YIQUAN – THE POWER OF THE MIND
by Karel Koskuba
Most styles of Taijiquan
incorporate one or several forms of Zhan Zhuang (Pole Standing) in their
training. These standing exercises are often presented as the one most
important aspect of the training (to begin with, anyway), yet not always enough
information is available to students apart from the usual advice to relax, keep
everything open and keep standing.In this article, I will describe Zhan Zhuang
training as it happens in Yiquan. (There will be more about Yiquan later.)
In Yiquan, Zhang Zhuang has
been promoted to play a pivotal role from the most basic training all the way
through to the most advanced training. Progress through the Zhan Zhuang
training steps is methodical and detailed. I hope that by the time you have
finished reading this article, all the above questions will be answered.
Before I start describing Zhang
Zhuang, I think we should establish some common ground in terms of what is the
final result of such training. Let’s say your teacher is a great master of
internal martial arts. When you try to push him, he is like a rock — you can’t
budge him. When he tries to push you, his body feels like steel — you can’t
stop him. At other times his body feels like cotton — and you still can’t stop
him!
Let’s call these three feats a
Rock Body, a Steel Body and a Cotton Body, respectively. In any of these feats,
it feels as if he is using great strength, and yet when you try to imitate what
he does, you are told not to use strength. If it is not strength, what does he
use?
The usual answer of qi (ch’i),
or jin, refers to concepts from a different culture. I shall make an attempt at
explaining it by using more familiar concepts. By the way, your teacher may be
able to do other things than the ones I have mentioned, but I shall limit my
description to those that can be trained by using Zhang Zhuang.
Whole-Body Strength
The above three feats of Rock
Body, Steel Body and Cotton Body are all expressions of what is called
whole-body strength. To understand what the whole-body strength is, let’s look
at body musculature. There are two kinds of skeletal muscles: those that are
involved in movement, socalled motor muscles, or mobilizers, and those that
stabilize the body, so-called postural muscles, or stabilizers.
The mobilizers are, on the
whole, of the fast-twitch variety; they can contract and relax in a short
interval but they get tired quickly. The stabilizers are of the slow-twitch
variety; they do not get tired easily but, on the other hand, are quite slow.
They are situated deeper in the body than the mobilizers.
The above division into the two
kinds of muscles is a somewhat simplified view for the sake of clearer
explanation. In reality, there are stabilizers, mobilizers and muscles that
act in both roles. We can pretend that any composite muscle is split into a stabilizer
and a mobilizer by extracting the appropriate type of muscle fibers
(slow-twitch and fast-twitch, respectively) into each of them. The
functionality of the body would remain unchanged.
We have very little, if any,
conscious control of the stabilizers. But stabilizers have two properties that
are very useful. First, they are stronger than the mobilizers and, given their
position with respect to joints, they can make the body structure really
strong. Second, most of them are designed to stabilize balance our body against
outside force (usually the force of gravity). We can use both of these
properties to our advantage.
Strong Structure
Let’s look at the first point.
When discussing muscle strength, there is a distinction made between a static and
a dynamic strength. Static strength, when the muscle is locked in position, is
greater than dynamic strength, when the muscle is expanding or contracting.
This is because static strength is facilitated by slow-twitch fibers, which
are stronger.
Thus the stabilizers, being
composed of slow-twitch fibers, are very strong. Coupled with the fact that
they are usually very close to the joints that they stabilize, you can see how
they can be used to produce a lot of power. Locking the body in a very strong static
position may be interesting but is not very useful. Especially if any push just
topples the whole structure over! This is where the second point comes in.
Dynamic Structure
Let’s imagine you are standing
on a steep hill, with one foot higher than the other and you are supporting a
fairly heavy weight sliding at you from above. Suppose that you support it
from underneath, with your arms above your head. You would naturally try to
let the weight pass through your body into the rear foot, using the front leg
to stabilize yourself against the hill.
If the weight were to wobble,
you would simply adjust your arms and body underneath to keep the weight
passing to the rear foot. It would not require any (significant) mental effort
and, unless the wobble took the weight too far from your base, not any
(significant) extra physical effort. Your stabilizers would perform any
adjustments needed automatically, with the mobilizers acting in unison.
