Always find somethings new on tai chi or martial arts on every discussion. Surely if happen to be trained by professional is perfect, to know the basic movement and find your own movement in line with the body structure, the level of flexibility, the stamina, no matters in what age can do pls ajust to own capacity and to include the breathing technique. It would become a life style and energetic until the senior time, primarily on muscle and tendon fexibility and stamina....happy tai chi practice. All the very best...!
Even the cue "sinking" is a limited translation of the instruction Fang Sung. "Unravel toward the ground" or "unwind like a spool of thread suspended by it's loose end" are both more complete pictures of the concept of Sung than "sinking" IMO. "Allowing the Qi to fall through us" is another good cue. I find when people hear "sinking" they strongly tend to misinterpret that as "squatting" or "squeezing the frame toward the ground" and neither of those is desirable, IMO
Hello @The_Taiji_Viking. I like your descriptions very much. Of course, any way we try to say it will be ultimately limited, and you never know what image will resonate with a student and click for them. I adress the very misunderstanding you mentioned in this video: ruclips.net/video/aWKEShLbefg/видео.html. Thanks for your comment. I use a lot of analogies with my students. I sometimes hold up a slinky from one end and slowly let the sections drop from my fingers until the other end hits the ground. I think I will add your phrasing "unwind toward the ground," if you'll allow me. It's nice. Regards.
"unwind like a spool of thread suspended by it's loose end" - beautiful, but I wonder how many people actually would be able to use this. If you lack the actual experience for how this fees, it's very difficult to use this imagination, especially for a western mind.
Hi, @ken-waidoo6180. I hope you are doing well. Thank you for that question. The short answer is yes, well... no. Actually, let me try to explain: In the same way that sinking isn't lowering the posture, but may have some attendant lowering movement, releasing pressure up from the ground isn't the same as raising the posture, though the posture may rise up a bit. If by "mentally," you mean using the mind to both feel/track the transference of force/inner motion through the body, as well as generating that motion through intention, then I would say yes, do it mentally. If by "mentally," you mean imagining a feeling going up without any movement in the body at all, I would say no. This is a tough thing to explain in words. I can offer some "don'ts:" Don't push up from the ground with the legs. Don't use tension in the torso (especially the back, sacrum, and tailbone) to lift yourself up. Don't raise the breastbone. Maybe this will help... If you know what sinking/downward internal movement feels like (the sense of your mass fluidly moving through your soft tissues as you release tension), then upward internal movement is the same thing in the opposite direction. The pressure built up between your feet and the ground when sinking is then released and guided upward through your tissue and joints in the same way as in sinking, only in the opposite direction (up instead of down). What does the guiding is the mind. Hope this helps. Best Regards, Grant Clyman.
Hello, @xbigxbadxwolfx1. That is more or less what I am trying to convey. Swaying from foot to foot implies that you're likely keeping your weight up - what some might call "uprooted." Apart from making your postures and movements less stable, keeping your weight up will also prevent the changes in the soft tissue and joints from taking place that we want from the practice. Rolling the feet from front to back and back to front while stepping is fine, as long as you're sinking into the bubbling wells (yongquan points) of the feet and not swaying your weight. As for the legs being like springs... I sort of like that analogy and have used it, but it seems a little misleading. The more I think about it, the more the image of springs gives me a sense of bouncing and uprooting. It feels a bit more hydraulic. We don't want to bounce the skeletal structure. What I'm describing feels more like a wave or current of pressure moving up and down through the body. The development of sinking generally comes first (before rising force - which doesn't necessarily raise the posture and definitely shouldn't uproot you) through standing wuji or zhan zhuang practice. Once you can clearly feel your weight and density sinking through your soft tissues to the ground without obstruction or leak (force being blocked or being directed away from the bubbling wells somewhere along the path down through the body), then it becomes much easier to feel it rise up through the body in a similar manner. Both are done through releasing the tension that holds density in place in the body. You can practice the exercise without the rising part. Simply focus on sinking from one leg to the other until the external, horizontal shift from foot to foot feels powered by a vertical "pouring" down into one foot, then the other. Furthermore, you can simply practice sinking your weight into one leg by standing still on it and releasing tension for a few minutes at a time. Hope this helps to clarify. Regards.
