day 234: elbow drills and a brush with xiao kai men

concepts:

• movement
• weight

lessons:

• bagua elbow basics
• xia kai men
• kyudo

we spent a little time on applications this past Saturday, reviewing elements of xiao kai men as well as the elbow basics.

bagua elbow basics

we continued with the moving elbow basics. Sifu asked Eric to lead this time, since Phunsak was out. before we began, Ari (who is with us for the month) asked that we go through all the standing elbow basics before starting the moving elbow basics.

we obliged and did a short review of the standing basics--i say standing, but there are so many that it ends up taking about an hour to cover them all. i did a little better remembering them this time, although there are still a few that i need some help recalling.

we went a little further with the moving basics, although we had some confusion with a few of the drills. Eric and Art remember different versions of the moving basics, and so we ended up taking a little time trying to sort the confusion, particularly in terms of figuring out whether there was a memory issue (i.e., people forgetting the drills) or just simply a disagreement (i.e., people knowing really knowing different versions).

xiao kai men

at some point in the discussions, Eric and Art ended up asking Sifu some questions about the correct forms of some of the moving elbow drills. it was at this time that we got switched into xiao kai men applications.

we have several new students learning bagua (Shin, Martin, Jerry), and Sifu has begun taking them through xiao kai men. after answering Eric's and Art's questions about the moving elbow drills, Sifu ended up using us for demonstration dummies for xiao kai men. in particular, he focused on black bear probes with its paw, giving a description of the technique and then going through several variations in applications.

this turned out to be good. originally, i thought i'd figured this technique out some time ago, but today it turned out i still didn't really have a clue. the application i'd learned works, but only in certain situations--situations which Sifu said were unrealistic. he said it was better to concentrate on the physics of the technique, and that this makes it much more flexible in terms of usage, to the extent that it becomes applicable in a large range of realistic situations.

Sifu pointed out a couple of things today crucial to making the technique work properly:

• do not focus on the front arm. the temptation is to try to exert force through the front arm. but this is a structural technique that requires the upper body maintain a structure to transmit the biomechanics from the lower body. exerting force through the front arm tends to disengage the arm from the rest of the body, breaking the structure and impeding the transmission of the force vectors through the body from the ground.
• do not push forward or pull back. the temptation is to try to do either one. this may work against weaker opponents, but not against stronger ones. in addition, it acts to disrupt your center of gravity, giving a skilled opponent something to exploit.
• do not push down with the arms. there is also a temptation to push down. this is problematic for the same reasons above.
• do not collapse. the technique involves sinking. the tendency is to collapse, by letting the entire body go limp, breaking the structure and losing the transmission of physics.
• aim to use the rear leg (the leg away from the opponent), by directing your weight into it so that it pushes against the ground. this is somewhat similar to the trick Sifu had shown us before about sending a force vector into the ground--except with the trick Sifu uses a wrist lock, while here he used the same idea with regards to the technique. to a degree, the rear leg does bend, and thereby lowers you. but it does so in a way that still maintains the structure of the body, so that whatever force vector you are driving into the ground is returned (Newton's laws of physics) and sent through the body into the opponent (laws of statics and dynamics).

w Sifu's help, i managed to get the technique to work better than i had before, enough that i could apply it against Martin, who is about 100 pounds heavier than me. and i could get the technique to work even if he was resisting. the issue, however, was consistency, since there were times i could get it to work and other times when the results were marginal. the trick is to feel out the opponent and sense the location of the centers of gravity (yours and your opponent), so that you know just how to place your legs to send the force vector in a way that sends the opponent down and off-balance (as opposed to down but still balanced, or not down at all, either of which allows the opponent to push back). still, i consider this progress, and something that i want to work on.

kyudo

kyudo this evening was a little shortened. i had a bike ride Sunday morning, and so i decided to leave at the kyudo tea break to prep my equipment for the ride. still, i managed to get a good session in, since the turnout for class was low (only 7 people, including Sensei) due to the South Carolina seminar (many people had skipped the class to fly out to the seminar). i experimented a little this evening, trying a bow w a lighter draw weight at the suggestion of Yukari, and i found it dramatically easier to shoot. Sensei, however, hinted that he'd wanted me to use a heavier draw weight, since it would force me to be more aware of the defects in my form. mindful of that, i put in time to focus on those issues--which i definitely have.