Posts Tagged Single Push Hands
Single Pushing Hands Builds Reflexive Power
Place your hand on a hot stove and — jerk it away. That’s a reflex! For all the times it works, keep it: you’ll need reflexes later. Your body, your nervous system, crafted this technique for a long time. Use your current training strategies and single pushing hands to unleash the power of reflexes!
Three training methods promote vibrant self-defense: strategic, reflexive, and sensitive.
Strategic models employ set routines and applications to mock attacker behavior and defender technique. Good stuff, and every movement education employs it. Hard styles utilize this approach to a large degree. Faster forms, both one-person and two-person rely on strategic concepts. They hold the possibilities of near-full-power because random attacks are removed. Such drills improve an individual’s threshold of resiliance; they toughen you up!
Sensitivity models reduce fear-reactions and increase deep-body awareness. Slow forms, sticky hands, and soft, punch-absorption practices do this too. By learning to resist little, responding and flowing with attackers, a defender learns to coil around force and to redistribute force into an attacker. These drills and methods create proper responses and deeper inner power.
(Sometimes: because of choreography, strategic models of self-defense become unrealistic, and they may accidentally teach rigidity to bodies and fear-reactions to minds—an uh-oh reflex. Likewise, because sensitivity models utilize slow, soft motions to emulate realistic attacks, they become unrealistic, often teaching weakness to bodies and fantasies to minds by devaluing force and pretending toughness.)
Reflex training exists between hardened training and softened responses. Long-term reflex training represents a balanced approach. Unlearn conditioned fear-responses, and develop sturdy of body, mind, and spirit. Built-in to your spinal column, reflexes —like the hot stove reflex— cause action before you can think about, or cognitively process, events. Strategic methods go reflexive by adding random elements and by increasing perceptions; i.e. strategic methods become reflexive by inserting softness and sensitivity. Sensitivity methods go reflexive by toughening up, by adding some force and oomph to your work.
Single Pushing Hands releases innate, reflexive power by allowing one to practice either or both: structural, heavy hitting push-hands or soft, light, sensitive pushing hands.
Single Pushing Hands, utilizing the methods from the World Taiji Boxing Association,
- builds circular strength
- releases reflexive self-defense
- sensitizes coordination, balance, and timing
How do we do it?
