“An intangible and lively energy lifts the crown of the head.”
One of the things I often notice about my rolling partners in BJJ is that when they’re passing guard, they’re too easy to pick apart and attack because they let their spine bend by allowing their head to drop. As soon as this happens, I can attack their limbs easily because they’re suddenly not as strong. The spine is an integral part of the structure of our body, and when it’s not properly aligned, we’re weaker.
When we’re rolling in BJJ, and I’m in teacher mode, I’ll stop and point out when their head is down, and it’s often a kind of revelation to them. What I mean by “when their head is down” is that their head (and neck) is not in alignment with the rest of their spine. Once your head is aligned with your spine, you’re much stronger physically, without even trying. You’re also much more resistant to attacks from your partner. The game in BJJ then becomes about how you can break their spinal alignment while they try to keep theirs and break yours.
This takes you beyond the realm of just techniques and into the realm of principles. My BJJ book is certainly full of techniques, but I also tried to include a lot of text, especially in the intro pages for each section, about principles and strategy, too.
Having a background in tai chi, I think I’m more aware of spinal position than people who don’t have some sort of bodywork background before they start BJJ. In the 10 essentials by Yang Cheng-Fu as recorded by Chen Wei-Ming, it says, “An intangible and lively energy lifts the crown of the head. This refers to holding the head in vertical alignment in relationship to the body, with the spirit threaded to the top of the head. One must not use strength: using strength will stiffen the neck and inhibit the flow of qi and blood. One must have the conscious intent (yi) of an intangible, lively, and natural phenomenon. If not, then the vital energy (jingshen) will not be able to rise.”
Now there’s a lot of Chinese jargon in there that we can probably do without, and the way it’s written is not incredibly helpful. In BJJ, I usually just say “keep your head up” because that covers a multitude of sins, but what I’m really talking about is keeping your head in alignment with your spine.
If I’m teaching tai chi and I tell a student to keep their spine “vertical,” or lift “the crown of the head,” as it says in Yang Cheng-Fu’s recorded sayings, they almost immediately stiffen up straight like a soldier, holding their shoulders rigid and looking really uncomfortable. That’s not what you want in tai chi.
I think this stiffness is what Yang Cheng-Fu meant when he said in the next sentence of Chen Wei-Ming’s work: “One must not use strength: using strength will stiffen the neck and inhibit the flow of qi and blood.” A good tai chi spine is not a fixed position; it’s an alignment, and that means it’s an ever-changing position that adapts to your movement.
The general movement of your body in tai chi is always down. You are always relaxing and sinking down. That doesn’t mean you give up and slump on the floor like jelly; it means you just stop trying to hold yourself up all the time. You don’t really ‘do’ anything.
Relax the shoulders and just stand still for a bit in a wu chi posture. If you relax and allow it to happen, your head will naturally find the right spot where it sits in balance on top of your spine. The key is to stop trying to make it happen and let it happen. It wants to be there; you’ve just got to get yourself out of the way and allow it to happen. As it says in chapter 2 of the Tao Te Ching, “The sage acts by doing nothing.”
You’ll know when it feels right, and you can transfer that feeling to other situations: driving, working on a computer, and even, doing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
How to time you strikes with your footwork, a video lesson
Sun Lu Tang, performing xing yi’s Zuan Quan.
Xing yi is a martial art I’ve got a lot of time for. The first thing I noticed about it was its approach to stepping and how different it was to other Chinese martial arts like tai chi, for example. In fact, the only other martial art I can think of that uses a similar type of stepping is yi quan, which is a derivative of xing yi, and perhaps Sun Style Tai Chi, which is obviously influenced by xing yi because it was the main martial art of the founder, Sun Lu Tang.*
When approaching xing yi for the first time, most people seem to be more interested in what’s going on in the body because it is an internal art. I think that, in a way, the label ‘internal’ is something of a blessing and a curse for xing yi because it leads to a lot of intellectualising about it, which is sometimes unnecessary. Before you need to start worrying about things like the internal workings of the body, I think you should be focusing on the footwork of xing yi, because that’s the key to getting the right feel for the art.