I'm sorry but this is rubbish. Gravity operates downwards and you can't move mass within your body, you can only move it onto one leg or the other. I call bullshido. 🤨
The word "sinking" is often misleading people into thinking to let their weight down to their feet. While it's not wrong, it's not exactly right either. I prefer to teach mentally lifting the foot we're sinking into. It partially disengages the legs' muscles that are used to support our weight and engages the antagonist muscles. This releases, empties and roots the leg. This release creates a feeling of vacuum under our foot which sucks our body directly down to Yong Quan and initiates body movement. When stepping, it's like our front foot is pulling our body forward instead of our backfoot pushing us. And by doing that, the leg of the front foot is directly supporting the weight that is progressively distributed to it throught the motion, without the need to re-adjust our muscles' contraction before we can actually pick up the other foot.
Hello, @KelGhu. Thank you for this comment. I really like what you've said here. While I think of the term "sinking" as denoting a movement through a released/emptying body that transfers force to the ground, I agree that it can be misunderstood as loading weight onto the structure of the legs and cause muscle tension where release should be. Your description does a nice job of bringing awareness to the creation of internal space in the leg and foot, and generates a nice image of the weight draining out of the body and into the ground - a bottom up "emptying," instead of a top down "sinking." It fits nicely with something I teach my students - the notion that we aim/move force through "empty" spaces. As it relates to what you described with the legs and stepping, I teach that our weight passes down through the inner hip space (kua), the hollow behind the knee (weizhong point), and the space under the foot (yangquan point), and that this happens as we yield/empty the leg. The notion of "pouring water" I talk about in this video is meant to describe the legs as empty recepticals, or conduits, that the "water" of our weight (and other forces) pours through. I have never thought of the cue to "mentally lift the foot" as a way to generate a drawing of the weight down through it, however. I like that.
Hello, @rickgan4096. Thank you for your question and for supporting my work. We can talk about sinking on some different levels. In the context of this video, I am referring to the sinking of our weight. That sinking is the top-down transferance of gravity's pull on our mass, which is done by aligning our skeletal structure and releasing tension in our muscles (the specifics are a bit much to get into here). This allows the pressure of weight in different areas of our body to "sink" down until it transfers into the ground (a feeling almost like your weight is draining through the bottom of your feet into the earth). There are a couple of typical reasons practitioners find trouble with this. One may be that their skeletal alignment is off, which causes tension as muscles attempt to support the sub-optimal alignment. Another reason may be that they are doing what I call "holding shape." This is an act of assuming a posture, or an element of posture, using tension to create the shape. Often, that tension isn't recognized until it is examined and let go of. Finally, some practitioners believe they should be holding themselves up. They may have relaxed their upper body but believe their lower body is meant to support them. This is true, in a manner of speaking, but the legs act as conduits for the force of weight released from the upper body (as well as their own weight), which is accomplished by letting go of tension. When going through this process, generally learned in the wuji posture and certain exercises (different depending on style), it is common to feel the weight get stuck on the way down. Common areas may be the shoulders, mid back, low back, hips, thighs, calves, and lastly, the feet against the ground (which I refer to as the last joint). Part of the purpose of standing practice is to learn to align and release until the sinking can get all the way down without obstruction. PS - You don't need to get into a low stance to accomplish this. While we need to "sit" into the kua, and other alignment principles do require a degree of lowering your structure to open your joints, don't keep lowering your structure. Instead, let your weight pass through your body, and your muscles and connective tissues kind of hang off your bones. I'll get into this step by step in my Online Academy. I also go a bit more into this in this video: ruclips.net/video/aWKEShLbefg/видео.html Hope this helps. Regards, Grant
I suck at tai chi, I been doing it 20 years and still can only do the 1/3 form of tai chi chang style from the school I used to go to until they shut down. I`m more of a JKD guy, but I really enjoy tai chi.
