Internal arts principles: dealing with over-commitment

A discussion of how the 3 internal arts handle the issue of over-commitment when delivering blows. Taijiquan, baguazhang and xingyiquan each have a preferred method of "preserving" your momentum so that your continued flow takes you out of dangers inherent in over-extension, particularly during power punches, strikes and kicks. They also share each other's methodologies to some extent making them clearly a "family" of arts.

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• taijiquan
• baguazhang
• xingyiquan
• internal arts
• momentum
• over-extension

[Benbanme]

great video, but shitty camera-handling >__> so damn dizzying

[dandjurdjevic]

@Benbanme Sorry - my little girl was the only one on hand at the time. I can hardly expect expert photography from her! I'll redo it another time!

[ogretubing]

Interesting discussion. I can think of a slew of examples where each art does what you characterize as a specialty of one of the others. I think taiji has a really good mix of all of these tactics. I also think that taiji might better be characterized as specializing in "rolling." You roll continuously from one movement into the other, without necessarily absorbing backwards in a change of direction - rather it is continuous motion in any direction, including in the direction you were going.

[dandjurdjevic]

@ogretubing Thanks - you're right. I tend to call taiji's main emphasis as "continuing momentum", bagua's as "turning momentum" and xingyi's as "falling momentum". Clearly taiji does a fair amount of turning and falling - as they are subsets of "continuing". However, the "absorb" (ie. where you rollback) is most prevalent in taiji, then turning and falling. The exact terminology is not something I have had a great deal of time to develop, hence my expression in the video is a bit imprecise.

[facejobby]

no offence meant at-all please :D ,, but why do you have a japanese-martial arts uniform on (with belt) when these are Chinese arts?

[dandjurdjevic]

@facejobby I train in multiple arts. On this day I was in a gi, and didn't see the point in changing clothes for this discussion.

[TheDemzlyChannel]

Love your work Dan and hearing about the internal arts