foundation, grace, and speed

I've previously said grace, speed, and power, in that order, but I need to amend that.

Before grace comes foundation, the flexibility and strength that enables grace.

Also, true power is not the same thing as what is generated by muscles, although it does encompass that. However, the pursuit of power is dangerous, and can lead to a very dark place. Power comes of its own accord, when needed, and manifests through the practitioner rather than residing within them.

Therefore, foundation, grace, and speed, in that order, but be wary of the desire for power.

sitting in horse stance

Granted that this is a little silly, but if you can get past that it might actually work for you.

When not overdone, horse stance is a great way to build leg strength, as well as to stretch muscles that can become resistant to stretching on a steady diet of walking.

But just 'sitting' in horse stance can be really boring.

My advice is to combine it with something else, like to occasionally substitute horse stance for a chair when sitting at a table or watching television.

Once you've built up the strength and flexibility to maintain a low stance for more than a few seconds, you may even find that this is more comfortable than most chairs, at least for a short time.

More importantly, so long as you don't overdo it, in other activities you'll be far less likely to injure your legs!

the martial context

The martial arts may have begun as an expedient means to train warriors to fight and hone their skills, to improve their chances of survival and success in battle, but they've long since evolved into something far broader and richer than that.

What unites them all is that they take combat as context, but what they do with that, including how literally they take it, varies widely.

That context provides a framework which renders meaningful what might otherwise be random, pointless movement. If near-term utility is a pressing concern, as for soldiers training for impending deployment, that context can also be a powerful source of motivation.

But even when utility is not an immediate priority, or no priority at all, having such a demanding context can help to focus the mind and drive practice towards perfection. One trains to make one's actions real, to invest them with integrity, as defined by the context, even if one has no expectation of ever using the skills developed in combat.

More importantly, through practicing in this manner, one is brought face-to-face with one's frailties as well as one's strengths, and ultimately with oneself.

grace, speed, and power

Grace will serve you in all things, even those not involving physical movement.

Grace and speed may be enough to keep you safe in most circumstances.

If you've already acquired grace and speed, you have recourse to options not requiring power, and are free to not use it, even after developing it.

Therefore, grace, speed, and power, in that order.

perhaps not such a bad start after all

Now that I've had some time to get over my initial disappointment, I find there's more value here than I'd been thinking when I quit posting, in early 2014.

So, if and when I do make another pass at this, it will most likely be as a continuation of this blog rather than in any other format.

that's all, for now

I'm really not happy with how this blog has turned out.

Yes, there are some good ideas here, but what I've posted really doesn't make those ideas as accessible as I would like, and there are problems with the (lack of) organization and with not having had a clear idea of what I wanted to say at the outset.

Also, I can't go as deep into this subject as I would like without addressing the application, self defense, which becomes more important as one becomes more vulnerable with advancing age. I believe that it is possible to incorporate this consideration into one's physical activities without having it encroach into aspects of one's life where it does not belong, but this is something of a balancing act which I don't feel I can do justice to in this format.

So, I'm going to consider this a false start, which I may or may not ever get around to replacing. If not, it will have to stand as is, for however long Google consents to keep it online.

If I do come up with something better, I'll post a pointer to it here.

attentiveness and the integration of practice into life

When your practice is about a quality of mind and motion, rather than about particular motions, every moment becomes an opportunity to apply it and to hone your skills, and this is never more true than when one's body isn't functioning normally.

As one ages, one discovers how easy it can be to handicap oneself. An afternoon of immoderate exertion is all too likely to be followed by days of pain and weeks of tenderness.

While avoiding this in the first place is preferable, the need to favor an ankle, knee, or hip can be an interesting, useful experience, putting a fine point on issues of balance, kinetics, and inconvenient neurological responses to pain, like when your leg suddenly decides to go limp and collapse beneath you.

Avoiding too much stress on the better leg is an important part of this process, just as important as avoiding further strain to the leg causing trouble.

