Posture With A Little Push

A good stance and posture reflect a proper state of mind¹.

把勢、把勢，全憑架式

Skill, bluster, it is all a question of posture².

理是功能之本，法是功能之機

Structure is the essence of capacity, method its crucial point².

Posture used to be one of the cornerstones of internal practices. It served many purposes, but deep body transformation and breathing training were amongst the most important. Nowadays, postures are limited, both in their range and diversity.
Often, posture training is only limited to the one and only to be taken in the ever-same position. However, practices with the aim of deeply transforming the body tend to adopt different angles for the same posture, like for the feet, while also changing them along with one’s body transformation. Furthermore, posture has also often become only a question of aligning the different parts of one’s body, the pressure element, tensing the body in a certain way, has also often been let aside. For internal practices, posture training was a comprehensive exercise where body, mind and breathing were all trained.

Since external comes first, the present post will describe the synergy between alignments and fascia tension in postural training, which final aim is to add so much elasticity to one’s body that it does not need to be aligned to be connected.

I. External Synergy

If alignments are used both actively and passively, working on posture implies also to try put the body in two opposite directions in order to create tension.

1.1 Active, Passive

If aligning is a way to connect or reconnect entire lines or a whole web when the student knows how to work three dimensionally with the fascias, sometimes a correct alignment is just a natural result of doing something else correctly. 

a. Transforming the Body

For internal practices, alignments are a way to connect or reconnect whole fascia lines, or webs, in order to reach the whole body power. Their aim is to spread as evenly as possible the pressure exerted by the body weight when one stands. To achieve such feat, three parts are important, the chest through the sternum, the pelvis area through the vertebrae and the knees through the crotch. Not correctly aligned, those parts will retain much of the pressure linked to one’s body weight. Observing correct alignments, chest contained, butt tucked in and knees centred will stretch the fascia lines where they may be too stiff or lax in order to strengthen these.  

b. As a Result

Aligning sometimes is not used as an active process to transform the body, but as a tool to check if one is really relaxed. Indeed, as mentioned before in this blog, the popular “sinking shoulders and dropping elbows” of internal practices is not something to be done, but just the simple outcome of having all the neck, head, chest and arm muscles totally lax. Otherwise, forcing it may lead to neck and back pain.

1.2 Opposite Directions

Aligning and stretching fascia lines is actually only a part of the training. Indeed, what is, with time, sought for in internal practices is the capacity to tense the whole body through fascia elasticity, reaching the locks. To do so, one has to put the body in opposite directions. The idea is to go against the direction imprinted by the alignment. Two examples, one upper body and one lower will be given: 

a. Arms

The example actually comes from a previous post. Indeed, while having the shoulders sinking and the elbows dropping when correctly relaxing, one’s intention will be that, on the contrary, they float and soar. In “Wei Tuo Presents the Pestle II” the idea is to first relax and then, once shoulders and elbows sink and drop, imprint a slight movement to make them float and soar.

Wei Tuo Presents the Pestle II

Done correctly, one should have the arms stretch even more. This would be the opposite in “Wei Tuo Presents the Pestle III” where one would first make the shoulders and elbow float and soar, 

 Wei Tuo Presents the Pestle III

i.e. try to extend the arms as high as possible to only, then, relax them so that they would naturally sink and drop.

b. Legs

Tucking in the butt done correctly, one shall have the crotch round and such pressure will have the knees bent. The idea is, then, to try to have the legs straight. The rounded crotch forcing the knees to bent while the feet push the legs up in trying to straighten them is the exact pressure one tries to create.

External alignment mastered, one can then direct his/her training towards the internal one, mainly a question of elasticity.

II. Internal Elasticity

It is important to understand that, in internal practices, body alignment is not a final goal, just one of the tools used to connect the fascia webs and reach the whole body power. Such connection is sometimes called internal alignment and is mainly a question of elasticity. Internal elasticity is trained and used in mainly two ways, by tightening up one’s structure internally while being externally aligned or taking postures non-aligned externally while trying to keep the fascias’ connection.

1.1 Locking

The locks training has actually already been explained in a previous post. In such training it is actually elasticity which rules, in the sense that alignments come naturally from a correct lock. They are a byproduct, a way to check if one is correctly locked, a process very similar to “sinking shoulders and dropping elbows”.

Reaching such elasticity, all and any parts of one’s body will have to be tensed in the same way a bouncing ball is. It is this kind of tension that is sought for. To do so, one shall have the muscles become as lax as possible while stretching them as much as possible. The laxer they are, the longer the stretch, the longer the stretch, the tenser the body. Such apparent oxymoron is often described as “firm outside and tender inside” or “both extremely firm and extremely tender”.

1.2 Ballast

The waist or the pelvic area being the centre of the body, training elasticity while being not aligned serves two purposes. Indeed, it not only strengthens the pelvis and the rest of the fascia webs’ elasticity, but is also a means to learn how to keep the connection between the three parts of the body (upper, middle, down) using the pelvis area as a  ballast.

If the swaying fist has been already mentioned in this blog and will be described in length as being one of the corner exercises of 'Bamboo Training', one can also read “Connection and the Butt” in Still And Straight, which describes one of the basic exercises for training the ballast. Indeed, when working with fascias, power, balance and rooting are all linked to one’s ability to keep the pelvis area connected with the legs and the feet and the torso/arms and the head. Hence, if when training teenagers, stretching did not take into account alignment in the beginning. Still, once the super-flexibility achieved (basically having acrobatic skills), one had to reverse and start to work the same exercises while adding the correct alignments.

Standing, then only walking, then only running, an internal martist always has to come back to postural training to solve any issue or start a new research avenue.

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1 Morei Ueshiba, The Art of Peace, translated and edited by John Stevens.

2 More examples of the different levels of interpretation the same saying can have when it comes to martial arts.