This exercises set is designed to strengthen your leg muscles, your sense of stability and your root. Developing your sense of stability and root is extremely important in internal martial arts. You need to be able to stand on one leg while using the other one for kicking, sweeping and blocking, without loosing your balance. These exercises will in particularly help you develop:
1.Internal small stabilizer muscles. Particularly foot and ankle muscles.
2.Muscle control infrastructure, which means your brain and your nerves. In order to have a good balance, you need to be relaxed, but alert (sung), and your nerve pathways have to be fast and unblocked, so that you can quickly adjust your body position, by switching on and off your muscles.
3.Your internal feeling in your legs all the way from your hips to your feet. In order to be able to your body position on time, before you start falling, you need to be able to feel what is going on in your legs. You need to be able to feel where your body is spatially, and correct its position in real time, while doing something else, like kicking, or sweeping.
During this exercise set you need to pay attention to these details:
1.Do all exercises in sung state. This means using only minimum of necessary muscle, ligament and tendon power, required to perform the exercise. This does not mean be slumped.
2.Your supporting leg needs to be vertical with foot, knee hip alignment maintained at all times.
3.Your torso needs to be vertical. You should not lean forward or backwards or sideways.
4.Don't break your hip. To break the hip means to stick you hip to the outside to counter balance the weight of your opposite leg when its lifted up. Breaking hip creates an angle between your supporting leg and your torso. Your supporting leg and your torso should be inline and vertical at all times.
5.Keep your core muscles engaged at all times. This will cause your pelvis to be slightly tilted forward and up, and will straighten your lower back making your coccyx point down. This will prevent you from sticking your bottom out to counter balance the weight of your leg when its lifted forward.
6.Do not hold your breath. Keep your breathing smooth and continuous. Use lower dantien breathing. Your waist should expand on inhale in all directions, from your lower ribs to your pelvis.
You can repeat each of these exercises 10 times, holding for 3 breaths. You can then increase the number of breaths during which you hold your leg up.
If you can not balance properly and hold the required alignment, you should do these exercises while holding onto something, like a wall. Do the exercises using support until your core muscles and your leg stabilizing muscles are strong enough to allow you to do the exercises without support.
Here is the video that shows how to perform this exercise set.
