Strategic stepping | ||
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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
agility.
Don't over-stretch
Unless you are performing one of the very specific stretching exercises from
our syllabus, you should not be over-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.
Lower grades
It is important to lay the appropriate foundation during the lower
grades.
Everything that follows assumes a fundamental layer of knowledge and
ability, and simply will not work if the basics are
not familiar.
Students explore 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, stepping drills, standing post and
form.
Once these basics are comfortable, strategic stepping will be addressed.
Progress
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.
The rear foot must follow in order to maintain a strong
stance.
Lunging assumes an abandonment whereas this is more of a leisurely drift.
Ghost walking?
In Asia, ghosts are depicted as having no feet. They float. A
tai chi student cannot literally float but their sense of being
'suspended from above' should feel as if
they do.
Asian ghosts don't have heavy footfalls. In fact they make no sound on the
ground at all.
Many people have very loud steps. Concussive. Vibrational. Loud. This
indicates weak, collapsed muscles. They have succumbed to the pull of
gravity...
Instead, we must lengthen upwards and be light and
silent. Like the old Kung Fu TV show where Kwai Chang Caine must walk
on rice paper without tearing it?
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 combat to work, countering needs to feel comfortable.
San sau 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 combat.
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.
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)
Page
created 18 October 2001
Last updated
10 November 2023
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