Xing yi stepping is different
It’s not like all Chinese martial arts don’t use stepping, (of course they do), but there’s something really nice and practical about the way xing yi uses stepping and striking in harmony*. If you look at a random xing yi link (its name for forms) then no step is wasted – something is happening on every step.
But it goes a bit deeper than than – the timing of what is happening is the thing to look for. The strikes combine with the stepping to put your mass into each strike, so rather than hitting people with just the weight of an arm, you’re hitting them with your whole body weight behind the arm.
I made a video about the timing of xing yi steps and strikes before and I’ve talked about xing yi stepping basics before, but a viewer of one of my YouTube channels, contacted me recently asking to know more about it, so I thought I’d make another video.
So, here it is – I’m demonstrating some standard ‘jab, cross, hook’ strikes on some pads first. There’s nothing special about this, then I look at how it would change if you were going to adopt the xing yi footwork. I show this with the weight staying on the back leg first, then I show how you’d do it with a palm strike and the weight on the front leg – in the way you do it with Bear (Xiong Xing). And then I show some xing yi movements in a linking form, where the steps and the striking are using the same timing. This is a mix of elements and animals.
Is there anything ‘internal’ in this? No, it’s just the mechanics of stepping and striking done together in the general way xing yi uses them. However, my controversial opinion (sorry, I’m trying not to get into arguments these days) is that you need to get this down first before you start with the more subtle internal stuff.**
* Yes, I’m sure there are other Chinese martial arts that use this sort of stepping sometimes – talking in generalities helps make a point, but it is rarely accurate.
** Xing yi is a big art, what I’m talking about is a feature of Hebei Xing Yi – other styles may vary and not use the same sort of footwork. I’m not attacking the way you do XY or the way your Sifu taught you.
The latest way of selling tai chi is to say it gets you jacked
I’ve seen a lot of things come and go in the Tai Chi universe over the years, but the latest marketing trend has got me scratching my head. Almost every advert for Tai Chi courses I see on Instagram and Facebook at the moment promises ripped muscles and a hyper-masculine physique, mainly for men over 50!
Tai Chi, with its soft, slow, flowing, gentle movements, is perhaps the least masculine-looking martial art you could imagine, yet here is “Master Lee” strolling around a TV studio with his top off showing off his impressively-muscled abs, which he says he got from tai chi.
Or this guy, who claims tai chi is the path to a six pack. “Real men don’t starve… they do tai chi”, he proclaims.
So, what’s going on here?
Firstly, these confident, super-tonned Chinese gentlemen, are clearly creations of generative AI video apps. Everything about the videos looks as fake to me as the idea that tai chi on its own will get you that shredded.
Tai chi is good for many things, like learning how to use qi and jin and producing a feeling of tranquility, or as a self-defence system, but producing athletic-looking people over the age of 50 is really not one of them. *
When you look deeper into the exercises being offered here they look like simple, repetitive qigong-style movements. The idea that you’d replace weight training and body weight exercise with these and still build muscle is wrong, as far as I can see.
There’s no getting away from it, if you want to lose weight and build muscle you need a diet, cardio and weight training routine.
—-
* Now, I’m aware that there is another trend at the moment to train intensively with kettle bells and call that “tai chi” or “internal”, but really it’s no different to doing a kettle bell workout and not calling it tai chi.
The age-old debate on sport vs self defence training opens up again, and this time, I’m in it!
“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. If you had somebody who has only ever trained sport jiu-jitsu and they’ve done the most sporty of the sport jiu-jitsu – they’re only ever training berimbolos, crab rides and rolling back takes – that’s their whole game, but they’re training against resistance, and they compete, especially if they compete, they are 100 times better at self defence than a guy who just practices self defence techniques in isolation.” – Stephan Kesting
That’s a quote from the first part of this clip that has been making its way around the Internets from Stephan Kesting, one of the shining lights in the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu community.
He goes on to say more, but the above quote is the essence of what he’s saying.
I completely agree with him, but not only that, I’m actually in the clip – I’m the guy with the glasses at the bottom of the screen.
This clip was part of the longer podcast we recorded I recorded along with my writing partner Seymour Yang (Meerkatsu) with Stephan about our new BJJ book, which is currently being shipped out to people that brought the pre-order.