But you needn't wait for an injury to put this principle to work. The first step is to pay attention to what your body is telling you. If you feel cramped, you probably need to readjust your position, perhaps expand your lungs. If you feel fidgety, you probably need to move. If you can't get up and stretch try rocking from side to side or front to back.

Pay attention to posture and body mechanics, especially when doing something unfamiliar or lifting more weight than usual, and don't be afraid to ask for help if that weight is more than you should be attempting to lift by yourself. There's no shame in having limits; it goes with being human.

On the other hand, don't be afraid to cautiously explore those limits. You may be surprised how much latitude they afford, even in your later years.

the nature of chi and the value of imagination

Just glancing at the title above, you might think that I am about to take the position that chi is imaginary. Nothing could be further from the truth. In my view, chi is very real, but at a level of abstraction that would be intangible, were it not for the immense computational power of the cerebellum.

Understand that I'm not talking about symbolic computation, but something more comparable to what an analog computer does, performing accumulations and other transformations on combinations of inputs (usually either current or voltage levels) to produce outputs in a useful form. In the cerebellum, the inputs and outputs are patterns of neural activity, and the available transformations include rates of change.

In calculus, a rate of change is referred to as a derivative. An example commonly used in conveying the concept is the sequence: position, motion, and acceleration. Motion, being a rate of change in position, is its first derivative. Acceleration, being a rate of change in motion, is its first derivative, and the second derivative of position. The next step in this sequence is variously termed jerk, jolt, surge, or lurch. Jerk is the rate of change in acceleration, and therefore its first derivative. It is also the second derivative of motion and the third derivative of position.

Before getting into how this relates to the cerebellum and the subjective experience of chi, I need to introduce another set of concepts: mass, force, impulse, and momentum. Mass is like weight, and is in fact proportional to weight if gravity is held constant. Weight is the force exerted on a mass due to gravity, and in fact varies slightly from one location to another across Earth's surface, despite being measured using a constant mass. But force isn't limited to gravity. Electrical and magnetic fields can also exert force. So can flowing air or water, or the skin of one's fingertips when throwing a ball.

Momentum is the multiplicative product of mass and velocity (motion or rate of change in position). Velocities are produced by accelerations. Mechanical force is commonly defined as the multiplicative product of mass and acceleration, and impulse is the multiplicative product of force and time. If mass is held constant, force is proportional to the rate of change in velocity, which is to say that it is proportional to acceleration, and impulse (force x time) is proportional to the accumulation of change in velocity. With variable mass, force is the rate of change in momentum, and impulse is an accumulation of change in momentum.

The thing about impulse is that it is agnostic with respect to time. Time is factored out. A given impulse can represent a small force over a longish time or it can represent a strong force over a very short time. To fold this back into the above discussion of motion and its first and second derivatives, an impulse delivered as a small force over a longish time has a low jerk factor, whereas an equivalent impulse delivered as a high force over a short time has a high jerk factor – a sudden, sharp change in acceleration.

Jerk can result from a hard body part, like the skull, coming into contact with an unyielding surface, like a brick wall, or it can result from a coordinated explosion of neuro-muscular activity. Either way there is some potential for injury, and part of what the cerebellum does is to avoid dangerous extremes.

Now, to come full circle, I believe chi to be the subjective experience of momentum, force, and (most notably) impulse [and the projection of these a fraction of a second to a few seconds into the future - 25Sept2016]. Imagination figures in because the cerebellum will just as happily estimate these quantities for imaginary objects and fanciful circumstances as for real objects and circumstances – whatever is presented to it, so long as that presentation is vivid and convincing. Imagine yourself doing some difficult movement and your cerebellum will issue the instructions to perform it, the danger being that if you lack either the strength or the range of motion you may end up on the ground in a heap.

Imagination is seldom as convincing as reality, but it can still produce an effect on the cerebellum's output. Moreover, in some cases, as with the square root of minus one, the imaginary nature of what's presented to the cerebellum can factor out. For example, if you imagine passing a ball back and forth between your hands, the additional impulse needed to accelerate the imaginary ball results in your arms moving faster than they otherwise would, but by the time those forces are transmitted to your legs, there is no discernible difference between an imaginary ball and a real one. Another example, if you want to build strength for faster side-stepping, imagine that you are standing over the pivot of a teeter-tooter, having to push yourself up as well as sideways with every sideways step.

