PYTHON, SUIT, & DANTIAN
The snake is considered to be the animal that is representative of Qi, so let's think about how a snake feels. When I was young and stupidly macho I used to go hunting in the swamps with my mates and we'd catch poisonous snakes (and non-poisonous ones, too) so we could sell them to a nearby serpentarium. So, I know what a snake coiled and constricting around the arm feels like; some of you may have to imagine it: it's a powerful, squeezing sensation.
A snake can be thought of as a dense cylinder of muscles built around a hollow cavity that has the lungs and organs in it and that's what we have to imagine for our qi-body: it's the outer covering of our body that is composed of a lot of involuntary muscle systems that we have to learn to squeeze and manipulate the body with.
So let's imagine that our torso, arms, legs, hips, neck, etc., are covered with a thin layer of muscles and it is that layer that I usually refer to as the "suit". The trick is to train that layer of involuntary muscles to do what we want and to do it strongly as an assist to our voluntary muscles, which we have to retrain to move with jin and with dantian coordination.
This external layer of "qi" is a real thing and both Chinese qigongs and Yogic thought mention this external Qi or external Pranic Sheath as a basic building block to the Qi/Prana paradigm.
In the Cando Exercises and the Silkreeling "Arm Wave" exercises we're aiming at developing that outer sheath, without the interference of the voluntary muscles and joints, so that it can function as a muscular mechanism that is sort of like a snake-body connecting hand and foot to the dantian.
It takes a while to develop and feel the connection and then growth of the involuntary-muscles/fascia connections that make up our snake body. It actually takes a lot longer to develop the qi of the legs than it does the hands and arms, I suppose because the hands and arms are so heavily innervated, as opposed to the legs.
I'll put a URL to a video below of Wang Hai Jun doing the basic Silkreeling "arm wave", but remember that it is not the arm he's trying to develop … it is that outer sheath that connects the fingers down the arm and torso to the dantian.
I'll also include a general drawing by Mantak Chia showing how the qi-"suit" contracts downward, squeezing the bones and arm tissues. It is that constant squeezing with every breath that has left me with very dense bones, over the years (ask my surgeon).
Also, there's included a crude illustration I made years ago trying to explain how the arms and legs wind/twist like foam pool-noodles while doing Silkreeling exercises: I was trying to explain the lengthwise winding of the snake-body and couldn't think of how to do it more clearly.
And I'll put a URL to that video excerpt of the Taiji teacher twisting the dry limbs of wood and breaking them: watch him and imagine that he has shifted from arm and leg muscle to where he's demonstrating his overall "snake-body" twisting as one unit to break the wood.
When I say something like "making a fist using the dantian", BTW, it's basically simply having developed the outer "sheath" or "snake body" to the point of control that you don't need to make the arm-wave with such big motions. As your motions approach Stillness, you need less overt movement and simply finer control of your gradually strengthening qi-suit.
Wang Hai Jun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIpue1bRzwc
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