Boom and Beyond
Click above pic to watch brief clip before reading on. That’s just 12 seconds from my Seattle Summer Sword Seminar (2024) event, a quick cameo moment. But it makes a certain point, or illustrates an analogy, that I want to explore more deeply here.
What’s shown there is purely physical. Motion transfer and transformation of ordinary energy in the normal sense: kinetic to sonic power. However it serves as a great analogy for the amazing training experience of traditional (Hebei 5-12) Xingyiquan dynamics.
Doing any of the techniques of XYQ is analogous (not an identity, an analogy) to the whip thing. As you move your physical body, you coordinate the massing and then projection of the surge experience (yes, the end of every correctly executed XYQ strike really feels like a huge hydro-electric power surge through your extended striking arm).
Energy-centric XYQ is vastly more difficult than getting the cheap knack of that whip snap. But the learning process on the whip has some features in common, in miniature. When people start, they are too tense, too timid, not extensive and expansive enough, and strangely, while being psychologically timid, they also physically overpower the whip, which perversely underpowers the weapon and ultimately sabotages the sonic crack. Dud time!
That’s how it is when learning XYQ dynamics too (real XYQ, which is entirely energy centric). Due to the movement style of XYQ, everyone is easily tricked into approaching it as a kind of rushed and forceful slobby karate, with a little foot stomp for extra YouTube cred. If you go down that road, you’ll never get it. You need to assume (even before actually feeling it) that the motivating power of the art isn’t going to be physical at all. Yes, in the beginning you need to take that little teaching on faith alone. If that sounds a little too Jim Jones thing for you, well, I understand. But you’ve slammed shut the gate between yourself and XYQ.
If you keep working the basics: crisp (but not tense), fast (but not rushed), accurate and mindful as you do the two-step reps: setup chambering, strike delivery - eventually you’ll realize that sometimes you’re able to feel and then even control the surge of internal power up from your torso to and through your striking arm. Amazing! So much fun. But once you get a taste of it, that isn’t enough. It’s like finally getting one decent actual sonic crack from the whip (though much harder). Even after that first time, you’ll still fail again and again to reproduce it perfectly on every rep.
But eventually you’ll achieve total command of the internal coordination of the non-physical energy paired with the physical guiding and shaping dynamics. And then you’re finished training? No, then you’ve finally started training. And that’s when the fun really begins.