Sung

Tai Chi should be heavy, like a stone

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Move your hips! Photo by: Samuel Castro

One of the most frequent things you hear in BJJ is “move your hips“.

Brazilian teachers tend to say “escape your hips“. Which is an odd-sounding translation of presumably something that sounds better in Portuguese. In American and English it usually gets turned into “hip escape“, as in, “do a hip escape here“, “it’s not working because you need to hip escape more“.

 

We hip escape up and down the gym as a warm up (also known as “shrimping”) because it’s a fundamental movement you need to have in your tool box that you can pull out without having to think about it.

But why? What is it? Simply put: It’s designed to create more space between you and your opponent on the ground.

You can use hip escapes for escaping bad positions like side control and mount. But it also has benefits for attacks too. Basically a good rule of thumb is that if what you’re doing isn’t working try doing a hip escape and doing it again. The change of angle and leverage will probably fix it.

Now we know what a hip escape is, let’s get to the point of all this.

When we say “move your hips” that’s not the part of the body that you need to move from. If you just moved from your hips you’d never go anywhere.  You’d just spasm on the floor like a dying fly having its last buzz. What you actually need to do is push with your toes and feet on the ground so that your hips move.

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Your hips moving is the result of the action, not the action itself.

Which brings me onto Tai Chi Chuan and the dantien (the lower abdomen area of the body).

All wise and knowledgeable Internet-enabled Tai Chi practitioners know that we need to “move from the dantien” in Tai Chi Chuan. (This is the supposed secret to Tai Chi that you get told by your wise master only after you have paid the required tuition fees for a number of years. 🙂 )

 

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Cheng Man Ching, Single Whip posture.

But again, where does the action originate? I would say that, just as in JiuJitsu, you don’t actually “move from the dantien” by originating action there. Your dantien moves, but it’s your foot that provides the impetus. Your foot pushing against the ground is where the ‘power’ comes from in Tai Chi Chuan.

(A side note here for the Order of Advanced Tai Chi Wizards of the Internet: When you get this concept of the power from the ground you will find that you can actually originate the movement in the dantien as a kind of dropping force that is then rebounded from the ground, so it’s less of a push with the legs. File this under “advanced” if it makes no sense right now and come back to it later).

What Tai Chi Chuan specialises in is transmitting this power to the extremities without interfering with it as much as is humanly possible. We know that in Tai Chi we need to be relaxed (song), which seems like the last thing you’d want to be if you have to hit something hard, but there is a method in the madness.

In Tai Chi Chuan you are trying to transfer that power – the ground reaction force – from your foot all the way to your fingers as smoothly as possible and directing it with the dantien. This is called ‘threading a pearl through the 9 crooked gates‘ in the Tai Chi classics. The gates here are the joints of the body. All the breaks in connection between your foot and fingers are the points where power leaks out. Usually we cover these things up by using muscular strength to get by – you can spend years fooling yourself with this, and it’s a very hard habit to stop.

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Points of interest, where we generally mess this up, are the lower back (keep it open) and the shoulders (stop using them as a power source). The whole body should be Song.

‘Relaxed’ doesn’t mean light and floaty. It means heavy and rooted like a stone.

 

“You’re really tight” is meaningless

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I found this article recently that I thought was pretty interesting. It’s about massage and the often used phrase “you’re really tight” by therapists.

Statements like “you’re really tight” are a bit of a verbal tic, something automatic — even expected — that massage therapists to say to pass the time and make conversation with clients. Tightness doesn’t even actually have a clear meaning.3 In this context, it is trivial and harmless.

Being “Sung” (translated as “relaxed”) is one of the things we get told to do all the time in Tai Chi, and it’s open to a lot of misinterpretation. Really, what it’s talking about is not overly tensing muscles, so that the power of an incoming force can be directed to the ground without the muscles taking the load. If you can get the ground to take the load then your muscles are free to do other things.

 

Using the waist in Tai Chi Chuan

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You know how it is when you can tell a section of your form has gone to seed, but you can’t put your finger on exactly why? While doing the form this morning I was having major problems with one particular move. Which one is of no consequence, all that’s important is that it just didn’t feel right whatever way I did it. My form felt week and uncoordinated in that one particular spot. So, what is a student to do when they get stuck like this?

