By Tu-Ky Lam
Believe it or not, young children know how to use whole body force from birth. If you have ever let a toddler hold your finger, and try to shake off his grip, you will find it not easy, because he is holding you with the force of his whole body.
As we grow older, our muscles get bigger and stronger, we can just use our hands or arms to do everything in our daily life, and no long need to use the force of the whole body. We end up losing this instinct.
Internal martial artists want to revive this inborn talent so that they can be stronger and so improve their skill. Taijiquan, Xingyi quan, Yiquan, and Bagua zhang all try to achieve this goal differently: by doing the routines, by stepping, and by zhan-zhuang (standing practice). Of all these methods, the most effective one is zhan-zhuang because it can quickly build up a structure (posture) in our body, from which the whole body force can be produced and released.
The main reason is that zhan-zhuang can make our bones, tendons, ligaments and muscles work together so that our strength can easily move from our feet through our legs, torso, arms, hands and released. Our mind and bodies will undergo a lot of changes through doing zhan-zhuang and so we become fitter and stronger. Our thinking will be clearer and we are more confident. Here I will explain to you how this happens.
Let's start with our skeleton, which is the support of our body. Our skeleton is mainly made up of bones. If our bones are big, hard and heavy, we will have enormous strength. If they are small and light, we will have much less strength. Zhan-zhuang is a process that makes our bones hardened and heavier to produce more force. Those who practice zhan-zhuang can feel this happen in their body.
Our ligaments join our bones together in our skeleton. Our ligaments can contract or stretch a little bit when we run, jump, release power, etc. When we jump down from a four feet height and not hurt ourselves, this is because our ligaments work as a shock absorbent which absorbs the shock.
If our ligaments are strong and tough, we will have more strength, and so can run faster, jump higher, and release more strength. Zhan-zhuang helps to make our ligaments become bigger and tougher.
Other tissues in our body that perform similar role to our ligaments are our tendons, which connect our muscles to our bones. Zhan-zhuang can make our tendons and muscles tougher, bigger and stronger in the same way as they do to our ligaments. People who spend a lot of time doing zhan-zhuang grow bulkier and stronger, and their mind is much clearer. The coordination between the mind and the body is better as well.
It is quite easy to feel your tendons tense up to produce strength. During zhan-zhuang, make sure your fingers are slightly bent with a gap between them, and make sure you remember to bend your thumbs for about forty degrees. (Imagining your hands are grabbing a ball is helpful if you do not feel the peng energy. My students say they feel their hands are like the claws of an eagle, which is quite true.) Then you can feel very quickly that your thumbs and tendons (on your arms) are bringing a lot of strength to your fingers and palm making them very strong.
Please note that the bending of your thumbs does not require a lot of force, but surprisingly, it can bring a lot of strength to your hands and make your arms strong like a bow. Your arms are full of "peng" energy, but you are not using a lot of force. With this peng energy you can attack or ward off an incoming force quite easily. You are relaxed and yet powerful. This is Peng energy at work.
Peng energy is indispensable in push-hands as without peng you cannot do push-hands properly and improve. When teachers teach push-hands, most of them just tell their students to relax and not to use force. When students do as they are told, they always get pushed off balance. So they start to use force to prevent from being pushed. They are using force against force.
To use force in push-hands is wrong but not to use force is also wrong. You need to have the peng energy when doing push-hands. The trouble is that most people do not know what peng energy is. If these students spend time doing zhan-zhuang every day, and bend their thumbs and fingers as described above to produce the peng energy, their problem will be fixed instantly. They will not get pushed easily and they can push their opponent more easily. Their push-hands skill will take off. Peng energy is bought about by doing zhan-zhuang. It is a sign that your whole body begins to connect together as a unit.
With constant zhan-zhuang practice, our body weight and "Jin" (spelled as jing in Chinese pinyin, meaning internal strength) will be able to sink to our feet. We can feel that our feet are liked being planted in the ground. Our internal strength starts to develop and gets stronger with our practice (of zhan-zhuang).
From our feet, our jin can be released through the pushing of our feet into the ground. How do we do this? Generally speaking, in the "Embrace-a-Tree" posture, our back leg (hip, knee and foot) pushes towards the front leg and at the same time our front leg pushes down into the ground to brake (stop the forward movement of the back leg). The two forces from our legs will merge to send jin up to our hands and out.
But an advanced practitioner will know that the process is much more complicated than this. Before the release of power, there is a short brief gathering of energy or jin. We will need to sit properly on our legs, lift the top of our head up (unfortunately not many people can do this properly), and let our energy and jin sink to to bottom of our feet. Then we make our real hip move back slightly and we sit slightly more on the rear leg. (When we sit back, our knees move away from each other –front knee goes slightly forwards and back knee backwards. Our legs are like holding a balloon in the shape of a rugby ball which is expanding. Our back leg pushes into the ground while our front legs, with the knee moving out and heel lifting up, pushes upwards and backwards to send jin slightly backwards.) This is the gathering of our energy.
When we release power, our knees and hips move closer to each other (our front heel will move down to the ground, which will in turn bring our front knee back at the same time our back knee moves forwards. Our hips will move in accordance with our knees) and our back leg pushes toward the front leg which will pushes into the ground. This is how our legs work when releasing power.
In our upper body, our torso has to move forward to push our arms forwards to release power. Many masters like to describe the movement like this. The forearms are like a nail and the torso a sledgehammer which strikes hard at the nail. This is an example of releasing power to the front. Releasing power to the back is the reverse of this movement while releasing power to the left or right is only a variation of this. Practice the power discharge exercises in four directions will help perfect this skill.
Zhan-zhuang trains on our bones, ligaments, tendons, and muscles to make them work harmoniously to produce whole body force. It builds up a good structure in our body to make the strength of our whole body work together as a unit – all the strength in our legs, torso, and arms will be directed to our opponent very quickly. Our opponent can feel the coming of the enormous strength from us but cannot do anything about it.
Zhan-zhuang is the foundation of all internal martial arts and can make us healthy and strong. Without zhan-zhuang, all our training will be a waste of time.
Although this article mainly mentions the training of bones, tendons, ligaments, and muscles, we should not forget the important role of our mind which coordinates the very small movement in our body during zhan-zhuang.