I rather like the effect of imagining the handling of a ball, about the size and mass of a volleyball, sometimes incorporating this into my practice, and, because I spent so much time doing so, it's relatively easy for me to imagine the handling of an end-weighted staff convincingly enough that I can practically feel its weight in my hands. I expect this is similar to arts, like Escrima, in which one starts out using sticks and then progresses to empty-hand.

Caveat: I have attributed neural activity which is distributed through other parts of the brain to the cerebellum as a simplification. It's true that the cerebellum plays a pivotal role in coordinating movement. That it does so in close cooperation with the brain stem and midbrain seems beyond the scope of the present purpose, although the reader may be interested in pursuing greater detail.

on symmetry and long lines

Whether recirculating or reciprocating, exercises may be bilaterally (left/right) symmetrical, but aren't necessarily so. Exercises that are not bilaterally symmetrical should be performed on both sides (both mirror-image versions) to approximately the same degree.

There are other symmetries, which can usually be described in terms of rotation, either circular movements or the twisting of a hand, foot, shoulder, or hip to its limit. Circular movements are generally reversible and should usually be performed in both directions. Twisting may also be reversed, although doing so usually causes the original motion to become awkward and in need of other modifications if it is to continue to flow smoothly.

Gently oscillating between opposite twists is a fine, and a good way to familiarize yourself with the limits of movement, but doing so can quickly become boring. It helps to combine joints, for instance rotating one hand as far as you can, twisting shoulder, forearm, and wrist all in the same direction, perhaps twisting the other hand at the same time, either in the same direction or in the opposite direction.

By combining arm/hand and leg/foot twisting together, you will discover that there are stress lines, like rubber bands pulled tight, which you could trace through muscles and tendons, extending continuously from toe to fingertip. These are not the meridians of Chinese medicine, but a chain of tissues that are all being stretched at the same time. You'll also find that the second step in reversing the twisting motion (after relaxing the muscles that put you into a twist in the first place) is to contract all of the muscles along that chain, and that if you continue to do so the result will be an approximately opposite twist.

These long lines, composed of chains of muscle and tendon, when uniformly stretched and developed, are capable of generating movement that is both graceful and powerful, because it involves the entire body.

walls and the cerebellum

A wall is something that stops you, anything that stops you.

If you overdo exercise, exhaustion and soreness can become a wall.

If you do your exercises mechanically, the same way every time, boredom can become a wall.

In the context of the martial arts, if you concern yourself overmuch with application – how effectively a sequence of movements might be applied in combat – or with precise form and maximal dynamism, you may find that you've walled yourself off from all of the various possibilities that can be present at each step, in a more playful approach. And, too, there's legitimate reason for concern that practicing in a violent manner can make one more likely to participate in or even initiate violence, and less apt to take the opportunity to avoid a needless fight.

Similarly, I'm finding that the effort to accurately describe something that is never exactly the same, should never be exactly the same from one moment to the next, can become a wall, both to the work of description and to the practice.

On the other hand, there are still a few ideas that I have yet to touch on, the theory that I mentioned in the original post on this blog.

You already have the basics, stances (with particular attention to positioning of the knee) and recirculating arm motions supported by subtle alterations of those stances (reciprocating motions when exploring cusps), and a small collection of principles to act as a guidebook. While I prefer not to constrain your imagination with respect to what motions you might wish to include in your repertoire, I hope and intend to fill out that guidebook.

Reach to the back of your head and find the little bump at the top of your neck. On the inside of your skull, most of the tissue within a couple inches of that point is contained in the cerebellum. The cerebellum is fundamentally an integration machine. (Integration, along with differentiation, form the basis of calculus. Integration is essentially the accumulation of an effect as the factors creating that effect also change.) The cerebellum measures the effect of various and varying forces upon momentum, your momentum or that of something you handle, throw, or sense remotely. It also makes predictions about the effects of forces that haven't yet occurred. And it does all this incredibly fast, but it needs experience upon which to base what it does.