Luckily, I have a video of my teacher doing the form, so after failing to find the fault myself I simply popped open my laptop to watch how he approached that move. Immediately I saw my problem. He does the move with a lot more waist turning than I do. In fact, he does a lot more waist turning on all the moves compared to me, not just this one. The waist and legs are of utmost importance in TCC. In fact, it should have been the first place I looked for the solution to my problem rather than turning to a video, since the Tai Chi Classics already tell you that this is where you should be looking first to correct errors in your form. The Tai Chi Chuan Treaste (attributed to Chang Sang Feng) says it quite clearly:

If correct timing and position are not achieved,
the body will become disordered
and will not move as an integrated whole;
the correction for this defect
must be sought in the legs and waist.

That seems pretty clear – if your movement feels uncoordinated or generally wrong to you then first look to the legs and waist for a solution to your problem. The emphasis on the waist echoes on through out the rest of the Classics. In the “Song of the Thirteen Postures” (Unknown Author) the first two lines are: “The Thirteen Postures should not be taken lightly; the source of the postures is in the waist.” And later: “Pay attention to the waist at all times; completely relax the abdomen”. From the Five Character Secret by Li I-Yu it says: “The ch’i is like a wheel, and the whole body must mutually coordinate. If there is any uncoordinated place, the body becomes disordered and weak. The defect is to be found in the waist and legs”, and also Yang Cheng-Fu recaps the whole matter neatly in his 10 Important Points:

“3.) Sung [Relax] the waist. The waist is the commander of the whole body. If you can sung the waist, then the two legs will have power and the lower part will be firm and stable. Substantial and insubstantial change, and this is based on the turning of the waist. It is said “the source of the postures lies in the waist. If you cannot get power, seek the defect in the legs and waist.””

On a purely physical level it’s the turning actions of the waist that generate Sung Jin (Relaxed force) in Tai Chi Chuan. For example, regardless of which style of Yang you do, after raising then lowering the hands most Yang forms start with a turn to the right accompanied by a ‘Ward Off’ movement with your right arm. For that movement to actually ward something off it needs to have power in it, rather than just being as soft as a noodle. But it needs the right type of power to avoid using just brute force. It’s the turning action of the body to the right that initiates the arm movement and puts the correct type of power (Sung Jin) in the arm. Rather than it being a separate movement powered only the arm muscles independantly, the movement is done by the whole body forming a unified shape. Still with me? Good. If not then read that again, and maybe watch a video of somebody who is good doing Yang style, like this guy.

The rotation of the waist is usually done in the horizontal vector and is most evident on the transitional movements between postures in the form*, but the waist is also the commander in forward and backwards motions which don’t involve rotations to the left or right, like the Push posture.

Integral to the idea of moving from the waist is the idea of empty and solid. If you consider the waist to be a like a wheel, which is what the Classics advise, then when you turn it to the left the upper body also turns to the left, and when you turn it to the right then the upper body also turns to the right. In Push Hands if you feel force applied to one side of your body you need to turn the waist, taking that side away from the force, effectively ‘emptying’ it, but at the same time ‘filling’ the other side. It is crucial that you fill the other side of your body at the same time as you are emptying the side that’s being pushed, otherwise your movement will be disordered and you will be pushed over. This can be trained in the form practice too, even without a partner to push you, using a simple mental awareness that whenever you turn the waist you are effectively emptying one side of the upper body as you fill the other. Imagine a fluid being transferred smoothly around your body if that helps. The principle of empty and solid is much further reaching than just this simple example, but it can really help you understand why the Classics stress that “the source of the postures is in the waist”, and later admonish you to “Pay attention to the waist at all times”.

If you’re looking to correct your form, then that’s the place to start.

* In effect, there are no fixed postures in any TCC form, but if you’re teaching it to beginners you have to stop somewhere. Once you’ve learned the form it needs to be smoothed out, so these fixed positions all dissolve into one flowing movement. That’s easier said than done though, since the process of smoothing out your form to a good enough standard to start incorporating other principles can easily take over a year.