Incidentally, the book is not on sale anymore, that pre-order was a limited run, hard back, collectors edition. We’ll probably release a softback version in the future on a similar limited print run idea, but we haven’t decided for sure yet.
But back to the clip.
Obviously, because this is the Internet and people can’t read or listen to something without immediately copying and pasting their own opinions about what they think he said, or wrote. So, this clip caused a bit of a ruckus online, attracting comments such as:
“This is hilarious BJJ is not good for fighting at all in sport (MMA) or self defense.. but ok keep believing that “
“I don’t know not all fights end up on the ground right away. And no one’s is gonna wait for you to sit down and start fighting. My complaint with some of the sports jiujitsu has to be Takedowns, it’s like they forgot to do takedowns.”
Now on their own there is some merit to the points being made, however they don’t refer to what was actually being said by Stephan. Let me reframe his statement in the way that Bruce Lee used back in the 1970s with his article called “Liberate Yourself from Classical Karate”:
Stephan is saying that the spontaneity and natural reactions that ‘live’ training will develop is worth 100 times what you’ll learn by practicing ONLY dead forms.
That’s the point, not the applicability of BJJ to self defence or whether all fights end up on the ground. And obviously it’s not an either/or choice, and there’s a lot of grey area in regards to marital arts triaining, but that’s the crux of the matter
Bruce framed the argument around the idea of live, spontaneous training vs repeating dead forms. There are a lot of great quotes in the article by Bruce Lee, but here’s a couple I particularly like:
“It is conceivable that a long time ago a certain martial artist discovered some partial truth. During his lifetime, the man resisted the temptation to organize this partial truth, although this is a common tendency in a man’s search for security and certainty in life. After his death, his students took “his” hypotheses, “his” postulates, “his” method and turned them into law. “
“Prolonged repetitious drilling will certainly yield mechanical precision and security of that kind comes from any routine. However, it is exactly this kind of “selective” security or “crutch” which limits or blocks the total growth of a martial artist. In fact, quite a few practitioners develop such a liking for and dependence on their “crutch” that they can no longer walk without it. Thus, any special technique, however cleverly designed, is actually a hindrance.”
To me the argument that Stephan is making and the argument that Bruce is making are different aspects of the same thing. It’s the ‘learning to swim by never getting in the pool’ analogy all over again. You simply can’t learn to swim without getting wet, no matter how great your theory of swimming may be.
We would all laugh in the face of a theoretical swimmer who only ever practices on dry land and yet we tend to revere the opinions of the theoretical martial artist far too strongly, especially if they have a cool uniform and a black belt with lots of stripes on it.
Personally, I find that the less I practice sparring in a week the stronger the need for coming up with solutions for theoretical situations becomes in my mind. The more actual resistive sparring I engage in, the less my mind craves these sorts of questions. Instead, I’ve actually got something useful to be thinking about, like how I would do a technique from that last round better, or how I would escape a particular situation that actually happened, next time.
Just imagine if you haven’t done any actual sparring for years. There are plenty of ‘martial artists’ like this. Their heads must be full of theoretical knowledge, most of which probably wouldn’t survive an encounter with reality. And all of which can be silenced with just a few seconds of actual sparring practice.
I wanted to share the process and journey of how Seymour Yang and I made our new Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu book.
First of all it’s worth noting we are both black belt instructors with many years of teaching experience. The book is aimed at beginners to developing white and blue belts and covers everything we felt was useful and relevant in today’s Jiu-jitsu club environment.
After much time planning and researching we then set about creating the contents. Every illustration is based on a photograph or video still that we took of our students or training partners. These stills Seymour used as references to hand draw the line art images. I then wrote the text.
That was just the beginning. The hardest stage was making sure the book was as accurate and tight as possible as a work of reference. For this we spent a long time proofing, editing and redesigning it. We then tested sample after sample from independent book printing companies to find the best one (we did not want to go the Amazon print on demand route)
I’m proud to say the book is finally available for our followers to buy (as a pre-order) and so far it’s proving very popular.
We decided to make it a pre-order as we just didn’t know quite how many to print in advance. A two week window was decided and after the pre-order window closes (June 11) we can then tell the print house how many to make.
