Men are born soft and supple;

Dead they are stiff and hard.

Plants are born tender and pliant;

Dead they are brittle and dry.

Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible

Is a disciple of death.

Whoever is soft and yielding

Is a disciple of life. 

The hard and stiff will be broken.

The soft and supple will prevail….

- Tao Te Ching

When your body is pressed it will want to close and contract – making it weak and unstable.  We have to train our mind, breath and body to encourage the ‘myofascial bodysuit’ and joints to soften and open enabling the spine, arms and legs to ‘bow’ properly for power transmission.

My previous blogs of ‘Continuous Neigong’, ‘The Language of the Body’, ‘The Art of Listening’ and ‘Connecting Hands and Feet’ deal with the training of these skills.

I noticed that most Martial Artists are unable to access their legs and feet properly to gain any root or stability, on many seminars I have shown long term practitioners how unstable they are and how when they think they have most of their weight in their front leg, they actually have it in the back.  This is because as they start to put their weight into the front leg and the foot presses to the floor, the muscles contract and throw the body backwards.

The skill starts in the neigong and standing exercises teaching the myofascia to soften, lengthen and open to accept the bodyweight expanding and ballooning as a result.  The joints are then disengaged and open to function effectively. Posture training starts with ‘suspending the crown of the head’ to gently open the body and joints from head to feet to allow a free flow of energy through the myofascial tissue and in and around the skeleton.

On the wall in our training centre facing the students when they train is a list of 8 words, these 8 words represent the 8 principles that we need to fully understand to make our Martial Arts work.

The first of these words is ‘Feet’.  Our feet is our contact to the ground that we stand on and the pressure of our feet to the floor is what gives us the power and energy to stand upright and move around.  Most people usually do this mindlessly not realising that the skill as a Martial Artist starts at this point.  Each part of the foot can engage a myofascial chain up the leg, which in turn engages the body core to power the torso and arms through to the hands.

To engage the feet properly we must first stop balancing the body on the skeleton and suspend most of the body weight into the ‘body suit’ of myofascia. To do this we have to soften and connect the body core from the head down to the feet and enhance this by disengaging the joints upwards. As we then gently spiral in the feet we can feel the myofascial chains connecting upwards.

Neigong cannot just be trained for an hour a day, because for the other 23 hours you could be doing ‘anti neigong’ – and which would prevail?

As you learn the skills, you need to practice ALL the time.  You are always doing posture and breathing and your life can only be enhanced by more mental awareness, concentration and sensitivity.  This is then an excellent exercise in ‘mindfulness’ to constantly and dispassionately recreate a mindful state of being in everyday action.

This practice will instantly and in the long term effect your mental and physical wellbeing, affecting your emotional intelligence, your ability to interact with other people in a more  aware, balanced and sensitive manner, improving your relationships, your team work and career.  

Developing these abilities will affect your self defence in the broadest possible way, treating people in a way that is not so likely to cause offence and being more aware to their reactions to your speech and activities, when unavoidable physical action is called for, it will be more appropriate and sensitive to the situation.

Find your quiet time to enhance the skills in the 5 standing postures – remembering to train the linked emotions, continue through the qigong and then into form and technique.  

Remember to continuously soften down the bodycore to connect and loosen up through the joints, suspend the posture, spiral the soft tissue, creating the 5 bows in arms legs and spine.  Remember in everyday life all of this is subtle enough that to anyone looking you will simply look drawn to your full height, aware and confident.

Whatever Martial Art you practice, if you don’t practice and then ‘live’ these skills you will never have the connection, balance, fluidity, ease of movement, connected power and character of a Martial Artist.

Watching a variety of YouTube Martial Art instructional videos I was struck by the extent of what I would call unintelligent reasoning going on.  What the Coaches were saying sounded like structured teaching, but in fact they were focusing on unimportant points in the technique – and how they were explaining them meant that, in my opinion, most students would not be able to perform the movement with any efficiency.

Some students will get better despite the Coach and they will go on to teach in the way that they have been taught and more often than not students with ‘something that looks like’ a good technique end up being graded, making up for the loss of power with heavy breathing, foot stomping, shouting and pulling agonised faces.

Application to Kata can be like a ‘101 things to do with a dead cat’ scenario.  No one knows the true reasoning behind the original structure of the techniques and therefore they end up trying to make educated guesses with scanty historical facts that can end up being twisted to suit the answer the researcher wants; they would have been far better to restart the whole training structure from scratch by working backwards from real situations.

Then there’s always the pseudo science, which sounds okay until you start to work it out for yourself – it sounds logical at first but the problem is that there are so many factors to take into account in one movement that you would need more volumes than an Encyclopaedia Britannica to fully analyse how the science behind the movement works – and one bit can easily negate another.