The Bow, Cornerstone of Elasticity

兩肩垂兮十指連

The shoulders drop, the fingers link!*

兩手垂兮兩肘彎

The hands drop, the elbows curve!**

屈可伸兮伸又屈

Bent but able to stretch, stretched but also bent!**

前開後合天然妙，雙峰對峙

A natural wonder the front opened and the back closed, the two acromions stand facing each other***

To be able to use fascia elasticity, as it has already been mentioned in previous posts, one has to stretch connective tissues to gain elasticity and get the proper alignments to really connect the whole line again. But this combination of stretching with proper alignments goes beyond just transforming the body, it is a mean to get the fascia lines to tense, first indirectly and then actively.
The image of the bow, often used in internal practices, is actually a key to understand how to achieve fascia tension in the first place. Indeed, fascia elasticity is first a question of putting different parts of the body in certain angles towards each other so that they create a tense elastic reaction, just like the wood and string of a bow become tense because of their interaction. Training through the bow principles undergoes three phases, pure straightness to stretch the connective tissues in order to make them as elastic as possible, straightness with an angle twist to stretch even more and start to understand how to tense the fascias, and roundness through the longbow. To make things easier to understand, the work on the chest and the arms through the "Wei Tuo Presenting the Pestle II" posture of the Fascias Change Canons will serve as an example.

Wei Tuo Presenting the Pestle II

A Little Tenderness

One's usual use of contraction or elasticity is very easy to verify by just pressing one's muscles. If they are hard, contraction is their main way to generate force. If the muscles are tender, like a good steak, fascia elasticity is used to generate force. 

To make the connective tissues more tender, one has to stretch them, which is simple, having the part one wants to stretch as straight as possible and trying to extend it as much as possible. It is just like a straight bow string stretched by the wood. Internal arts are not about just stretching the muscles or tendons separately, but whole lines of fascias. Hence, in "Wei Tuo Presenting the Pestle II", what has to be first stretched are the lines running from one hand to the other through the chest, the longbow string. To do so, one has to reconnect those lines by taking the proper angles. Hence, the first work to do is to contain the chest, meaning to align the sternum with the shoulders. By doing so one reconnects the line between the shoulders (if the sternum protrudes the line breaks there). The shoulders, themselves, have to be kept right in the middle of each side of the body, neither forwards nor backwards. The elbows shall not only also be in the middle of each side, but their tip shall point vertically towards the ground. The wrist shall be flat and the fingers tip shall bend towards the ground. Then, with those alignments, one shall try to extend the arms as far away of the body as possible while keeping the muscles totally loose.

For a person starting with hard muscles, the ones around the shoulder joints quite strong, holding this posture with the right angles will quickly be quite painful. If not, one's alignment is definitively not correct. At this point, because the muscles are too hard, there is no fascia elasticity, stretching just aims at making the muscles tender and allow the connective tissues to really become elastic again.

Tensing Up

"Wei Tuo Presenting the Pestle II" held in the right alignments literally pulls the whole lines of fascias from the tip of the fingers of one hand to the other. Once one has become tender again, such pull will naturally tense up the lines, just as the string of a bow gets tense because it is pulled on both sides by its wood. Here, the fingers trying to go further and further apart from the body pull the fascias like the wood of the bow pulls the string. In order to be pulled as far as possible, the connective tissues have to oppose as little resistance as possible, it is pure logic. To do so, they have to be as loose as possible. Hence the principle "外剛內柔", firm outside but supple inside, the looser the connective tissues are the more they extend, the more they extent, the more tense they are. Old methods would say "to be firm, you have to be loose", or "the tenser, the looser", an apparent oxymoron.

At this stage, the tension is passive, it is created mainly by the alignments and the posture, arms straight. It is then up to the student to realise what is happening to one's muscles, tendons and connective tissues to recreate the process actively, not through alignments but just by loosing up and extending the muscles at the same time. For adults nowadays, this is the real hard part, the contraction and search of sensation reflex is so imprinted that, even with a proper tender muscle structure, it comes back naturally.

From String to Wood

Keeping the example of "Wei Tuo Presenting the Pestle II", once one is totally accustomed and understands tension through loosed extension by means of straightness, he/she has to train to do the same thing but with a curve, 三弓, the three bows, also called 三曲, the three crooked. For "Wei Tuo Presenting the Pestle II", they are the hands, the arms and the chest. Indeed, the fingers keep bending backwards but their tip bend forwards, arching very much like the wooden part of a bent bow; the tip of the elbows keep pointing at the ground but they drop, the arms not totally straight anymore, the elbows being lower than the shoulders and the hands, the second arch; finally the sternum, more flexible, will place itself slightly inside the shoulders, the third arch. At this stage, the muscles are supple enough to support the tendons when stretching, in order to avoid tendonitis, while the new alignment provides the fascia lines with heavier stretching and better connection. 