If you want to know even more about how we made it then check out this informal 2 hour (2 hour!) video where we chat about making the book (it will be released in a more thoroughly edited audio-only version as an episode of my Tai Chi Notebook podcast shortly):
I just saw an advert for a week long “Tai Chi for beginners” intensive with the teacher in question demonstrating a tai chi posture with the head thrust forward, so the chin juts out, the hips and pelvis thrust forward so it looks like he’s doing a bad Elvis impression, the arms awkwardly twisted so the shoulders lock up and the souls of the feet rolling to the sides and coming off the floor, so the ankle joint is not stable.
And yes, he was calling himself “Master”.
I think “buyer beware” is good advice in the tai chi market.
One thing I’ve observed in so many tai chi teachers is this desire to be the teacher way before they are ready. People don’t want to be the student – that’s boring! – they want the glory of leading something, of creating something, of being the person at the front of the class sharing their vast wisdom with their adoring students…
Why is this? I think it’s just ego. I’ve definitely felt it’s twinges in me. It’s a subtle trap that you need to avoid. And one I try actively to avoid all the time when I teach.
It is undoubtedly a nice feeling when people ask you for advice, and look up to you. However, I think it’s nearly always a mistake to want to be that person. People are rarely ever ready to teach tai chi when they start. You could say it’s the curse of tai chi in the western world. That’s why we have people called “master somebody” who can’t do basic tai chi postures or understand tai chi movement leading week-long intensives.
But what do we do about this? After all, somebody has to teach something or there would be no tai chi for anyone!
Perhaps some guidelines if you are teaching:
1. Think of yourself as a coach, or a guide, not ‘a teacher ‘master’. After all, people need to do the work themselves, you can’t do it for them.
2. Don’t let people start to treat you like some guru or master – if they do instantly stop that behaviour developing. You’ll be surprised, a lot of people want a guru to take away all their self responsibility.
3. Self reflect. Are you constantly talking about things you can’t actually do? If so, just stop. There’s never any need for that.
4. The most important thing: Be honest. Tell people what you know, how long you’ve been training, where you got it from. Don’t make yourself into something you’re not in other people’s eyes.
5. Finally, you also need a teacher. Find people you can learn from and don’t stop learning.
This video has been doing the rounds online, showing some tai chi (taijiquan) fighting applications.
I don’t think there’s much to say about it, but it does perhaps prove useful for answering that question you get a lot: “can tai chi be used for fighting?”.
Let’s just try to say a few things about it though:
Firstly, he’s clearly just taking a tai chi posture (‘Play Guitar’) that looks very like that an ‘on guard’ position and using it in the same way a boxer does to parry and block punches. The hand he has by his chin he’s using in just the same way a boxer does their back hand to parry a jab. Is there anything wrong with that? Maybe not. You could use the posture like that, but is that its purpose?
Is that what that posture is designed to be used for? At this point, who knows. Usually you see ‘play guitar’ used as an arm locking posture, or combined with a foot sweep into a shuai jiao-style throw.
On the positive side, he’s actually getting the guy to throw the attacks properly, which is nice to see. Maybe they could be a smidgen closer together, so the punch would actually land, but compared to most applications you see from non-committal attacks, it’s not bad.
No, it’s not sparring, but not everything has to be. I don’t think it would look quite as much like ‘tai chi’ if it was sparring.
Finally, is there much ‘tai chi’ going on here? I’d be looking for smoothly flowing into sticking, yielding, and neutralising. He follows up a couple of times, but I don’t see much in the way of controlling the opponent here. The opponent is more often than not just blocked, and not controlled.
The bar for tai chi applications is pretty low. There are too many videos of people bouncing away at the slightest touch to muddy the water, so I think we have to say that this is at least a step in the right direction.
Judo and (Brazilian) Jiu-Jitsu might have exactly the same origins, but they’ve gone down really different paths in their evolution. While Judo has focused more on the sporting elements and becoming an Olympic grappling sport, BJJ has always wanted to keep things closer to its Value Tudo origins, which evolved into modern MMA.
Even today, many BJJ classes have a strong self-defence element, however BJJ is a broad church and some associations and classes are much more orientated towards sport grappling, particularly the no-gi variation.