OK, Sir, are you speaking about adding internal visualization while moving at the same level? However, performing a formal exercise utilizing postures with different levels, sinking the body is a must, yet it has not been dealt with. Paul,69
Hello @bajuszpal172. Thank you for contributing to the conversation. I have to say, I'm not sure I understood your question properly. Honestly, I'm not even sure if you are addressing me or someone called "Paul,69," but I will try to answer in case you are 🙂. I don't use "internal visualization" when sinking. Sinking (in the context of this video) comes from gravity once we've aligned and released tension (song). Rising comes from the release of pressure between the feet and the ground and transfers up through the soft tissues and joints. The mental element comes from tracking the physical sensations of sinking and rising as well as guiding them through intent (yi). This requires suffusing the whole body with the mind (ting - "listening"). "Performing a formal exercise utilizing postures with different levels, sinking is a must, yet it has not been dealt with." If by that you mean that I did not address the relationship between the vertical level of postures within the forms and sinking, to me, they are not necessarily directly related. Sinking, as it relates to our movements, whether in forms or otherwise, is a transfrsnce of gravity's pull on the body's mass (primarily through the soft tissues) to the ground through aligning and releasing. That movement is essentially vertical, though, because it travels along the skeletal structure, postures with wider stances will cause the vertical movement to "shift" the body somewhat horizontally when sinking into one leg or the other. That is, if external movement is the intention. It is, of course, possible to sink and rise in one leg with virtually no external movement of the body (because the skeletal structure was not moved much, only the mass was transferred through the soft tissues, guided by the mind). In this sense hopefull you can understand why, to me, the level or height of a posture in the forms is a separate issue from sinking and rising force through the body. Hopefully I understood you and this answer helped to clarify. Regards.
Hi @webherring. It's funny you should mention that. In the original cut of this video, I actually took out a slinky and used it as a prop for a physical analogy, but I felt I was being redundant. I've used that analogy so many times that one of my students gifted one to me. It's not a perfect analogy, though, since a slinky doesn't have the springy upward force we develop through sinking that rises back up. Still, I think it can be helpful for students to grasp the concept.
@@DarsanaMartialArts What a coincidence! That's pretty funny. I also think the bagua circle walking looks to me like a walking slinky. What you call sinking, is that the same as what others call rooting?
@webherring. It can be. It depends on what the peson means by the term rooting. I would say sinking is the action/process by which one becomes rooted. Some might use the term rooting to mean lowering their center of gravity and widening their base to create a more stable structure and better leverage from the ground. That is not what I would call sinking or rooting. Sinking, to me, is the conducting of force (in the case of solo work, gravity's pull on our mass) through our center and to the ground. That comes from aligning and releasing tension not from lowering the structure or widening the base. Once you've sunk force internally and opened the tissues and joints, you become an effective conduit and are now "rooted." If that is what they mean by rooting, then yes, I would say we mean the same thing. That said, I've spoken to some practitioners who seem to confuse or conflate rooting with the sort of external change in posture I mentioned above. So, I wanted to clarify rather than just say yes. I prefer the term sinking because it conjures images of something moving down through something else (as in force through our structure). It has a fluid quality, rather than the whole structure going down as a solid unit. I feel rooting can have a connotation of being fixed in your posture and position (though it doesn't have to). I made a video about this recently: ruclips.net/video/aWKEShLbefg/видео.html I think it all depends on how you understand and use these terms. Hope this makes sense. Regards.
Always find somethings new on tai chi or martial arts on every discussion. Surely if happen to be trained by professional is perfect, to know the basic movement and find your own movement in line with the body structure, the level of flexibility, the stamina, no matters in what age can do pls ajust to own capacity and to include the breathing technique. It would become a life style and energetic until the senior time, primarily on muscle and tendon fexibility and stamina....happy tai chi practice. All the very best...!
Even the cue "sinking" is a limited translation of the instruction Fang Sung.
"Unravel toward the ground" or "unwind like a spool of thread suspended by it's loose end" are both more complete pictures of the concept of Sung than "sinking" IMO.
"Allowing the Qi to fall through us" is another good cue.
