Effortless Power

[rauokinn]

"Always use your legs and feet for power, and your center for movement and direction. When your arms are full of ch'i, relaxed and subject to center, they hit with power but do not feel hard (to you). If you think about hitting hard or with great force, you will inevitably cock and strike out with shoulder and arm muscles. Although this feels as

Comments

[banzaimf]

I think I have attained it once. I was apologizing for a light shot, when Mike started complaining about bruising him through the Ti shoulder cops.

[rauokinn]

Yay for bruising Mike -- I have scars from him . . .

[banzaimf]

the downside is all the times I cannot get it to work, and then I end up throwing light.... i.e. all the time!

[octapig]

This is such a great book and Peter Ralston has such an amazing grasp on this. So the next question is how do you practice this both at practice and away from practice. I have started breaking down my movement and focusing on each individual peace to get a "Feel" for it. As I stretch in the morning I try and isolate each muscle involved so that I can really feel and understand where the movement and stretch is occurring. When I practice on my relaxed sword and body work I get the motion going so that it feels right, and then I work on isolating each part of my body that is involved so that I can feel what is happening...ie I focus on my feet, then ankles, and so on as I move up so that I can really get a feel for where the force/power moves from. At practice I try and work on the relaxed core by creating that first shot and then trying to keep the upper body and arms relaxed and pulling the force that was created back into relaxed motion or what I refer to sometimes as dynamic motion. For instance as I throw a snap, instead of

[rauokinn]

Worth way more than 2 cents I think. thanks so much for lending me this book. I have been practicing calm mind daily with those mental workout CDs and book, which I gave you a copy of -- even though I have not graduated yet from the first exercise, I think it has already helped a ton.

Also, I have been trying to practice on the pell really concentrating on using the power from the ground and aiming with my belly button and it is amazing how effortless it is to throw with power even at 50% speed. Thanks again for the book, it is going to take me awhile to get through -- it is meaty stuff, so you may not get it back for a month or so . . .

[cghall74]

Excellent! Love to see people thinking about relaxing while fighting. I was always given shit for it by many knights when I was a squire but I am all about fighting relaxed...

You can realize how true this is when you watch me try to fight tense....NOT pretty.. :)

Let me know how it works out for you. This might sounds really silly but one thing that is fantastic for teaching you to generate speed, torque and power while maintaining a relaxed posture and not tensing your muscled is.....

GOLF.

Laugh away... :)

Cheers

Chris/Ulf