One of the frequent criticisms of modern Olympic-style judo was that it had sacrificed too much realism in pursuit of beautiful big throws in competition. One way it did this was to make any grab of the pants or legs illegal. This seemingly simple rule change had dramatic effects on the sport. Since the legs were no longer a target the stance of judo players became more upright in their stance, leading to more possibilities for big dramatic throws.
Remember, under Judo rules a match can be won with an Ippon, a throw that lands the opponent on his or her back. In BJJ no such rule applies – a spectacular throw simply earns you two points and the match continues.
All Japan tournament rules
I hadn’t noticed before, but there has been a recent rule change in judo, in a particular Japanese tournament called the All Japan Championship, that means you are allowed to grab the legs again, opening up a whole range of possibilities for long-forgotten judo techniques to make a reemergence.
There are some restrictions though. To grab the pants you have to have a grip on the upper body with one hand, and you cannot grab the legs with two hands. This rules out popular BJJ and wrestling techniques like the single leg or double leg.
Will the new rules get adopted by wider judo federations and ultimately the Olympics? It’s unclear at this stage, and too early to say, but it will mean that going forward, judo could end up looking very different to the way it does now.
Mike Sigman’s post on qi has made me want to think more about jin and qi again. I realise I haven’t been posting about it very much recently – partly because I’ve been distracted by writing a book about BJJ – but now the book is finished it’s time I came back to the subject. I read another post Mike made recently on his 6H group about pushing against a wall, which I think is a brilliant idea, because it’s so simple.
In a way this post is just me writing it out in my own words as an exercise, so I can understand it, and contextualise it a little more in terms of my tai chi practice.
Pushing is a big deal in tai chi because it features so prominent in the form – one of the four ‘energies’ of tai chi is called push in English, which (as I discussed with Ethan Murchie in my last podcast) is confusing since the translation of “an” into English is more accurately to “press down”, which isn’t what the push posture in tai chi looks like, or how you’d push a wall.
An AI-generated tai chi ‘push’against a wall
Pushing is also part of tai chi’s two person exercise, tui shou – “push hands”. So most tai chi people are pretty familiar with the concept of pushing.
Now imagine you are pushing against a wall and somebody asked you to push harder. Most people would simply push harder with their arms and lean harder into the wall. What you’ll feel when you do this (try it) is that it pushes your upper body backwards and away from the wall quite a bit because it’s impossible to push hard with your arms without introducing excess tension into the system.
This is the “you’re using your shoulder too much!” criticism that a lot of tai chi teachers sling at their students, without really explaining how not to push using the shoulder.
So, let’s look at exactly how you could push harder without using the shoulder.
The only another way to increase the power of your push is to increase the downwards power through your legs. Now, it’s pretty hard to push downwards with your legs, since we have nothing above us to push off from if we want to push downwards. Instead, all we have in a downwards direction is gravity, so how do we use that gravity power? The answer is to relax and sink down into your legs harder.
Put your hands on a wall and try it.
As you sink and relax more through the legs you should feel the power in your arms increasing.
What you’ll notice is that you have to internally align your body correctly for this power to reach your hands. The good news is that you don’t need to think very hard to do this, you can just feel how you need to arrange yourself and your subconscious will do the rest. But you need to properly relax. If you tense up parts of your body – your shoulder being the main culprit – the power won’t slow smoothly and uninterruptedly through the body to reach its destination.
At this point you should start to realize why the word relax (or “sung” in Chinese) is said so often in tai chi practice.
That path from floor to hands is what you’d call a ground path, or a jin path. And the force you are channeling into your hands is known as jin in Chinese. The usual English translation of jin that you see used is “refined strength”.
Again, don’t get hung up with where the path goes through the body, just where you want the force to go.
You should also notice that as the jin force in your arms increases, you don’t get knocked or pushed backwards as easily as you did when you were using brute strength, because there is less tension in your upper body.
Obviously you are not going to push a wall over! But you can now feel the forces in your body that we should be dealing with when doing the tai chi form, and hopefully when you do “push” in the form, your push will now be a little bit different, more refined, a little less clumsy and a lot more tai chi-like.
