Hold a rod not by grabing it with the whole palm, but split the span into two dots. One dot on the index finger underneath the rod acts as the pivot, and another one at the root of the palm placed above the rod acts as the balancing arm. We can tilt the rod the other end of the rod this way without lifting the rod itself.
This is what allows the power to go along the rod to the other end, and it is said to go over.
During push hands, we must hold the two sides of the opponent, and such two dots must have some distance between them so that we can create a lever. The shorter the distance, the easier to control, but less power. The longer the distance, the harder to control, but more power.
The demonstration on locking the two ends of a rubber cord, and hold two points in the middle, and push in opposite directions but perpendicular to the stretched cord, and is the same idea of holding the two sides of a rod.
My left shoulder needs to open up more. It is at a lower stage relative to my right shoulder. My experience has been the left side of my body is about 2 years behind the right side.
Put my torso inside a vertical cylindrical shell, so my shoulder can’t go outside.
Hong’s Photos: https://www.pinterest.ca/harshilmeraiya/practicalmethod/
Master Chen said even if we were to take random pictures of Hong when he was doing yilu, 95% of the pictures would be good in terms of structure integrity. This speaks of the high precision of his moves, and this is what means to be always ready. We normally have to get into a “mode”, and we have to work hard to get into a good posture for a photo.
To me, this means Hong’s yilu was made of many, many good postures, and in other words, he connected many good photos together to make a good movie.
Back to the same exercie of rotating the torso to cause the front arm (as a rod) out. First, the front fist is caused by the front shoulder movement, then we should connect the fist to the dantian, and later to the foot.
Imagine that we are unwinding a fire hose from a wheel and feed it through a pipe/tunnel, this is how thread something from behind and the power comes from converting a rotation to a linear move.
Imagine that we are winding up the reel on a fishing rod, the fishing line will come in along the fishing rod.
