Silk Reeling and "The Upper Body Turning Movement"

Master Stephen Hwa speaking of the quarter body movement, half body movement and upper body turning at a workshop 2011, Buffalo, NY.  The video is here:  "Upper Body Turning"

In speaking of Silk Reeling another movement is the “turning” movement.  You keep the pelvis fixed and you turn. The buttock is fully engaged actually.  The buttock function will keep the pelvis from not turning.  So when you are turning up there the buttock is holding the pelvis.

As usual, with this one, I find more people have problems when you teach this. The problem is getting the shoulder away from the turning movement. If the shoulder has even a little bit of initiation in the movement you lost it. Don’t use the shoulder.  Everything is in here (core, lower abdomen).  The shoulder is just a slave following the movement.

Anybody have any questions on this turning movement.

“Do you practice with a tuck”?

Yes, because the buttock is involved.  You feel the buttock is energized and holding the pelvis.

“Master Hwa, at the end of the turning movement, is there a sense of a denser contraction that is happening”?

Well, a lot of places you feel the contraction. When you turn in this direction, without moving the pelvis, your buttock is supporting you.

“When you change direction, does the new direction take over?”

I guess, initially it is relaxed back to the neutral position.  

You can do it either way.

You could relax to the neutral position or you could energize back to the neutral position.

You probably want to energize back to the neutral position.  Because when you have an application you may have to energize any segment of the turn.  So you want to energize back to the neutral position.

I think you want to energize so you are intentionally turning back, rather than just relaxing back.

Try to get the shoulder away from any of the movement.

I notice on this side, you get a little bit of drop of the shoulder.

Good, very good.  Do you find how much energy is involved in making this movement, compared to  turning at the pelvis…because it is moving at the abdominal area.  So this is another silk reeling exercise.  Boy the beginner just eat it up.

“Well it is something they can do”

They can feel, and they feel somewhere they never have sensation before.

A Golden Rule with many facets..."do not hurt yourself"

Click here:  "Hand follows the foot..."

The Youtube Video along with a transcript under the video (the small square icon looks like stacked paper), the  photo above,  and the following is excerpted from Master Stephen Hwa's comments in a 2011 workshop.  The subject had to do with internal discipline but also delves deeply into body structure and the benefits of practicing.  You will have to link from here to the Youtube video on the subject and can either follow along with what is written here or from the "Description" at the Youtube video itself.  

One of the things that occurred to me as I was editing the video for publication was a new perspective on something I had read in "Uncovering the Treasure".  A golden rule that Master Young gave to Master Hwa was that the knee does not extend over the toe.  It occurred to me that the knee can (incorrectly and harmfully) extend over the toe in more than just the forward direction, it can extend over from a "torque" that Master Hwa speaks of in the video and here.  In other words, it can extend over the side of the toes as well as the front, can it not?  All of that resulting from a thoughtless rotational action on what should really be a simple understandable concept for a healthy stable knee joint.

Sifu James Roach

Workshop 2011, Buffalo State College:

"If you stick to this Classical Tai Chi program there will be a big improvement to the back. This is an important component about the back.  The back will respond to stretching  if you give consistent opportunity to stretch and the lower back will improve.  If you tuck your chin in correctly, you will also stretch your cervical spine as well. So the parts of this stretch are equally important. This may very well work to correct cervical spine problems or such things as a “knot” in the back of the neck.

So as relating to body posture, that is one of the central themes.  In this regard you will be able to have the energy transfer from the neck down to the heel. The energy can flow this circuit without outflowing to the middle of the body, like the lower spine for example.  This will transmit all the force to the ground in one uninterrupted  flow,  it will not be transmitted to just the lower back where it can cause problems.

The other important body posture is referred to in Tai Chi  as “Hand follows the foot, elbow follows the knee and shoulder follows the hip”. In other words we do not turn by only using  half of the upper body and neglecting to turn the lower.  The turning power has to come from the waist and the entire muscles of the back.  There is a vast majority of Tai Chi schools that do not follow this rule.

There is a question which has been raised in the past about this rule.  Where do we apply this rule?  Because we also have turning moves as well.  This is relatively easy to see in the form but when you are doing applications with other people, or as in “free form”, when is the rule applied?