Along with stretching, strengthening, and mild cardiovascular exercise, the main point of practice is to provide the cerebellum with some experience upon which to base its predictions. The more varied that experience, the better able it will be to handle something totally novel, something it has never had to deal with before. Also, the more diverse the range of situations with which it has learned to cope, the more gracefully it will be able to guide your motion under ordinary circumstances.

The upshot of this is that it is better to ferret out the essence of what your body wants to do today than to stress over whether you are performing some movement correctly. Protect your knees, find something soft to land on if you're doing something that may cause you to lose your balance, and otherwise allow your cerebellum sufficient license to explore variations on motions, even beyond the point of their becoming unrecognizable. Thus liberated, it will guide you well.

incremental variations & escalation, and cusps

To illustrate the concept of incremental variations, let's also introduce a new exercise.

Beginning with your feet positioned about 1.5 shoulder-widths apart, toes pointed just to the outside of straight ahead (about 15°) and knees slightly bent, upper arms hanging loosely at your sides, elbows bent so that your forearms extend in front of you, parallel to the ground, palms facing towards each other, and hands level but otherwise limp, rotate your left forearm so that your left palm points down, even slightly outward if you can do so without pain, and move your right hand across in front of you until it is above your left hand.

Rotate your body slightly to the left, also shifting your weight slightly to the left, and allow your right heel to move slightly outward (to the right) while you slowly push another inch or two to the left with both hands, right above left.

Now, in one motion, pull your right hand towards your body and then down, brushing the inside of your left elbow with you right fingertips, begin to rotate your left hand back towards the palm-inward position, pull your right heel back to its original position, and turn your body back towards facing straight ahead, re-centering your weight.

Now to the right, sweeping your right hand slowly to the right, rotating it down and outward, and move your left hand to the right a little faster, so that it catches up with the right hand, left over right, turning your body slightly to the right and shifting your weight to the right, while allowing your left heel to move slightly outward (to the left). Push both hands an inch or two past your right elbow.

Pull your left hand towards your body and down, brushing the inside of your right elbow and then rotating down and outwards as it moves in front of your body to the left, with the right hand rotating back to the palm-inward position as it also moves in front of your body, rising above the left hand as it catches up with it. Meanwhile, pull your left heel back in, rotate your body and shift your weight to the left, and allow your right heel to move slightly outward.

Repeat until your hands are flowing continuously, instead of reciprocating, and your feet are making the little adjustments they must make automatically.

Now begin to spread your hands further apart vertically as they reach the outer limits of their movements, so they at first make larger circles, then sweeping arcs, then even larger sweeping arcs. Try to do this stepwise, so that each iteration is slightly more expansive than the last but it takes at least twenty repetitions to move from the petite version of the exercise to the most extensive.

(As you become more accustomed to this, and as you gain strength and flexibility, you'll find yourself reaching further to the outside, bending your knees more deeply, and shifting more of your weight.)

There is a point in the escalation of this exercise beyond which it is impossible to maintain recirculating motion, necessarily reverting to reciprocation, because one hand is reaching so high and the other so low (and/or so far behind your back) that they are both exploring corners (cusps), through which no smooth paths exist in your freedom of movement. Go ahead and explore these cusps, when you reach sufficient flexibility to do so, but don't forget to take your time getting to them by very gradually escalating the extension of the movement up to the limit of recirculation, and also be careful not to throw yourself into those cusps more vigorously than your muscles and tendons can handle. By their very nature, cusps limit your options, so be alert to the possibility that you might lose your balance while in an extreme position from which there is only one direction of retreat and go at it carefully.

Henceforth I will use "reciprocating" to mean movement into and out from a cusp, and "recirculating" to mean a flowing sequence of movements that is free of cusps.