Now let’s tilt the hill so that
the ground underneath becomes horizontal and the weight you were supporting is
now represented by a push from someone in front of you. There will be two
likely changes in your behavior. First, you would have to adjust your posture
because gravity now acts in a vertical direction. Second (and here I am asking
you to pretend you are a beginner again, before you had all that extensive
training), because your stabilizers now act in a different direction from the
push, you will use your mobilizers to resist the push.
In order to stop the push, you
will start pushing back with the same force. If your adversary starts changing
the direction of his push, there will be nothing automatic in your response! So
if you could somehow get your body to act as if the push was a result of a
force of gravity, you could relax and let your automatic responses neutralize
the push for you. My first Taijiquan teacher told us once to “make gravity your
friend.” Unfortunately, I had no idea what he was talking about at that time!
What is Zhan Zhuang?
Zhan Zhuang is often translated
as Pole Standing. It is a name that refers to a number of stance practices in
which the body is kept essentially still and mostly upright, though there are
some stances where the spine is not vertical. The purpose of these exercises is
to become aware of the stabilizers and then gain some measure of control over
them.
The first task is to feel how
the body acts against gravity. The best way to do that is to stand and feel
(observe), in other words-Zhan Zhuang. There are a number of positions to
produce different effects on the body, but the most popular one is to stand
with arms as if embracing a large ball in front of the chest.
To isolate the stabilizers, you
must relax the mobilizers. Unfortunately, the mobilizers will interfere, as
most people (it seems) from a fairly early age will start (mis)using mobilizers
to take on the task of stabilizing the body. Because you can’t really feel the
stabilizers, you must try to relax all muscles.
As far as our perception is
concerned, mobilizers are all the muscles you are aware of. That is, by the
way, why my teacher (and yours probably, too) used to say “do not use any
muscles.” So the first task really is re-educating the body to use the
stabilizers. The next one is to try to integrate the body’s movement to use
stabilizers against any resistance that is encountered, as if acting against
gravity. This will give you the basis of whole-body strength.
As the Taiji classics say,
“essential hardness comes from essential softness.” Eventually your arms and
body will become very heavy to the touch. Further training will be needed to
be able to use the body in a natural way and especially to integrate the
mobilizers and fascia (connective, fibrous tissue) in issuing of strength (fali
or fa-jin) but that is not the role of Zhan Zhuang anymore.
Less is More
To set up a regime for Zhan
Zhuang practice, I would recommend the following procedure. To start with, no
more than five or ten seconds should be spent on the practice; but the practice
should be performed every day without fail.
There are three reasons for
this seemingly ridiculous length of training. One is that it is very difficult,
for an untrained person, to keep concentrating for any length of time on
something as mundane as standing-and you do not want to stand just for the sake
of standing.
The second reason is that, to
start with, the most important goal to achieve is to get into a habit of
standing; to achieve the rhythm of daily practice. It is far easier to do that
if the practice is short.
Lastly, it is quite likely, as
I said above, that you might be using the wrong kind of muscles in the
beginning. The last thing you want is to train yourself to hold the posture
with the mobilizers.
You may have heard of people
suffering agony in standing practices of this nature who eventually made the
breakthrough into a relaxed stance. Well, it is one way to achieve the same
goal, but it is rather wasteful on resources and quite painful. As I said,
mobilizers tire quite quickly, and then they hurt. Getting them out of the way
can be done either by just standing until they give up and stabilizers take
over or by trying to relax by carefully monitoring the state of the body and
inducing relaxation by the use of mental images.
The length of the standing
should be governed by your attention span. When the concentration is weakening
and other thoughts start to impinge on your mind, make a brief attempt to come
back to the practice, but if it fails, end the training for the day (or the
time-being). In this way, your concentration will gradually improve with the
standing in a natural way.
The process is quite simple. As
you keep standing, gradually areas of the body that you were not aware of will
come within your awareness. As it happens, you will have more of the body to
observe, and thus your standing can be longer, without you getting bored. So,
if on your first day you exhaust your observation in five seconds, stop after
five seconds.
After six months you may be
occupied with your body even after five or ten minutes. This is the easiest,
and I believe the quickest, route to success. Standing in Zhan Zhuang and
watching television is better than sitting and watching television. But it
shouldn’t be thought of as replacing the standing where you concentrate on the
body.
