The Silly Magic of Asian Martial Arts versus Reality

 DON'T BLOCK THE QI?

The Chinese perspective of movement and body mechanics was postulated long ago and their approach was different from the current western view of movement and physiology. Let's look at some of the major differences.

First of all, strength was seen to follow various routes through the body. For example, if I hold a glass of water in front of me, there is a traceable path from my hand, along the top of my arm, over the shoulder, down the back, down the back of the leg, to the outside of the foot. They thought generally in terms of routes of strength, or "channels".

Secondly, if I am holding a glass of water in front of me, the force/tension path must ultimately end at the ground at my feet. Conversely, if I was pulling something downward, the path would be along the front of my body and would end at the center of my weight in the abdominal area. So, a path of strength will draw some of its power from either the solidity of the ground or the down-pull of weight ... and both of those things are artifacts of gravity. Hence, the Chinese talked about the Qi of the Earth (gravity) contributing to the Qi of Man.

The Chinese also postulated a strength contributor in the air/heavens around us (the "Qi of Heaven") as part of the Qi of Man, and that contributor, in those early days before science, was thought to be some unseeable type of energy. Note that the unseeable, energetic part of Qi is only an adjunct to the physical aspects of Qi; however, it is a troublesome concept for many people.

The Qi of Heaven is usually brought in with the breath and the breath can be trained to pull in and contract all of the elastic tissues that connect the body, from head to toe. So Qi and Breath have a strong relationship.

Lastly, a confounding difference between the Chinese perspective and the western perspective is that the Chinese considered the contributions of the involuntary-muscle systems and the subconscious to the overall strengths of Man. The elastic tissues that pull-in during an inhale are also part of the involuntary-muscle systems, mostly, even though we can briefly apply voluntary controls to our breathing mechanics.

One point to emphasize is the idea that the Gravity supplies an input to our natural strengths and breathing supplies an elastic and pressure input to our normal strengths. This is where the idea of Heaven, Man, Earth comes from.

If we want our full and true strengths to be applied, for instance to our hand that holds the glass of water, we need the support from the solidity of the ground to reach as purely as possible to the hand, and we need to be able to manifest our elastic-involuntary tissue's strength to the hand. Just muscle and bone is not the classical idea of full and desirable strength.

So, to get all of our available strength/qi to our hand we need for our posture and joints and muscles to fully allow propagation of support from the ground and we also need to have a good and clear connection of the elastic tissues (centered at the dantian) to be functioning in the hand also. We need to train our body to let these types of qi through to the hand, so we work to eliminate any blockages between the ground and hand, forcewise, and between the dantian and hand, tissue-wise.

Here's an example of a body-connection/loosening qigong to do just that:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_sCs4NI8RU