This exercise, rather than the first, is the foundation of my practice, and it has more variations than the one already described. I'll get into those in a future installment.

“reciprocating” vs. “recirculating”

I have, until now, referred to the exercises that constitute my practice as “reciprocating”, but that really only applies to a small subset, those involving motion reversal, as though a short video were being played first forward, then backward, then forward, then backward again. Examined in fine detail, this is almost never the case; there is nearly always something which distinguishes the ‘return’ portion (when there is one) of a sequence of motions from being a true reversal. So, in nearly every case, the word “recirculating” is a better descriptor. Likewise, “cycle” is preferable to “sequence”. I will endeavor to use these more descriptive terms in the future.

To put a finer point on this, you might wish to abort a movement, in practice if you find that you are about to overstrain a joint or the muscles connected to it, or in application if you realize that what you'd begun to do stands little chance of working out as you'd hoped and is likely to get you into further trouble. But even aborting and backing out of a movement is not the same as reversing it. The impulse (force X time) that brings the initial motion to a stop and that which launches the backing away motion both point in the same direction, back. They are not mirror images of each other. What is actually happening is that you have initiated a new plan that has initial conditions (position and motion) which are very different from the one that came before it.

Exercises which are equally well described as “sequences” and “reciprocating” as “cycles” and “recirculating” are possible, but they tend to be less interesting (and less useful) than those that are better described by the latter terms. Still, they add some variety to the mix.

chewing gum while walking: involving the hands

First allow me to apologize, for having succumbed to the temptation to idealize form, in the reciprocating exercise described in the previous few posts. The problem is that most of us can't maintain that 45° angle while shifting weight onto a foot, not without putting undue stress on the knee. Maintaining knee alignment being far more important than maintaining any arbitrary foot position, let's start by modifying the angles.

So, starting as before, with your feet spread about 1.5 times the distance between your shoulders, toes turned outward comfortably, but not more than 45°, shift your weight onto one foot (it really doesn't matter which you start with), removing weight from the other foot. When the unweighted foot becomes light enough to pick up or slide, pull the toes in so they are only turned out about 15° from straight ahead.

Now begin to shift weight onto this foot until the other (the one you first place weight on) is light enough to pick up or slide, and point it directly away from the hip joint that connects it to your torso, so that hip, knee, ankle, and the ball of the foot are all aligned in a vertical plane.

Next, begin to move your weight back towards your unweighted foot, and in the same moment rotate that foot so that it is turned out about 15° from straight ahead, unweight the other foot and point it directly away from its hip, with the hip, knee, angle, and ball of the foot aligned in a vertical plane, as above.

Repeat, seeking the foot placement that results in no net movement, neither forward nor backward.

Now add the lead-with-the-eyes aspect back in. As you come to rest with nearly all of your weight on one foot and the other pointing straight away, imagine a soft shuffling noise coming from behind the ear on the side bearing your weight, turn your eyes towards the noise, allow your head to follow, and rotate your unweighted foot as you begin to shift your weight onto it.

Repeat until you are comfortable with this much.

Now, while at the end of a weight-shift, before beginning the next, raise the hand on the unweighted side with the fingers held straight and vertical, until the tops of the fingers are at eye level, palm turned half outward, with your forearm extended at about 30° from vertical, and pull the elbow in so that it's as close to your ribcage as you can comfortably place it. Place the other hand so that its fingertips are lightly touching the inside of your extended elbow, with its palm cupped and turned downward.

Lead with the eyes as before, then, in one motion, begin the rotation of your unweighted foot, begin moving your weight towards it, and move the hand that was touching the other elbow, first behind that elbow, then beneath it, then wiping along the arm towards the wrist, leading with the index finger. While this is happening, your weight is shifting and your arms are crossing in front of you, with the one that had been extended on the inside.

Properly coordinated, your head finishes its rotation and the foot from which you were removing weight becomes light enough to lift or slide at the same moment that the hand wiping along the other arm reaches the wrist, at which point both foot and hand rotate, the foot to pointing directly away from the hip and the hand that was doing the wiping motion into palm half-outward, fingers vertical, forearm partially extended. At the same time the other hand (on the side that your weight has shifted to) sinks to touch the elbow of your extended arm.