I searched the entire form and found there is consistency and explanation actually. It is easy to explain and there are many different levels of explanation for this:  Any movement that you where you are going to cause a torque (a twisting force that tends to cause rotation) (the danger of which comes from “shear force” a stress which is applied parallel or tangential to a face of something  as in this case a knee or ankle) in the knee or ankle, then you use the rule.   In other words, any time you have the potential for a twisting force that tends to cause rotation, key words twisting force which causes rotation to a knee or ankle. 

This is surprisingly such a simple concept but people are not following it. One of the best examples of this I can use is a golf swing.  Do you see the torque in my knee and ankle?  This why golfers have ankle problems, lots of people have knee problems.  I am not a golfer so I cannot say but certainly if you “hand follow…” the foot out you will not have that problem.  Whether you can do that as a golfer or not, I do not know.   However, if you look at our form and in every case, every  instance, it is always following the rule to the letter.  Now if you examine the “half body” turning movement, there is no torque down at the knees or ankles.  So this type of turn is allowed because you see I do not have to turn my foot with it.

Now this is certainly for health viewpoint.  For martial art viewpoint, it is this way and you have much more power.  More power than the leg lagging behind, in which you are fighting yourself.  The torque force pulls your body backward while you are attempting to turn forward.  

On another level, remember at one time we came back to considerable argument regarding “turning at the waist vs. turning at the hip”.  People have said that “turning at the hip has more power than turning at the waist”.   Well, you see, again that turning at the hip is torqueing your knee and ankle.  WELL, YOU MAY SAY YOU ARE GETTING YOUR OPPONENT ON THE GROUND BUT EVENTUALLY YOU WILL HURT YOURSELF, YOU ARE ALREADY HURTING YOURSELF.

After all, when you learn martial arts, the first principle is that you do not want to hurt yourself.   Otherwise, your opponent can wait just a few years for the damage to set in (laughter).  Somehow not hurting yourself and delivering the power really coincide with each other.   If you don’t hurt yourself, you can deliver more power.   Now there are people, who argued with someone here in the past, now they are very strict…STUDENTS HAVE GOT TO TURN THEIR HIP.

If you are a young person, you can get away with all kinds of movements for awhile.   You see this in golfers when they are young but when they get older they are really hurting themselves.  Sooner or later this will take its toll."

Master Stephen Hwa

Classical Wu Tai Chi Silk Reeling (Quarter Body Move)

 Silk-reeling exercise is really about taking a small segment of the Tai Chi form and converting it to a symmetrical/continuous movement.  One then can concentrate on practicing just those few movements. This is of course different than practicing the Tai Chi form which as we know is huge in scope. So then we have reduced things to a very simple motion and can just work on that. This concentration is really concerned with the kernel of the movement and goes to the heart of it which is the internal.

So these are not easy and some of them are extremely advanced.  Talking of these movements we see that practitioners in old times did not begin silk reeling until after about 10 years of experience.  Now however and in consideration of improved teaching methods we  can teach beginners and see that people do get it and enjoy it.  It is quite convincing that anyone you want to teach can incorporate this as part of the teaching program. This incorporation can be in parallel to the teaching of the Tai Chi form so this can maintain the interest of the students.

A movement which is considered the most advanced but is really quite simple to learn is moving the hand in conjunction with the body.  The hand becomes a slave of the movement of the body and does not move independently.  With either the right or left arm hanging down at the side you slightly stretch it down at the shoulder.  I repeat "slightly" for you do not want to bend the body itself as you stretch.  One can concentrate on the elbow and slightly stretch at the shoulder as you do this.  Then you move the body on the right or left side to move the arm.  Ask yourself if you feel the connection between the arm and the abdomen at this point.

There is a common mistake which occurs when that movement is taught.  This mistake occurs when students start bending the arm at the elbow.  Once the elbow is bent, you immediately lose the connection between abdomen and arm.  This loss of connection occurs because your concentration goes to the forearm instead of to the body.  So the whole arm has to move like a unit and not bend at the elbow. In observing students try this,  one also sees them angling the arm across the front of the body from right to left side or left to right side.  You should try to keep the arm moving straight ahead and not across your front.  Other mistakes I observe are students drooping the engaged shoulder, sometimes drooping one entire side of the body and even cocking their head down as well.  If you observe the students in this Youtube video you will see what I mean as well as what to avoid.

• Do not bring arm across the body
• Do not bend the elbow
• Do not scrunch up the chest, this is using the pectoral muscles, not the abdominal
• Do not drop the shoulder so much that you droop the body or cock the head and neck