Formosa Neijia

This installment is going to be more a photo essay than anything. I’ve thought a lot about how to introduce this stuff and words just don’t really do it. Pictures don’t really do it either. Video is better and actually taking a class in it is best. But we have to settle for now.

The pics for this essay came from the Tai Chi Gong Fa DVD by Chen Ching-hua, one of Xiong Wei’s top disciples. You can find it here. The DVD has an English soundtrack so you can understand what is going on. It is very professionally done, but is a bit more of an intro rather than a complete teaching DVD. It’s probably the most beautiful, stylish taiji DVD I own, FWIW.

I will start by continuing my impressions of the daoyin/zhaobao taiji class that I took.

We started the exercises by doing a few warmups and then launched right into the eight exercises I posted last time on this subject. Again, the exercises depend on tremendous hip flexibility and the ability to access muscles we don’t normally use. This how deeply you’re expected to sink into the kua:

Notice that his knees are almost above his toes and his butt is below his knees. This was impossible for me to do.

As an example of uncommon muscle usage in daoyin, everyone does shoulder shrugs. The daoyin version has you put out your arm like you’re going to do arm circles. But instead of rotating the arms, you rotate the shoulder joint forward without trying to use the arm, chest, or back muscles. Try it and you see what I mean. The instructor wanted us to move the shoulder through a much wider range of motion than I thought was possible but he could do it.

Many of the exercises required moving up from a seated position with no help from the hands. The seated position was a little like seiza from aikido except we were incouraged to roll our knees down and sit on them. This is an example exercise that uses this motion:

In the first picture, he lowers himself to the ground, and squats there for a second. Notice the position of the knees. You must have an extreme amount of hip flexibility in order to rotate your leg that far to the outside. Then, he presses up on the instep and pushes upward as in pic 3. Then he moves to low horse stance and stands up. How’s that for doing squats? Most of the squating motions are done in this fashion.

This was an interesting exercise. You go deep into a hurdler’s stretch and put your head on your calf. Then you rotate from the waist 90 degrees left, roll onto the ball of the foot that you have behind you (!) and then come into a low, one-sided squat as in picture three. Shift your weight to the rear leg. Go down into the hurdler’s stretch and repeat of the other side. Here’s an alternate view:

Unfortuantely, most of the pics I have are from the leg exercises. I don’t have many that stress upper body movement. But the system is very balanced in emphasizing both upper and lower body.

One of the major uses of this system is that the guy I took the class from was almost impossible to do qinna on. He asked me to get him in a variety of holds and I simply couldn’t hold him. For example, he asked me to get him in a chicken wing. So I torqued his arm up behind his back. But he wasn’t satisfied, he wanted more pressure. So I piled it on. He then asked me if that was all I had and I said yeah. Then he moved his shoulder in some bizarre way and the pressure I had on his arm was completely gone. I simple didn’t have anything to apply pressure to. I can’t really explain it, even though I was right there. He then showed us the exercise to develop that nad my first thought was that this would make my baguazhang about 10-15 % better by doing that one exercise. It obviously would help coiling.

I’ll leave you with one more exercise I couldn’t even get close to. Here it is:

Start in the foot-turned-out seiza and then bring one leg across into half-lotus. Yeah, I know. Then lean over the knee until your head is almost touching the ground. Then finally, rotate 90 degrees to the right. Of course, alternate.

So these are just some of the daoyin exercises. I’m trying to give you a good overview of what doing the system entails. The flexibility required by this is extraordinary and will definitely prepare you well for any verison of taiji that you wish to do. Squatting single whip, needle at the bottom of the sea, the squatting kick in lao jia yi lu, none of that will be a problem whatsoever after these exerices.

Again, video is better for this and you can see this teacher do his daoyin here. This is a group of his students doing many of the same motions. It’s good for comparison to see some that aren’t perfect.

So that’s it for this installment. I’ll continue next time with more of my thoughts on the exercises. Then, I’ll move into discussing their verison of the Chen style — zhaobao/huleijia taiji.