Continue to work on this until the two directional shifts (shifting weight left-to-right and right-to-left, while extending the arm opposite the weight-bearing leg) become mirror images of each other. Then begin to think about how to make each flow into the other so that they become a single movement. That is the real nature of a reciprocating exercise.

a firm foundation: involving the torso

Until now I haven't said anything about what to do with your arms. There are a couple of reasons for this. First and foremost, up until now it really hasn't mattered what you did with your arms, other than to have them ready to catch you if you suddenly felt an overwhelming need to escape from a painful position. But there is another reason, which is that once the arms become involved it's all too easy to let them take precedence over the legs, which would be an unfortunate mistake.

However the time has come to move a little higher, involving the hips and shoulders, and everything in between. For now I'm going to suggest that you put your hands on you hips to keep your arms from flopping around and making a general nuisance of themselves.

At the end of the last installment we were rocking back and forth, side-to-side, moving our weight almost but not quite entirely from one foot to the other. Now we're going to add some rotation around a vertical axis, from about 45º to one side to about 45º to the other side, for a total rotation of about 90º. The axis in question is the vertical line passing through the top center of your skull, and also through the center of your tailbone. You are going to pivot your upper body around this axis.

Standing with your feet under your shoulders, from a neutral (central) position, turn your head slightly to the left, shift your weight onto your right foot, continue to turn your head to the left, allowing your shoulders and hips to follow it until they have turned approximately 45º, replant your left foot with its toes pointing outward at 45º.

Now reverse the movement, turning your head slightly to the right, shifting weight onto your left foot, continuing to turn your head, allowing shoulders and hips to follow until you've pivoted 90º to the right (45º right of center), replant your right foot pointing outward at 45º. Your feet should now be slightly further apart than your shoulders and at a 90º angle to each other, and, except for slight adjustments while unweighted, should remain approximately as they now are. Turn your head slightly to the left.

Continue shifting your weight and pivoting your hips and shoulders, left, right, left, right. Notice that you are backing your body away from whichever direction you are turning toward, and unweighting what is becoming the leading foot as you turn. To the extent that it has any martial content at all, this is a defensive exercise.

Now try to synchronize your breathing with the movement so that your lungs are maximally inflated as you pass through neutral.

If your legs begin to shake uncontrollably, stop right away and do some gentle stretching.

PS: If you find that turning your body 45º to the side is too much, don't fret. Just do what you can comfortably and work very gradually in the direction of 45º. It will become easier when we add arm motions.

the passing of Bataan Faigao

I just learned of the death of Bataan Faigao, with whom I was somewhat acquainted. Bataan was born in The Philippines, into a Chinese family, immigrating to the U.S. as a young man. He and his wife, Jane, were both tai chi chuan teachers, until Jane's death in 2001. Bataan was among the founders of Naropa Institute (now Naropa University) and a long-time faculty member.

There's more I could say, but those who have been posting on his Facebook page new him better than I, so I'll defer to them.

I will say this much, Bataan understood “aging gracefully through gentle martial practice” deeply and thoroughly, and kept at it until the end. In this he provided as shinning an example as any of us can hope to.

a firm foundation: unweighting, part two

As must be obvious to anyone who gives it more than a moment's thought, if you keep increasing the percentage of your weight that you move from one foot to the other, eventually you'll be transferring all of your weight, or 50% if you figure that the starting point is equal distribution. Either way the result is that one foot will be supporting all of your weight and the other supporting none, not even its own.

(You might wonder what the big deal is, since we all do this every time we walk. Walking is automatic behavior, something our skeletons are designed for and our neural systems are predisposed to learn. Moving sideways is at least less so on both counts.)

To be quite truthful, even this state (complete unweighting) is not the end point of weight transfer, but merely a plateau, one you may not ever feel the need to progress beyond. What lies beyond is transferring weight not just linearly, between one foot and the other, but transferring it in time, and between force and momentum.

