Friday, November 11, 2011

Practicing relaxed and what is Sung

Don't do internal martial arts completely relaxed. That is slumping and will put your body out of alignment. This will lead to injury. You need to do it in sung state, which means using just enough muscle and tendon power to keep body in a REQUIRED position. This implies that ALL your muscles, big and small, external and internal are strong enough, so that if engaged together, they only need to be engaged up to the sung level. If you are physically week, then sung level of muscle activation is probably way above your normal strength and tension level, and does not feel like being relaxed. But you need to achieve this muscle tone level if you want to be stable.
Here are Erle Montaigue lessons on sung.

Part 1
Part 2

Warm up exercises that you should not attempt at home

Here is an example of a very dangerous set of exercises.
It was described as a warm up set, and indeed it is taught as a warm up set, in this form or a similar form, in many styles of internal martial arts. Warm up exercises are meant to prepare your body for more vigorous and more difficult exercises that fallow. They are supposed to warm up muscles and tendons and lightly stretch them and twist them. But the above set of exercises, the way it is performed, relies on the body being exceptionally strong and flexible. If a beginner or an intermediate tries to copy this exercise set the way it is presented, he will definitely injure himself.  Before you can do this set, you need to do a lot of joint opening exercises, a lot of muscle and tendon strengthening exercises and a lot of preparatory twisting exercises. Then you can start with this set, but do all the twists and stands at only 10 percent of what is shown in this video. And maybe, if you are lucky and don’t injure yourself, you might be able to do it like this in about 10 to 20 years time.