And why you shouldn’t train with weights when developing your qi
Mike Sigman has sent me an article to publish on this blog. I don’t normally publish other people’s work, or agree to their requests, but I’ll make an exception because it will hopefully generate some discussion. Regardless of how you feel about him, there’s is always a real depth to Mike’s writings and ideas that you can get a lot from, that you don’t really find anywhere else.
The article is primarily about one of the trickiest subjects in Chinese martial arts – qi (or chi).
I have a few thoughts about it:
1) The article starts by trying to “separate the skin-related qi, which includes the subconscious mind’s involvement, from the theoretical qi of traditional Chinese medicine”.
To some, particularly those people who relish Chinese history and the evolution of the concept of qi as it appears in Taoist thought, or medicine, that just won’t be acceptable, but I think this works for me. It moves the discussion into the realm of the physical and practical. It becomes a feeling and a doing thing.
2) It appears to be written partly as a reaction to a recent trend of mixing, or doing, Chinese martial arts conditioning through the medium of kettle bell or weights training. The question is, is that a waste of time if you want to get to the root of the subject, which is what the Chinese martial artists call qi?
Look, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with making yourself physically stronger at all. In fact, it’s obviously advantageous if you’re learning martial arts… But the article states that to master the internal movement, “the body must be completely retrained to learn to move with the qi, jin, and dantian”, and using weights will not help you in that respect. If you have retrained the body, then you could probably add them.
3) As I’ve said, nobody else really talks about this stuff, or if they do it’s watered down with a lot of other guff. If the article is correct on qi then what exactly are all the big names in modern tai chi seminar circuit and online courses out there actually teaching? Because they talk about qi a lot… but they don’t approach it in the same way as this article does, at least as far as I can see.
4) The article describes internal movement, quite simply and quite succinctly: “Ultimately, you develop a form of movement that uses the solidity of the ground as the focus of all forces to and from the body, while the qi covering of the body is manipulated by the lower-body and the middle to bring power to the arms and upper body.”
I find it hard to disagree with that definition, probably because it’s pretty broad. Sure, we can argue over what the “middle” is, or what the “lower-body” means,etc.. but as a succinct definition, it’s not half bad.
Now, let’s move on to how you do it…
The article talks about breathing exercises as a starting point: “Breathing techniques that stretch the surface of the skin and the involuntary muscle layers are the usual start of the progression.”
Now, I have personally trained in some of the methods that Mr Sigman uses (there’s a link to a video at the end of the article), and experienced what he’s talking about, and I’d agree that I can feel what he’s talking about. But I wouldn’t count myself as an expert in it, or knowledgeable about anything to do with it beyond the initial foot in the door stages, however, I have found that alone to be incredibly valuable and shone a light on some of the other things I was already doing. Even getting a foot in the door took a lot of work and a lot of time.
Anyway, I’ll leave you to read the article now and feel free to comment with your thoughts below.
Graham
Practical Development of Qi
And why you shouldn’t train with weights when developing your qi
by Mike Sigman, March 2025
Discussing qi is difficult because the definition of qi has become a bird’s nest of related topics. Let’s try to narrow the discussion and then describe an approach to practical development.
Most of the skills related to qi, in the physical body, have to do with an area near the skin of the body that is referred to as the “protective qi” or “wei qi”. While the protective qi is often referred to as an “energy”, it is actually a physical set of tissues that is controlled via the autonomic nervous system … but when you learn to control it via the subconscious mind, it does indeed feel sort of like an “energy” because it is apart from the topical sensations of the somatic nervous system, and the qi indeed feels odd, like an energy.
So, let’s separate the skin-related qi, which includes the subconscious mind’s involvement, from the theoretical qi of traditional Chinese medicine: that’s where most of the confusion lies. The skin-related qi and the subconscious mind are the artifacts which give us heightened toughness of the skin, odd sensations of qi, added strength by supplemental our muscle-bone strength, and dantian control of the body as whole connected by skin-related qi, among other things. Jin forces, the manipulation of the solidity of the ground and/or downward forces of gravity, are also the product of the skin-related qi: jin is defined as “the physical manifestation of qi” in many Chinese sources.
