Appledog wrote:Thanks for the great questions! In one sense, I don't know....
As I was taught, the purpose is to pull the body into the correct position. The mechanics are to just stand there. Now, the "physical mechanics" are not just "standing there" because there are specific cues you have to follow, which are mainly reserved for learning from the teacher, however if you just stand there it is good enough for now (because see below).
What makes progress in the "internal" arts and qigong difficult is often a lack of explicit teaching. It is easy to copy the external choreography of any practice or exercise and one can learn the gross choreography from nearly any video. It has been my experience that far too many students learn little more than the gross external choreography and then conclude that the core of the art IS that choreography and progress is simply repetition of that gross choreography. There is nothing "magic" about the choreography, itself, it is what one does with that choreography. That is, HOW that choreography is practiced/performed is what leads to understanding and progression.
Ideally, what a (good) teacher does is to teach sufficient explicit detail about what to practice and and how to practice it that the student can make progress by working with sufficient intensity and focus on those details. Even when explicitly taught, the student still has to put in sufficient focus and intensity to progress. Academic awareness of the details won't, by itself, produce much progress.
A sure recipe for lack of progress is to repeat external choreography over and over again.
As I was taught, you do one of these every morning for a month and you will make progress. The nature of this progress unfolds in stages where the first few stages are about figuring out what the physical requirements are. Then you can ask your teacher about your experiences.
How does one gage that progress or identify that progress, particularly if one doesn't really know why one is performing that exercise? Does it involve how long one can hold this posture? Is one supposed to feel something specific? And so on.
Experience has shown that many students have no idea what they don't know. To then ask questions about what they are unaware of is a particularly ineffective recipe for progress, since many students don't know what relevant questions to ask about things they are unaware of.
It isn't uncommon for a good teacher to provide explicit guidelines of practice and then reply to questions about the practice that arise from doing the work. (Too often, students who haven't put in the requisite work ask questions about the practice that aren't relevant to their progress. Or don't ask questions at all.)
For example the names of the exercises often contain a clue. 'Subdue the Tiger in the Southern Forest', or 'Vanquish the Dragon in the Northern Sea'. What is the southern forest, what is the northern sea? What is the significance of subduing or vanquishing a great beast?
I'm thinking of a number between 1 and 100. Nope, that wasn't it. Guess again. Not a great pedagogic approach.
If you apply the same logic to this move, it seems as if we are being drawn to, at a minimum, a particular kind of connection through the shoulders.
Why would you make that assumption? Why is it that the shoulders would be what is "lifting a thousand pounds"? Is "lifting" a correct translation, rather, than, say, "maintaining" or "supporting" a thousand pounds? "Lifting" implies motion. A static held posture probably doesn't involve overt motion.
That's part of the problem with "guessing". There are many viable-sounding interpretations, many of which can be incorrect and drive the exercise in a wrong direction.
You will notice that the boy on the left cannot raise his arms in the same way as the girl on the right (ex. arm to ear). That is because he has shoulder and posture problems. Doing this exercise will allow him to gently settle into a correct position (ex. arm to ear).
It might. It might not. Unless the boy gets explicit, hands-on corrections, probably not and at the end of a month's practice will see little to no progress.
Has the boy received any hands-on correction? Videos you've posted of him go back a few years, suggesting that he has been practicing things (incorrectly) for at least a couple of years. Has anyone corrected his forward-hip sticking out too far, not being aligned with ankle and knee, which also affects his vertical spinal alignment? Has anyone had him open/sink into the kua? Has anyone taught him to close his chest, allowing the muscles of the ribcage to drop, pulling the shoulders down with gravity while his arms/hands are raised? Has anyone corrected his bending forward of his head/neck, "suspending" the head/spine vertically? These are all basic day-one corrections that a good teacher ought to have provided. Correction of those are all elements of "progress".
I'm assuming that the video is "for demonstration only" and that their actual practice would involve holding the posture for a progressively increasing period of time. In the video, they hold the actual posture for not more than 30 seconds. No progress is likely from such a short duration.
Turning around between sets and adding a hunyuan qigong #1 between left and right parts of a set was added to characterize the ritualization of the exercise. In practice we are not so strict we only do a baihui gathering qigong between sets.
As demonstrated, there seems to be more "ritualization" than content. Is the hunyuan qigong 1 that you refer to from Feng Zhiqiang's hunyuan qigong set?
I'm not trying to give you a hard time or be a pain in the ass.
My concern is that too many students spend too much time in "ritualization" filled with repetition of choreography they don't understand with the assumption that if they just keep repeating it progress and knowledge are guaranteed. My experience has been that very few students make much progress that way.