day 110: chen and kuen wu (uh, maybe)

concepts:

• intent
• moving energy
• action and reaction
  

forms:

• chen long form
• kuen wu jian
  

i really had a hard time waking up this morning. not only was i still feeling the effects of Ironman and jet lag, but i found out the night before that it was the start of daylight savings time. of course, this threw my sleep pattern completely off. i arrived late again, but found that most everyone else had forgotten it was daylight savings time as well.

Sifu gave everyone a few extra minutes, especially since it was Sunday. this allowed a few extra people to show up to get a meaningful class practice, although we continued to get more people in the next couple of hours--all of them admitting they'd forgotten to change their clocks.

chen long form

we went through the chen long form. it appears the class went through quite a bit of the form while i was away during my 2 weeks in New Zealand. as a result, i had quite a bit to catch up on.

Sifu stressed the same points he made yesterday about intent and energy, with the exception being that he noted in bagua the moving energy is about rotation, spinning, angles, and circles, in chen the moving energy is comparatively somewhat more linear (although in absolute terms still very much circular), and involves a heavy emphasis on sinking the body and mind into the ground.

on this latter point, Sifu said the act of sinking helps you direct an action, and its force vector, into the ground, against which you produce a reaction, and its force vector. in essence, this makes your body a force conduit through which you can direct both your opponent's power and your own power, and combine them as an action force into the ground to produce a reaction force that goes through you back to the opponent. the result is that the opponent receives a larger reaction force (the combination of the opponent's power and your power, summed in the reaction force) then the action force they put in (which you redirected to add your own to send as an action force into the earth). essentially, this is an exploitation of Newton's laws of physics (every action has an equal and opposite reaction).

repeating his comments from yesterday, Sifu said you don't see sinking, since it can happen without any visual changes in the body. sinking is something that can be felt, however, in that it involves intent downwards into the ground which induces changes in muscle contractions that alter the magnitude and direction of the force vector.

we worked on combat applications for the new material of the long form, although i spent the bulk of my time trying to learn the stuff i'd missed...as well as resting my feet.

kuen wu jian

we finished the class by learning more of the kuen wu form. again, i'd missed a good chunk of this, since the class had apparently covered a good deal of ground on this in the 2 weeks i was away. i ended up spending a lot of time trying to catch up.

eventually we finished for lunch, although Sifu said he was coming back to give additional instruction to some students. Phunsak said he was going to stick around to watch, but i decided i needed to rest up and so i went home.