Strategic stepping
When you dwell on the sound
of your breathing,
when you can really hear it coming and going,
peace will not be far behind.
(Paul Wilson)
Step
In order to get closer to something, we step.
This is a fundamental human skill, yet so many martial artists reach beyond
their natural range instead of stepping.
Why is this?
Laziness? Poor body awareness? Naivety?
If you reach rather than step closer, you sacrifice your balance, and with
it your strength.
Natural range
Standing qigong 'hugging a tree' posture teaches you to feel your
natural range.
As soon as you ignore this sensibility, you stretch, you reach, you over-commit.
Your tendons, ligaments and muscles are hyper-extended. This locks your joints,
preventing mobility and resilience.
Essentially, your body loses its pliability and suspension.
Unless you are performing one of the very specific stretching exercises from our
syllabus, you should not be stretching.
Tai chi is always comfortably within your natural range.
Striking
In order to strike, maintain the 'hugging the tree' range/shape,
and step closer.
Your foot should be beneath your hands.
Be very careful not to 'cock' the shoulder or elbow.
Beginners
It is important to lay the appropriate foundation during the beginners
syllabus.
Everything that follows assumes a fundamental layer of knowledge and ability,
and simply will not work if the basics are not familiar.
A white belt beginner explores these simple topics in order to increase
whole-body awareness:
Walking within your natural range
Cat step
Walk like a sage
Pendulum step
Stepping around
Step behind
Not stepping
Stepping needs to be easy, natural and comfortable.
The legs must become as dexterous as the hands, so we begin by exploring leg usage via pushing legs (close and distant), stepping drills, standing post and form.
Once these basics
are comfortable, strategic stepping will be addressed.
Intermediate onwards
Students explore these topics:
Kwa
Leaping
Maintain distance
Evasion
Counter
Relative positioning
These prepare the way for the
forthcoming challenges, where comfortable footwork needs to be a given.
Kwa
When you develop the ability to move the leg using kwa, the leg is better
connected to the torso.
The centre leads and the leg follows.
Its path is a little unpredictable but the power is quite surprising.
Leaping
This kind of step is not to be confused with a lunge.
Essentially it is a longer step that forsakes natural range in order to secure a
strategic advantage.
Lunging assumes an abandonment whereas this is more of a leisurely drift.
Maintain distance
Students are trained to close the gap between themselves and the opponent.
You need to be versatile and use range in a creative fashion.
If you were to immediately dive forward whenever attacked, your strategy is
predictable.
It is also important to yield.
We train a variety of leading and following exercises that increase the
flexibility of your spatial relationship.
Evasion
To avoid a punch or kick effectively, you should step.
Using the arms alone is not the tai chi way; you must move the body and rotate the
spine.
Evasive footwork is not showy or fancy - it is slight and subtle.
The ability to yield and be soft is absolutely necessary if you want to move
unnoticed.
Working against two people is now necessary.
Counter
Having evaded, you counter.
Hands and feet are unified by body and you yield to kicks and punches,
eventually countering the attack naturally.
For self defence to work, countering needs to feel comfortable.
Silk arms will provide some ideas, but the drill simply serves to start you in
the right direction - freeform.
Relative positioning
Your positioning relative to multiple opponents is an important
consideration in self defence.
It is quite different to the usual one-to-one fighting approach.
We look at how to combine skills, explore range and increase our options.
Ideally, you should make numbers work to your advantage and make the attackers
an impediment to one another.
Page created 5 August 1999