"Take the Slack Out"
A number of Chinese and Japanese martial arts have old sayings about "taking the slack out", so the idea is pretty common in the Asian martial arts that use ki/qi as their major paradigm.
Although there can be some health implications in "take the slack out", the most important idea has to do with forces. If I am going to push an object, using the ground as the source of my force, that force can only be optimally propagated through my body if I don't have any slack in the body structure. Similarly, if I pull something, just imagine a rope and note that to pull something with a rope, there must be no slack in the rope, in order to maximally transmit the pulling force.
The forces going up from the ground through our bone structure to our hands are called the Yang qi and those forces are really from the 'solidity of the ground', aka the Qi of Earth. The Qi of Earth (gravity) is also responsible for the downward pull on our mass by gravity, so that Yin Qi is also the product of the Qi of Earth.
The way to take the slack out is to gradually develop the supplemental tissues and involuntary-muscles that work in conjunction with respiration (and twisting, stretching, and so on). Developing the qi-tissues takes time and work, but gradually they can be conditioned so that the body is connected from fingertips to toes, and thus when one part of the body moves, all parts of the body will move.
There's no way to shortcut the development of the qi-tissues via breathing exercises, intention, stretching, and so on, but there's a rude approximation you can do to get a flavor of a connected body.
Stand in a "Standing Post" posture and inhale with a reverse breath, somewhat pulling in the abdomen on the inhale and lifting the perineum area with the inhale. What you've done is constrained the abdominal area so that it can't expand, even though the diaphragm is coming down onto the abdominal cavity. There are two major reactions to this kind of breathing: (1.) the body's elastic tissues pull inward toward the abdomen; (2.) the hydraulic pressure within the abdomen increases.
By the way, one of the sought-after effects of the Standing Post posture is to evenly regulate the tissue connections around the body by keeping everything very slightly stretched.
As the pressure increases and the body tissues contract, the overall rigidity of the body increases, "taking the slack out", but only in a crude way that is not fully representative of our desired finished product. Still, even with this crude approximation, we can feel somewhat like we are an inflated-balloon figure, with all of the slack taken out. We can experiment with the idea that we are able to hold a sack of groceries with our total, inflated body ... and we can imagine that if we push something with our inflated body, everything moves as one, powered from the ground at the feet of our balloon body.
It's OK to experiment with the balloon-body example, but the body has to be developed over a period of time. Don't rush or over-do any breathing exercises or examples.
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