I find when people hear "sinking" they strongly tend to misinterpret that as "squatting" or "squeezing the frame toward the ground" and neither of those is desirable, IMO
Hello @The_Taiji_Viking. I like your descriptions very much. Of course, any way we try to say it will be ultimately limited, and you never know what image will resonate with a student and click for them. I adress the very misunderstanding you mentioned in this video:
ruclips.net/video/aWKEShLbefg/видео.html.
Thanks for your comment. I use a lot of analogies with my students. I sometimes hold up a slinky from one end and slowly let the sections drop from my fingers until the other end hits the ground. I think I will add your phrasing "unwind toward the ground," if you'll allow me. It's nice. Regards.
"unwind like a spool of thread suspended by it's loose end" - beautiful, but I wonder how many people actually would be able to use this. If you lack the actual experience for how this fees, it's very difficult to use this imagination, especially for a western mind.
@@romedbucher2854 Ambiguous as hell
The best way to learn this is doing "stand like a tree", this is a fundamental practice in order to develop internal energy.
Hi, @shotoneko. I agree. We call it standing in Wuji in our system. It's the foundation for everything.
I hope I remember how to do this on Rockaway Boulevard at 4:AM!!!
😅
Are you supposed to physically rise, and fall, or do it mentally?
Hi, @ken-waidoo6180. I hope you are doing well. Thank you for that question. The short answer is yes, well... no. Actually, let me try to explain:
In the same way that sinking isn't lowering the posture, but may have some attendant lowering movement, releasing pressure up from the ground isn't the same as raising the posture, though the posture may rise up a bit. If by "mentally," you mean using the mind to both feel/track the transference of force/inner motion through the body, as well as generating that motion through intention, then I would say yes, do it mentally. If by "mentally," you mean imagining a feeling going up without any movement in the body at all, I would say no.
This is a tough thing to explain in words. I can offer some "don'ts:"
Don't push up from the ground with the legs.
Don't use tension in the torso (especially the back, sacrum, and tailbone) to lift yourself up.
Don't raise the breastbone.
Maybe this will help... If you know what sinking/downward internal movement feels like (the sense of your mass fluidly moving through your soft tissues as you release tension), then upward internal movement is the same thing in the opposite direction. The pressure built up between your feet and the ground when sinking is then released and guided upward through your tissue and joints in the same way as in sinking, only in the opposite direction (up instead of down). What does the guiding is the mind.
Hope this helps. Best Regards,
Grant Clyman.
Bit of both but not so anyone would notice practice in a supermarket queue ?
Haha! I've done that more times than I can count.
What tho?
Am i doing it wrong if im swaying by rolling my feet and kind of swaying my weight from foot to foot or should i be using my legs more like a spring ?
Hello, @xbigxbadxwolfx1. That is more or less what I am trying to convey. Swaying from foot to foot implies that you're likely keeping your weight up - what some might call "uprooted." Apart from making your postures and movements less stable, keeping your weight up will also prevent the changes in the soft tissue and joints from taking place that we want from the practice.
Rolling the feet from front to back and back to front while stepping is fine, as long as you're sinking into the bubbling wells (yongquan points) of the feet and not swaying your weight.
As for the legs being like springs... I sort of like that analogy and have used it, but it seems a little misleading. The more I think about it, the more the image of springs gives me a sense of bouncing and uprooting. It feels a bit more hydraulic. We don't want to bounce the skeletal structure. What I'm describing feels more like a wave or current of pressure moving up and down through the body.
The development of sinking generally comes first (before rising force - which doesn't necessarily raise the posture and definitely shouldn't uproot you) through standing wuji or zhan zhuang practice. Once you can clearly feel your weight and density sinking through your soft tissues to the ground without obstruction or leak (force being blocked or being directed away from the bubbling wells somewhere along the path down through the body), then it becomes much easier to feel it rise up through the body in a similar manner. Both are done through releasing the tension that holds density in place in the body. You can practice the exercise without the rising part. Simply focus on sinking from one leg to the other until the external, horizontal shift from foot to foot feels powered by a vertical "pouring" down into one foot, then the other. Furthermore, you can simply practice sinking your weight into one leg by standing still on it and releasing tension for a few minutes at a time.
