Acrobatic Die

未学功夫，先学跌打

Before studying skills one shall study acrobatics

One shall keep in mind, as it was reminded in Standing, that old schools used to be for professionals, their usual students were teenager, if not kids, whose body could be transformed very quickly. Hence, the extreme flexibility required of martists described in the quote was something so obvious that the reasons behind it and part of their training methods have been lost in our modern leisurely times.

Training acrobatics was a way to improve one's elasticity as well as reconnect all the fascia lines, allowing more freedom and smoothness in one's moves. It was also a means for the losing battle against ageing and gravity. Nowadays, students being most of the time adults and the heavy stretching exercises often demoted from their status of basics to useless acrobatics, it may be necessary to remind what were some of their former goals and how can we get back some key points in our trainings without having to aim for an acrobatic flexibility.

Chinese practices often use the image of the bow. One of the reasons is that it actually represents two sides of flexibility and fascias elasticity, straightness through the string and roundness through the wood. Since straightness is a question of angles to be taken by the body while roundness the result of a deep transformation in the connective tissues, the former would come first in the training and will be the subject of the coming posts.

Practicing straightness is a way to connect or reconnect our fascias lines as well as to prevent and fight against our tendency to shrivel with age. In the search of fascias connectivity and elasticity, both our body hard and slack parts should be given special consideration, mainly the joints, the neck, the stomach and the pelvic area. 

Modern times and leisure trainings opting for moves directly useful in fighting have put aside the whole part of a martist training aimed to keep him/her fit, improve body skills and age slower, or at least better. A simple skill was the capacity to be able to straighten, as straight as a die, any joint, the stomach and the whole backbone for the least. Straightening up was built around the idea in internal practices that one shall make more flexible what is hard and firmer what tends to become slack.

I. Flexibility and the Joints

The older one gets, the direr the straightness issue becomes. This is not helped by the everyday life where we almost never really have the opportunity to get our joints so straight that they become locked. Not to mention that the use of muscular contraction as a means to create force prevents it because it would be hurtful to the joints to be straight while the muscles around are contracted.

Looking it through the eyes of Chinese internal practices and the Feminine and Masculine principles theory, vertebrates have a hard body since their internal frame is made of bones. Hence the need to soften what can be in order to avoid stiffness and to gain more elasticity.

In a hard frame made of bones, joints seems to be the flexible part. Still, this is as far as the bones are concerned, joints are actually the hard and rigid part as far as the fascias are. In this sense, tendons and ligaments refer to an end connection to a bone, whether bone to muscle or bone to bone, hence a rigid ending. Such rigid endings make the connective tissues, there, harder and less flexible. The need to soften them becomes then obvious and straightness, because it normally puts the joint in a posture with as less pressure as possible as long as there is also no muscular contraction, will allow a safe and relatively more efficient stretching of the joints. Indeed, old practices seek the capacity to slightly dislocate one's joints, making a cracking sound as a proof one has reached enough joint flexibility, especially as far as ligaments are concerned. Such capacity can be achieved through trainings where one's joints are as straight as a die. Therefore, some practices would start to train their routines muscles totally lax and arms totally straight. Other might had weights on particular parts of the limbs when stretching in order to target the ligaments.

II. Protruding and Forward

Though our body is mainly hard, two parts are obviously softer the stomach and the neck. Furthermore, what is true for the stomach, the necessity to avoid slackness, could be extended to all the connective tissues not connected to a bone in general, some of them within our muscles.

Keeping straight just on two limbs is not an easy thing, even harder with an innate arching lower backbone. Indeed, with time, such arch pushes the body forward, which accentuate the tendency for the neck to do so and for the stomach to protrude. This is a double issue. First it is about keeping the organs in their right place and avoiding the connective tissues to become slack since most of them do not have a rigid (bone) ending, hence being softer than ligaments and tendons. The second issue is avoiding the disconnection of the neck connective tissues with the rest of their respective fascias lines, or just simply having one's head falling forward.

Straightness, here, will allow the tissues to remain firm. Indeed, one shall remember that elasticity is a mix of suppleness and firmness, a right balance. Too firm, one becomes hard, too soft one becomes slack. Therefore, if pulling a tissue straight softens it when it tends to become hard and rigid, the same movement has the opposite effect for tissues having a tendency to become slack, it forces them to remain firm. Basically, pulling the body straight allows to kill two birds with one stone.

If in the old days such issues were dealt with from the very beginning by having the students become extremely flexible, as acrobats can be, just having then to maintain it through times, such method is definitively not suitable for most adults and especially when the practice is just a hobby.