Jian Dan 1 Push hands

( For Ni Kawa Kai )

Many people do push hands. The push hands here is a set of exercises based on the fundamental positions from San Zhan leading towards the kind of 'full on' push hands which I have done in Yong Chun ( only once when a bit drunk ).

The steps I have given here are based on a session I did with some good freinds who are karate practitioners in an association in England called Ni Kawa Kai

I have broken those steps down into 8 little clips so that if any of you guys are interested you can look back and remeber what, for me, was a very memorable session - also Jon who was not there.

Throughout these clips When I say 'outward parry' I do not mean that at all but it is something I hope karate people relate to more than block or whatever.

There are 16Meg worth of clips here. If you want to watch them all it is worth getting this zip file of all the clips rather than waiting for each one to download.

Or if you prefer as as one .WAV file ( 9 Meg ) here.

In this clip I play with yoko who is a lot smaller than me. This is because she is very good at the excercises and it is good / clear to demo with here. Do not worry about size. In particular the last step ( breaking the centre ) is seemingly much more effective against bigger people - Likewise you will learn a lot by practicing with smaller weaker people than yourself. In particular practicing with begginers or people from other systems who move differently is very interesting as their movements are still very natural. Last month I was in Amsterdam at a Pat McCarthy seminar. There were many karate black belts / teachers. For me the most interesting people to practice against were the judo people who fistly had excellent natural stances, but also had not had their natural movement and punches messed up by rigid training. Think about it! - but enough already - on with the clips...

Intro ( basic move ) ( 1 meg )
Demo basic cycle ( 300k )
Intro ( stepping through ) ( 2 meg )
Demo ( stepping through ) ( 1.8 Meg )
Intro ( changing ) ( 1 Meg )
Demo ( changing ) ( 5 Meg )
Intro ( Taking the Centre ) ( 1.5 Meg )
Demo ( putting it together )( 4.3 Meg )

principles we are trying to work on here

If you try pushing hands whatever your style you will love it so I won't bang on about the benefits. These points in particular are what I am looking for in it when we practice:

Everthing in San Zhan stances!
Transference of forces between the arms
Attacking using the whole body
Attacking the opponents Tan Tien ( taking the centre )
There is a lot more going on here than meets the eye.

Discussion

A few points of discussion on pushing hands which I am still working out...

It produces familiarity with close quarters but this can also produce complacency

When I push hands with a Tai Chi man, against my advance he will move beautifully out of the way. He will say that he has avoided the attack - but the point of my advance is to take his position. Whether my partner moves out of the way willingly or not I do not care - I just want the position. This becomes a philosophical discussion about conflict - not about effictiveness of the differing systesm.

The most difficult thing about push hands

Everyone I have seen do push hands apart from in Yong Chun balances the forces. i.e. for most systems the name of the game is to keep a continuity of pressure at the point of contact - whether you are doing sensitivity drills in Tai Chi or Wing Chun, or power drills in Okinawan karate or Hung Gar.

However this is not the aim of our push hands!!.

The difficult thing is that in many old texts from many systems we talk about meeting hard with soft, and soft with hard. This is not exhibited in many push hands ( as it tends to end the cylce rather dramatically! ).

For me , this is the end point of push hands. The practice of something which push hands itself finds very difficult to contain. ( and may not be able to ). As with most worthwhile things this is 'dancing on the edge of the absolute without being burnt'.

Winding up....

Anyway guys 'n' gals of Ni Kawa Kai - you may think this is all bollocks - but it is pretty much where I am up to. This particular base cylce is I think the most often one practiced, but you can choose any good base for whatever seems to be your own basic system principles. The great thing is that you can put in lots of different attacks / changes ( uppercuts / roundhouse punchs - whatever you fancy ) and it gives us a common language to explore each others systems.

From this starting point you can do insert some funky move and blow me away with it next time I see you!

Lot of love,
Martin

Some things we play with

Here we have the bits we practice at the moment ( Sept 2005 ) and that I want to be doing over the next year or so. Do as movement training and focus / tension training. This is nearly all San Zhan practice.