Hope this helps to clarify. Regards.
Excellent, the set is almost never double waited if done properly/
Thank you
I'm sorry but this is rubbish. Gravity operates downwards and you can't move mass within your body, you can only move it onto one leg or the other. I call bullshido. 🤨
@@dalehill6127It's ok not to understand. And if you don't care about this art, just gtfo.
The word "sinking" is often misleading people into thinking to let their weight down to their feet. While it's not wrong, it's not exactly right either.
I prefer to teach mentally lifting the foot we're sinking into. It partially disengages the legs' muscles that are used to support our weight and engages the antagonist muscles. This releases, empties and roots the leg.
This release creates a feeling of vacuum under our foot which sucks our body directly down to Yong Quan and initiates body movement.
When stepping, it's like our front foot is pulling our body forward instead of our backfoot pushing us. And by doing that, the leg of the front foot is directly supporting the weight that is progressively distributed to it throught the motion, without the need to re-adjust our muscles' contraction before we can actually pick up the other foot.
Your teach is quiet good for learning how to use kua (胯, hip joint) for sinking.
Hello, @KelGhu. Thank you for this comment.
I really like what you've said here. While I think of the term "sinking" as denoting a movement through a released/emptying body that transfers force to the ground, I agree that it can be misunderstood as loading weight onto the structure of the legs and cause muscle tension where release should be.
Your description does a nice job of bringing awareness to the creation of internal space in the leg and foot, and generates a nice image of the weight draining out of the body and into the ground - a bottom up "emptying," instead of a top down "sinking."
It fits nicely with something I teach my students - the notion that we aim/move force through "empty" spaces. As it relates to what you described with the legs and stepping, I teach that our weight passes down through the inner hip space (kua), the hollow behind the knee (weizhong point), and the space under the foot (yangquan point), and that this happens as we yield/empty the leg.
The notion of "pouring water" I talk about in this video is meant to describe the legs as empty recepticals, or conduits, that the "water" of our weight (and other forces) pours through. I have never thought of the cue to "mentally lift the foot" as a way to generate a drawing of the weight down through it, however. I like that.
Great description and it gives something for people to try out and listen to the difference in the body, while stationary and still.
I guess I don’t understand the how of sinking down. Is there another way of explaining it, and how you do it?
Hello, @rickgan4096. Thank you for your question and for supporting my work.
We can talk about sinking on some different levels. In the context of this video, I am referring to the sinking of our weight.
That sinking is the top-down transferance of gravity's pull on our mass, which is done by aligning our skeletal structure and releasing tension in our muscles (the specifics are a bit much to get into here). This allows the pressure of weight in different areas of our body to "sink" down until it transfers into the ground (a feeling almost like your weight is draining through the bottom of your feet into the earth).
There are a couple of typical reasons practitioners find trouble with this. One may be that their skeletal alignment is off, which causes tension as muscles attempt to support the sub-optimal alignment. Another reason may be that they are doing what I call "holding shape." This is an act of assuming a posture, or an element of posture, using tension to create the shape. Often, that tension isn't recognized until it is examined and let go of. Finally, some practitioners believe they should be holding themselves up. They may have relaxed their upper body but believe their lower body is meant to support them. This is true, in a manner of speaking, but the legs act as conduits for the force of weight released from the upper body (as well as their own weight), which is accomplished by letting go of tension.
When going through this process, generally learned in the wuji posture and certain exercises (different depending on style), it is common to feel the weight get stuck on the way down. Common areas may be the shoulders, mid back, low back, hips, thighs, calves, and lastly, the feet against the ground (which I refer to as the last joint). Part of the purpose of standing practice is to learn to align and release until the sinking can get all the way down without obstruction.
PS - You don't need to get into a low stance to accomplish this. While we need to "sit" into the kua, and other alignment principles do require a degree of lowering your structure to open your joints, don't keep lowering your structure. Instead, let your weight pass through your body, and your muscles and connective tissues kind of hang off your bones.