While you mull that over, let's get back to the plateau state, where all your weight is supported by one foot and none on the other. One thing you will quickly notice is that it suddenly becomes much harder to maintain your balance. This is because, instead of using small forces on a long lever (the distance between your knees), you are now having to use larger forces on a much smaller lever (the distance across a single knee). This increase in difficulty happens as the last few ounces of weight are removed from the unweighted foot, so let's put them back onto it for the time being, just enough to allow you to keep your balance without putting extra strain on the knee that's already supporting very nearly your entire weight.

You can use the ball of your unweighted foot, or leave it flat on the ground, or pull your toes back and use the heel, and it's best to try all three. While moving your weight back and forth you'll want to slow that movement so it comes to a stop, pauses briefly, and reverses just short of a complete transfer. Occasionally you'll overshoot and your unweighted foot will lose contact with the ground while the opposite knee complains about the sudden increase in strain. For this reason it's best to start out with something solid in front of you that you can hold onto or grab quickly when needed. A horizontal bar attached to a wall at about elbow height works well for this. If you're practicing outside, you might also try a pair of ski poles, with their points planted in line with or slightly behind your heels, and about two feet further apart. (Placing the points in front of your feet may cause you to fall backwards if you need to make use of the ski poles.) In urban areas, you may be able to find guardrails along sidewalks made from welded pipe; these are ideal.

This is the first fully reciprocal exercise. The end of the movement in one direction blends into the beginning of the movement in the other direction. These reciprocal exercises are an important feature of the practice I'm describing here, and there will be more of them.

a firm foundation: unweighting, part one

Once you can comfortably sit/stand with your feet spread about 1.5 times the distance between your shoulders, bend your knees sufficiently to place them directly above the balls of your feet, and hold that position for half a minute or so, it's time to begin playing around with variations on the theme.

The first and most important variation is about whether your weight is equally distributed on both feet or supported primarily by one foot.

To begin with, simple move your body gently in a sideways rocking motion, left-right-left-right. Take your time with this, and pay attention to how it feels in your feet, ankles, calves, knees, thighs, hips, buttocks, lower back, and belly. Practice for a short time, whenever you can, being careful not to overtire ANY of these links in the chain.

Start with your feet fairly close together (a high stance) and your toes pointed outward at about 30 to 45 degrees, then move your feet further apart (a lower stance) as your muscles begin to warm up and loosen up. Finish off by moving your feet closer together again.

For now it's enough to move 10% of your weight back and forth, so you move from placing 60% of your weight on one foot to placing 60% of your weight on the other. (If the math doesn't seem to work out, remember that equal distribution is 50% on each foot.)

When you are ready to go further, you can move more of your weight back and forth, deepen your stance (move your feet further apart), and spend more time in lower stances.

As before, it's best to have something soft in front of you in case you need an escape route.

That's enough for one lesson.

a firm foundation: from the ground up

Much of the value of my year practicing with an end-weighted staff was that it forced my attention onto my feet, because it was so heavy that the force required to put it into motion or stop it would cause my feet to slip, unless planted firmly, and the awareness that force was being transmitted between my feet and my hands sensitized me to every link in that chain, beginning with the alignment of the balls of the feet, ankles, knees, and hips.

The strongest arrangement is for all four to be in a single plane, but the best approach is to maintain an approximation of that alignment dynamically, having stretched so that both ankles and knees can safely range well out of the plane without tearing ligaments, and having built the muscular strength to recenter them.

With the ankles flexibility is usually not so much the issue as the strength to prevent overextension (a sprain). Standing on the balls of your feet and moving the ankles a very short distance in all directions is a good way to begin. As with everything else, be careful not to overdo it.