The qi of traditional medicine theory is/was an effort to explain the workings of strength, including the strength of our involuntary systems. We don’t need to know all the theories about meridians, putative different types of qi, etc., in order to develop the qi. Breathing exercises and focused physical and mental exercises are more important than complex qi-paradigm explanations.
The skin-area wei qi is initially controlled by respiration and “breathing exercises” are our initial approach to control and development of the qi tissues. During inspiration, if we are slightly extended or stretched out, we can feel a slight inward pulling of the tissues of the fingers and hand. Other areas of the body, upon being slightly stretched taut, can also be felt during the inhale, but many tissues in other areas of the body can’t be felt. They must be developed over time by breathing exercises before we can feel them respond to our breathing and before we can develop them further.
Some Chinese texts mention the fact that this superficial qi is something that animals still use (think of a horse quivering its flanks, for example), but which has atrophied in humans over the course of evolution. In order to regain our qi, we must use deliberate exercises of breathing, mental imagery, and posture manipulation.
Training the Qi in General Movement
Jin force-manipulation is a product of the qi tissues applying stressors within the body’s frame. That’s why jin is defined as “the physical manifestation of the qi”, among other things. We use jin unconsciously in our everyday movements, so another common definition of jin is as an “intrinsic strength”. The full-blown traditional movement methodology that permeates the Chinese (and related) martial arts involves both qi and qi’s subset, jin. Qi and jin. Jin forces are the mind-directed forces from the ground and gravity; qi can be thought of, in a simplified sense, as a superficial muscular layer that connects the whole body.
The basic idea of movement with qi and jin is that the power from the ground and lower body is used as the power source for the upper body. The qi and the jin work from the lower body (including the middle/dantian), so what we have with “internal” movement is a system where the arms and hands are controlled and powered by the lower body and the middle.
The general admonition is that muscle and power are used in the lower body, as needed, while the upper body is moved without the use of local muscle. I.e., a person has to learn to control his/her upper body via manipulation of the lower body and the middle. The person who thinks the internal arts would be best supplemented with typical weight workouts at the gym has lost the plot and is giving away a total lack of understanding about how the “internal” martial arts work.
Developing the Qi
Jin skills are actually fairly easy to learn, although it generally takes a few knowledgeable pointers and some personal, hands-on demonstrations to get someone started. There are a number of written attempts at jin explanations on the internet, particularly through the 6H forum.
Qi is difficult to develop because it takes time and the feelings we need to focus our attention are tenuous at first. Breathing techniques that stretch the surface of the skin and the involuntary muscle layers are the usual start of the progression. Many traditional Chinese martial arts talk about “100 Days” of breathing exercises to develop the qi to a usable status.
Movement of the involves directing all forces upward from the solidity of the ground (so you must “sink your qi”) or use the weight of the body as a basis for downward movement.
Ultimately, you develop a form of movement that uses the solidity of the ground as the focus of all forces to and from the body, while the qi covering of the body is manipulated by the lower-body and the middle to bring power to the arms and upper body.
All Asian martial arts that are labelled as “internal” martial arts, formal calligraphy, qigongs, traditional dance, etc., use this combination of qi and jin for movements. Learning the external choreography and appearance of a martial art, a qigong, etc., no matter how much it resembles the movements of an expert, will not be correct until the system of movement is changed over to the qi, jin, and dantian type of movement.
Almost all of the movements we so often see in western semblances of “Tai Chi”, Aikido, Xingyiquan, Baguazhang, etc., are based from normal movement parameters, rather than qi and jin mechanics and it will take effort to re-learn these arts with the correct movement basis. There is an old saying to that effect: “Taijiquan is easy to learn, but difficult to correct”. So, if your goal is to learn Taijiquan, Aikido, or related arts, remember that all the talk about “relaxation”, “don’t use weights”, etc., is because the body must be completely retrained to learn to move with the qi, jin, and dantian.
Here’s a video of Chen Zhaosen, with translation by John Prince, teaching basic movement drills for the Chen-style Taijiquan. Notice his comment about no strength in the upper body, but whatever strength you need in the lower body. https://vimeo.com/141009942
The Tai Chi Notebook 