Saturday:
1. Gear box / Bite: Don’t add extra moves. With twisting of towel you need to grind elbows on ribs. Everything is proportional and nothing is loose or it will break at higher speeds (like an engine). In this way, nothing leaks out.
2. A rock cannot have a relationship with itself; it needs to split and then one part can move around in relation to the other.
3. All human actions are called revolutions (no yin / yang cycle). We need to control the actions. The Earth has revolution that comes from rotation; it rotates and does a revolution around the sun. We do the opposite. We need to not move sideways. You need to have conflict and then spin. Spin is the result of the conflict. You need to resolve the conflict in your body.
4. Ying / Yang reversal: (example of training with a door handle and putting training into practice) Master Chen considers imaginary points around an opponent and locks onto these. You make one point of your body not move and the rest moves. The power you produce is the same whether practicing with nothing there or with an opponent (partner). You need to train like a dog so that when presented with a stimulus you do the same response (stimulus / response behaviour).
5. Match: Master Chen would point to a point where there was space and match it. Once you know how to match you know how to anticipate.
Sunday:
6. “Longer moves”: We need to produce longer moves rather than having one area of the body going out of alignment. We can’t have one millimeter of atrophy.
7. Expansion is done in one unit; one unit of whatever your choice. But all 3 dots cannot move.
8. Zombie: 50 / 50 I’m here but yet I do not exist. Not strong and not weak (these can be manipulated). Dead people – when they die everything is soft. After 1 hour everything is locked; a structure is formed (as when you put items in the hands, over the eyes, and in the mouth). You need to posture the body. Find the position that is optimal and lock it and make small steps through that position.
9. All actions are rigid (yang) and all adaptations are soft (yin). Power is how quickly you can find the action in the adaptation. A soon as you find it you attack.
10. We want to fight with a rhythm… if the rhythm is off it won’t work.
11. Taoist view on life: it’s the same; birth – death… age is never a factor. You never let age limit you. The Tao is the special skill.
12. First you train your eye and look for structure. When you do you can see how energy flows.
13. The truth is naked. (We talked about gi gong and 3 levels of taiji progression.)
Thanks for the great workshop!
Todd
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
While doing a lot of repetitions of the first 13 moves of Yilu, the focus was to isolate the linear sections of each move and cleanly execute them before moving on to the next section of each move. Counting these sections while practicing this way results in the movements becoming much more ‘clear’. There are between 2 to 7 sections in the various moves, as seen in the training video that was recorded.
Another skill set that was trained was to identify where our opponents weakest balance point was and how to access that spot. We trained with opponents who were in various offensive and defensive stances.
Gene and I also learned just how hard the floor and wall are.