The classic horse stance builds both flexibility and strength for letting the knees range to the outside of the center plane, and, in its most extreme form, also for the ankles. Kneeling with your knees together and your feet spread and turned outward (without trying to force them flat), and then sitting back between your feet, is an approximate inverse of the horse stance, but be very careful with this as it's easy to go too far too soon. It's best to position a chair on either side so you can support yourself with your arms if needed and/or a large pillow in front so you can escape by rolling forward with your upper torso. Go slow and stop as soon as it begins to burn. Alternatively, you can stand with your feet spread and very slowly move your knees closer together, until they begin to shake, then move them back to center alignment or a bit further out, rest for a minute, repeating a few times, or until the shaking starts as soon as you move your knees inside of center alignment.

The deeper the horse stance (or inverse), the more effective it is, but before going deeper make sure you can sit with your torso erect where you are. The tendency is to lean forward, and rolling forward is the way to escape if you go too far. Best to practice initially facing a bed or something else you can safely fall onto.

for everything there is a continuum

If you can find a perfectly flat, level surface, and walk across it in as straight a line as you can manage, each step may look very much like the last one, but they will not be identical, in fact no two will be exactly the same.

This will be more true when walking across a surface with slight variations, and still more true when walking a rough trail. Each step is a unique action designed to keep us moving generally in the chosen direction, and while we may pay conscious attention to the process, and consciously choose among various options (placing your foot to the left or the right of a rock or on top of it), the calculations involved in determining the fine adjustments all happen unconsciously, and are already being executed by our muscles by the time we become aware of them, if we do at all.

In working one's way through a dense maze, say through a forest thick with trees, both standing and fallen, and underbrush, the path one takes becomes more complex, and far more interesting, engaging the conscious mind to a greater degree. And while the overall motion can no longer be described adequately in terms of steps, let's continue to concentrate on foot placement.

At various times you will find yourself standing with your toes turned inward, at other times your feet will be parallel, and still other times they will be spread to varying degrees, at every conceivable angle the range of motion of your joints will allow.

So it is with practice. There is no one right way to stand. Rather, one's feet and legs should become accustomed to and learn to support every variation on the theme. Classic stances represent extreme positions, but are hardly ever used in their pure form because each has its own instability. Instead use them as starting and ending positions, and concentrate on making smooth transitions between them.

background

As a youth I was fat and weak. In high school I went out for wrestling one year, and slimmed down nearly to my ideal weight, but not quite enough so to avoid wrestling in the heavy-weight class. My first year in college, I took a class in Judo for the physical education credits, but was quickly hooked and returned to audit that class (unofficially a Judo club) for two more semesters, during which time I had an opportunity to watch a guest practicing karate (Wado Ryu). Noticing my interest, he drew me in for a bit of light sparring, during which he lightly landed several punches for every one I began to throw. His arms were slightly shorter than mine, but it didn't matter; he had an overwhelming advantage.

I was reminded of a situation years earlier, when an older student had taken exception to my campaigning for a ballot issue to authorize a bond to build a new high school, mid-way between the county's two largest towns. I was too close to the polling place, but that wasn't what he was objecting to. He picked me up, pinned me against a wall, and threatened to do worse. I'd been defenseless. Actions I could have taken occurred to me later, but it's just as well that they didn't at the time, because I would not have been able to follow up. He had an overwhelming advantage.

There I was, my second year in college, not knowing what I wanted to do with my life, feeling less vulnerable following three semester in Judo, but still vulnerable, and newly fascinated with karate. This was also when the television series Kung Fu was in its first run. Deciding that what I was seeing on television suited me better than utilitarian karate, I started looking for a kung fu school. The closest I found with a reputable teacher was in Denver, so I moved to Denver, interrupting my formal education in the process.

The story of the following two years is probably best left untold, at least for the moment, primarily because it does not bear directly on my purpose here.

Later on I learned a little Tai Chi, and much later I spent nearly a year practicing regularly with a long, end-weighted staff. Since then I have continued to practice sporadically, and that practice has evolved into a personal style with some theory behind it.

It is that style and theory that I mean to address here, and my doing so is as much to motivate myself into more regular exercise (because I want to age gracefully) as it is to inform or inspire others, although that may happen too.