I'll get into this step by step in my Online Academy.
I also go a bit more into this in this video:
ruclips.net/video/aWKEShLbefg/видео.html
Hope this helps.
Regards,
Grant
I suck at tai chi, I been doing it 20 years and still can only do the 1/3 form of tai chi chang style from the school I used to go to until
they shut down. I`m more of a JKD guy, but I really enjoy tai chi.
Chang style? What ? That might be the problem- sounds like a gimmick/made up thing. If it’s real at all it’s Really Really obscure
OK, Sir, are you speaking about adding internal visualization while moving at the same level?
However, performing a formal exercise utilizing postures with different levels, sinking the body is a must, yet it has not been dealt with. Paul,69
Hello @bajuszpal172. Thank you for contributing to the conversation. I have to say, I'm not sure I understood your question properly. Honestly, I'm not even sure if you are addressing me or someone called "Paul,69," but I will try to answer in case you are 🙂.
I don't use "internal visualization" when sinking. Sinking (in the context of this video) comes from gravity once we've aligned and released tension (song). Rising comes from the release of pressure between the feet and the ground and transfers up through the soft tissues and joints. The mental element comes from tracking the physical sensations of sinking and rising as well as guiding them through intent (yi). This requires suffusing the whole body with the mind (ting - "listening").
"Performing a formal exercise utilizing postures with different levels, sinking is a must, yet it has not been dealt with."
If by that you mean that I did not address the relationship between the vertical level of postures within the forms and sinking, to me, they are not necessarily directly related. Sinking, as it relates to our movements, whether in forms or otherwise, is a transfrsnce of gravity's pull on the body's mass (primarily through the soft tissues) to the ground through aligning and releasing. That movement is essentially vertical, though, because it travels along the skeletal structure, postures with wider stances will cause the vertical movement to "shift" the body somewhat horizontally when sinking into one leg or the other. That is, if external movement is the intention. It is, of course, possible to sink and rise in one leg with virtually no external movement of the body (because the skeletal structure was not moved much, only the mass was transferred through the soft tissues, guided by the mind). In this sense hopefull you can understand why, to me, the level or height of a posture in the forms is a separate issue from sinking and rising force through the body.
Hopefully I understood you and this answer helped to clarify. Regards.
Sounds like a slinky
Hi @webherring. It's funny you should mention that. In the original cut of this video, I actually took out a slinky and used it as a prop for a physical analogy, but I felt I was being redundant. I've used that analogy so many times that one of my students gifted one to me. It's not a perfect analogy, though, since a slinky doesn't have the springy upward force we develop through sinking that rises back up. Still, I think it can be helpful for students to grasp the concept.
@@DarsanaMartialArts What a coincidence! That's pretty funny. I also think the bagua circle walking looks to me like a walking slinky.
What you call sinking, is that the same as what others call rooting?
@webherring. It can be. It depends on what the peson means by the term rooting. I would say sinking is the action/process by which one becomes rooted. Some might use the term rooting to mean lowering their center of gravity and widening their base to create a more stable structure and better leverage from the ground. That is not what I would call sinking or rooting. Sinking, to me, is the conducting of force (in the case of solo work, gravity's pull on our mass) through our center and to the ground. That comes from aligning and releasing tension not from lowering the structure or widening the base. Once you've sunk force internally and opened the tissues and joints, you become an effective conduit and are now "rooted." If that is what they mean by rooting, then yes, I would say we mean the same thing. That said, I've spoken to some practitioners who seem to confuse or conflate rooting with the sort of external change in posture I mentioned above. So, I wanted to clarify rather than just say yes. I prefer the term sinking because it conjures images of something moving down through something else (as in force through our structure). It has a fluid quality, rather than the whole structure going down as a solid unit. I feel rooting can have a connotation of being fixed in your posture and position (though it doesn't have to). I made a video about this recently:
ruclips.net/video/aWKEShLbefg/видео.html
I think it all depends on how you understand and use these terms. Hope this makes sense. Regards.