day 170: final tune-up forms

forms:

• bagua 64 palms

i'm writing this post about a week late, since things have been rather busy lately. but there isn't much that was missed, since the Saturday for this post (August 23) was largely devoted to finalizing the forms of those preparing for tournament competition: Chieng-Chieh and Phunsak in the 2-person category, and Laura and John in the individual women's and men's categories.

Sifu also reviewed everyone else's form while he was at it. he noted that while my form is improving, i'm continuing to stop and start my actions--in his words, i'm not "letting the power flow." this is a problem, because it throttles the power generation. he said i needed to be more continuous in my transitions between techniques, especially with anything involving a change in direction...which, unfortunately for me, in bagua pretty much means every technique.

i think i can see how i can rectify this. based on what he described, and reflecting back on conversations we've had in class, i think that the continuity in movement is important to power generation in bagua because it allows the practitioner to generate and maintain momentum. in other words, a lot of the power (but not all) comes from the momentum of the practitioner's movements, and hence requires that momentum be preserved--which, in turn, means that actions follow a continuous, smooth-flowing pace throughout all changes in direction and magnitudes of force vectors.

this adds to the power sources in bagua. from what i've seen to date, it means the nature of power issuing in bagua comes from a number of sources:

1. reeling silk energy, or the classic "chan si jin" (sic)
2. force vectors from muscular movement (what i consider to be my usual modus operandi)
3. alignment of skeletal structure
4. reaction forces driven through the body through the ground (Newton's laws of motion)
5. momentum.

out of these, i really only know 2, have started to figure out 1 and 4, have no clue regarding 3, and i think i can sort out 5.

but having said all this, Sifu said we'd work on this once we got back from the tournament.