While the first stage of "Wei Tuo Presenting the Pestle II" is mainly meant to stretch the muscle fibres, this one stresses on the joints, being often called "opening the joints". Indeed, if done properly, opened joints will be able to very slightly dislocate, making a little cracking sound when doing so, and the clavicles will be much more flexible forwards and upwards (one being able to put them vertically straight, both arms being able to simultaneously touching the ears). At this stage, any muscle contraction would not only be counter-productive but also lead to tendinitis. Hence, it is very important for grownups to not rush too quickly to this stage, being cautious whether they can really be relax and extend their muscles.

Total Roundness, Internal Alignments

The last stage, still keeping the example of "Wei Tuo Presenting the Pestle II", is reaching the longbow, where the two arms and the chest are like the wood of the bow. When, in the two previous stages, the alignments make the stretching of the connective tissues, here, it is the stretching of the connective tissues that will direct the alignments, a full circle. Hence, this stage is called internal alignment because it is not ruled by the position of the body parts towards each other but by the stretching of the middle and the extremities of the lines of fascias. In this particular example, it is the sternum and the hands. Indeed, once the sternum is flexible enough to put itself inside the shoulders, it will be pulled by connective tissues towards the back of the first thoracic vertebrae, while the hands and their fingers are like pulling at each other (like the ends of the wood pulling the string of a bow). At this stage "Wei Tuo Presenting the Pestle II" will look very different from the original posture, the arms will be so bended they will look round (instead of totally straight) and, because of the pulling of the sternum, instead of facing directly the sky, they will face up on a more or less 45° angle (diagonally up instead of straight up). The tip of the elbows will be almost horizontal instead of pointing vertically to the ground while the wrist will be bent inwards at an also more or less 45° angle. Of course, those are general indications, the inborn structure and elasticity of each and every one affecting the angles. 

The key of such training is not the angles taken by the body but the capacity to elastically lock it.

Locks, Aim of Elastic Training

The immovable body used to be one of the tricks Martists used to earn money in fairs and such, but it actually comes from a real martial skill called more or less "locking" in some styles. The idea is to improve the whole body force, an opponent being then faced with something close to a statue, which you can only move wholly and not in separate parts. In internal arts, it is done, of course, by using elasticity. Still, it has limits, facing a stronger force than one's elasticity is able to handle, one limb can end up moving, though actually not independently from the rest of the body. Still, the main difference is that, once the opponent force is absorbed, the limb will automatically come back to its original position. Hence, it is customary in some practices to hit a student performing a routine, one of the aim being to check out if the arms stay still. For internal arts, stillness is of course good, but in case the arm moves because the force is too big, it will come back naturally at its original place, which is the most important thing. This is the actual difference between rigid and firm and what makes the arms having a up and down endless movement while walking "Wei Tuo Presenting the Pestle II".

Locking the body is mainly the search of which point in the body will stretch some lines of fascias to their utmost, like pulling the sternum to the first thoracic vertebrae. The wrists and the knees can give quite obvious examples of what a person can reach when working on elastic locking. For the wrist, as it has been mentioned, if locked, it takes a bend position which seems to be anything but correct, only the internal alignment through elasticity allowing it. For the knees, if one finds the lock linked to the pubic bone, they will separate, compared to this position, one being not able to make them touch each other anymore, the only part of the legs still touching being the feet. This is what is called often called the round crotch.

Elasticity being a particular way to use one's body, it leads to a different motion and quite noticeable body angles. Once the principle of the bow is understood, one has to train the cross, a way to link all the fascias lines, which leads to the six directions. Furthermore, stretching and the bow is only one side of elasticity, one has also to train springiness, which works by retracting (not contracting) the muscles and tensing them like the inside of the wood of a bow.

*Chang's Book of Martial Skills, Chapter 3, Paragraph 22, Hands. 萇氏武技書，卷三，第二十二章，手

**Chang's Book of Martial Skills, Chapter 3, Paragraph 24, Elbows. 萇氏武技書，卷三，第二十四章，肘

***Chang's Book of Martial Skills, Chapter 3, Paragraph 26, Even Shoulders. 萇氏武技書，卷三，第二十六章，平肩