light.

If double weightedness is two adjoining substantial/Yang segments, and its opposite is balanced and agile, then it's opposite/complementary error is double floating - two adjoining insubstantial/Yin segments, the opposite of rooted. That doesn't feel 100% accurate so I expect I'll revise that summation soon

These are the subject of a particularly gnarly one of the Yang 40 chapters, which I'm still struggling to fully comprehend.
Last edited by origami_itto on Wed Jan 02, 2019 7:10 am, edited 1 time in total.
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