Weight Training
So how about strengthening
one’s body using weight training? As I said above, the only muscles that we are
normally aware of are the mobilizers. When we decide to move, we immediately
use the mobilizers. In fact, as was noted, we often use the mobilizers instead
of the stabilizers.
So what muscles are we likely
to strengthen and build up when we lift weights? Working on strengthening
mobilizers when you try to use stabilizers is not going to help with your
progress. It is usually the strongest looking person who starts to shake first
when attempting Zhan Zhuang for the first time.
Having big and strong muscles
is not bad in itself, even in internal martial arts. The problem is that
normally weight training reinforces the habit of using mobilizers. This is
contrary to what we try to achieve with the Zhan Zhuang training.
So your first priority should
be to establish control over the stabilizers. After such control is
established, you can start using weights, if you so desire. But you should be
careful to use mobilizers for movement and stabilizers for handling the
weights.
Is Zhan Zhuang Training
Necessary?
Not really. Some people can
achieve all of the feats attributed to their imaginary teacher above without
any standing practice. What they probably do is to train a lot of slow moving
exercises (either forms or silk reelingtype drills).
The key to their practice is
again to relax all the mobilizers (which, as far as they are concerned, are all
the mus cles) and to imagine they are moving against some slight resistance
(for example, as if moving in water). Little by little, the stabilizers will
start being involved in a similar manner, as I discussed above.
Sometimes they can cheat by
practicing the form as a series of static postures. The idea is the same as
Zhan Zhuang, but they are training the stabilizers in the postures used in the
form.
Your Zhan Zhuang (or other
standing exercises) may be different in some aspects. As I said at the
beginning, what I have described is a Yiquan system of Zhan Zhuang exercises,
and I hope that it will give you some ideas that will help to improve your Zhan
Zhuang practice.
Yiquan for Health
Most posture and
muscular-skeletal problems seem to be caused by the misuse of mobilizers that
are usurping the role of stabilizers. Due to their low endurance
characteristics, they cannot do the job adequately. Thus, it is no use to tell
people who slump to straighten up. They will naturally use their mobilizers to
lift their posture with the inevitable result that the muscles will get tired
and hurt and so they will slump again.
To do any kind of conscious
movement, it is only natural to use mobilizers. This is where Zhan Zhuang
training of Yiquan can help. It is ideally suited for correcting all kinds of
problems stemming from the imbalance between stabilizers and mobilizers.
And I think the training gives
quicker results when compared to other therapies, like the Alexander technique
and the Feldenkreis method. And is probably less expensive, too.
There are other benefits
stemming from the emphasis on tranquility and very slow and careful movements.
It obviously helps with any stress-related problems, and problems with
co-ordination and balance. It is an excellent method of regulating one’s
metabolism and sleep pattern. The list could go on but the space is limited!
After the Shi Li training,
students are taught (if that is the right word in this context) Health Dance,
in which they link different exercises in a spontaneous manner.
The Traditional View
What I have been describing is
how to gain control over muscles of which we are not even aware. Clearly, any
movement using stabilizers must seem powered by something other than muscles.
In Chinese culture, qi is a cause of movement, so it is not surprising that the
kind of movement I’ve been describing would be attributed to qi.
We have seen how this qi is
trained by the mind (awareness) and activated by the mind. Sometimes bone
breathing or bone squeezing methods are used to congeal qi into the bones.
This is just another way of gaining awareness of the deep muscular structures.
Awareness of the stabilizers is felt like a tightness round the bones. Due to
the structure of slow-twitch fibers, deliberate use of stabilizers produces
more heat than is usual. This can be felt and it is different from a similar,
but smaller, effect in the skin brought about by relaxation.
Both of these effects, but
especially the heat produced deeper in the body, are often taken as a sign of
increased qi flow.
Conclusion
Zhan Zhuang is the first step
in acquiring internal power. The emphasis should be on relaxing all muscles and
feeling how the body balances against gravity. Slow, very subtle movements can
be felt under the guide of kinesthetic visualization (movement in stillness).
Later on, when learning to
move, the body’s structure should always be supported by stabilizers, producing
the feeling of standing at any point in the movement (stillness in movement).
While I have supported my ideas
with quotes, I would like to say that as far as I know, the people I have
quoted did not use any explanation referring to stabilizers and mobilizers.
That part is my own explanation and should not be treated as the official view.