Basic Punching Drills

This post is fairly self explanatory: the attached video gives a number of drills that can help you to improve your punching, even if you don't have a pad holder or bag to hit.  Punching practice is worthwhile on a number of levels.

Dr. Paul K Smith punching an instrumented makiwara board circa 2008

First, it can help you with your punching mechanics so as to make your punching more effective. I remember years ago when I was training in Baltimore with a well known instructor, he walked in on a black sash class and said the equivalent of "none of you all can punch properly."  We then spent the next hour learning how to punch all over again so that our mechanics were correct and we were able to issue more power in the punching.  In the drills shown below, there are a number of key principles demonstrated, among them the idea that you need to connect with the ground, the hips and waist must turn, and the motions must all add together to support the punch.

Tan Tui 2: "Cross Punch"

One of the more important things in Chinese martial arts is the development of cross body coordination.  If you think about the fact that few of us are truly ambidextrous, you begin to see why this can be important.  Without taking the care to train bilaterally, you will overdevelop one side, and underdevelop the other, and this can have consequences if you cannot bring your favorite side into play when you are sparring.  But contralateral or cross-crawl type motion is not just making certain that both sides are strong enough or fast enough.  Rather, it is about the coordination of both sides simultaneously.  Cross-crawl or cross-midline movement is used in stroke recovery to help patients retrain their nervous system after injury.  It's also been shown to help children with neurointegration of movement.

Tan Tui 1: "Coherent Steps"

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, it is interesting to me that when "stay-at-home" orders are given, they almost always include allowing people to go outside for fitness activities once per day so long as social distancing is maintained.  In West Chester borough, Mayor Herrin's clarification of the order indicated that residents could "Engage in outdoor activity, such as walking, hiking or running as long as you maintain social distance (6')."  Somehow, then, fitness has become important to us again, and is even cited in governmental orders.  Tan Tui can be an element of such fitness training even when one is trapped inside.  

Tan Tui Openings

Those of you who have been around OpenSource Wushu for a while know that we spend a great deal of time on Tan Tui, a Longfist style which is sometimes known as the "essence of the northern fists."  In class it is typical for us to spend perhaps as much as half an hour a night working on 5 lines both to train stance and technique, but also to work on application.  What shows up in the Tan Tui lines, also shows up in many of our other forms - so they provide excellent examples of basics.  However, many folks dismiss Tan Tui as being irrelevant for application, having misinterpreted a number of the movements.  I commonly hear things like: "I would never swing my arms that way when attacking someone."  My response is to remind everyone that Chinese martial arts focuses not just on hitting and kicking, but also on throwing and locking.  Many of the movements in Tan Tui presume that you have already closed with your opponent, and as such, the swinging arms are training to throw them after you have, say, caught their leg.  But this post will not focus on that.  I'm probably going to hold off on applications posts for a while considering that applications of forms are done best with partners, and due to social distancing considerations, we should probably be avoiding partner drills.

Back to Basics

So you're stuck at home with nothing to do.  You've read all your books, and for some reason haven't downloaded the Kindle app.  Then practicing some of your kungfu basics is just the thing.  The problem is that you are likely to have space limitations, so full forms are probably not going to cut it.  What to do?  What is most important to practice?  Here's a first take at what to do to keep in shape whilst also working on technique.

Remember that it's better to do a little everyday since this will aid your conditioning, help you with your muscle memory, and ultimately perfecting your basics will have a payoff in your forms and application work.

All the best, and stay healthy,
Sifu Tim

Critical Distance

Seeking critical distance can require some fancy footwork.

In Chinese martial arts, we sometimes refer to the range at which our opponent can reach us as critical distance.  At the surface, it's pretty simple - if you stay far enough away from your opponent, they will be unable to hit you.  But the idea becomes more complicated when your opponent closes in.  Your opponent may have critical distance with their leg, but not with their hands.  Or, if you are really close together, the legs may be unable to reach their targets, but the hands can.  As you become more experienced in sparring, you learn how to evaluate critical distance and where the potential threats can come from.

School Closings

In my last post, I noted that we would be closing OSW for the time being in order to help everyone maintain social distancing.  While this does seem to be the gold standard for the prevention of communicable disease, there is some mixed messaging out there.  Yesterday, I received an email from one of our kids' schools which included the following:

"The Chester County Health Department (CCHD) is not currently recommending that schools or organizations preemptively close as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak. The reason they are not recommending school closures at this time is because:

• Children have not been shown to be a high risk group for serious illness from this virus. As much as possible, children should be allowed to carry on with their education and normal activities. 
• Closing schools may not be effective because some children may congregate anyway at other locations therefore not reducing risk. 
• Closing schools may result in children staying home with alternative caregivers, such as elders, who are more vulnerable."

I want to address this point by point, while first acknowledging that the CCHD is trying to do its best at keeping people safe, and is doing so at a time of uncertainty about how COVID-19 spreads, its case fatality rate, and how bad it could be.

Kungfu Pandemic

In my other life, I write academic papers.  Usually, they have to do with clinical biomechanics; occasionally, the topic is growth curves; and once in a very long while, they might actually have something to do with martial arts.  I haven't written one of those martial arts papers in a while.  More and more often regardless of the topic, they involve the use of some pretty fancy statistical analyses. In this other life I tend to rub elbows with doctors of all sorts, and at times, I even have ventured into the area of public health.

In so doing, I've encountered all manners of models that describe how things work.  We've made mathematical models of how people grow, how gun violence propagates, and even how people walk.  So in a number of ways, I'm no stranger to how epidemiology works.  In fact, I often take an active professional interest in what people are doing to model data and better understand how the world around us works.  More on this below the fold.