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Professor Zheng Manqing showing Tai Chi’s 左掤履擠按 (Left Wardoff)

I recently wrote here about Foot and Leg internal power cultivation, emphasizing that the power rising or rebounding from the soles of your feet up through your legs is the key to infusing your entire body with IP.

But there’s yet another very interesting and surprising way to work deeply on foot and leg power. It’s based on a foundational posture coaching method pioneered by my teacher, Master Benjamin Lo. I need to explain it in several steps.

1. To see the canonical shape of Left Wardoff (our sample shape for this post), refer to the photo of Professor Zheng at the top of this post. That’s basically the perfect positioning of the master.

2. However, Ben always wanted us to sit even deeper, for longer times, as a static zhanzhuang method of IP cultivation. He didn’t much mind which of the many 70/30 (front-loaded) poses we used for the work, to him the same exact full-body principles applied, no matter what specific position your hands might take. So it doesn’t have to be Left Wardoff, but we’ll continue with that example. In Ben’s teaching, for all 70/30 poses the lower body was always invariant. The key elements of his version were:

   1. Body upright. In many styles of Tai Chi, there’s a forward lean of the upper body. I’m not saying this is wrong, just that not what Ben taught. He always wanted streight vertical upper body, no leaning not north/south/east/west.

   2. Differentiate weight: make sure the front-loaded leg is definitely and tangibly doing seriously more work than the rear leg.

   3. Rear foot flat (not curled upward)

   4. Front knee directly, vertically above front toe (not drawn back)

   5. Waist facing square to front (not sideways bladed as often seen in other schools)

   While doing all the above, and sitting as low as you can while keeping all the other princples, stay as fully relaxed as possible. So this is a good IP cultivation task all on its own. But we can go deeper.

3. Ben noted that when trying this pose people usually distorted their own body shapes without even realizing it. He said they were trying too hard. In all fairness, it really is kind of difficult to simultaneously maintain all the principles above, while standing for long periods. But to Ben, doing all that should be just as comfortable and unremarkable as sitting naturally at your ease in an ordinary chair. He said: When you sit in a chair in a normal setting, do you lean, and blade, and half-stand up (for relief lol), or otherwise distort yourself? No, you just sit relaxed, balanced, comfortable for quite a number of minutes if desired. No big deal. So he wanted to give a graphic illustration of the right feeling.
   
   To illustrate, he would take the Zuo Peng position (above, but Ben would sit much lower in this position - basically his front thigh would be absolutely parallel to the floor) while supported by a simple folding chair. Of course, that makes it easy to assume and maintain a very good shape, at least in his case: upright, balanced, relaxed, calm, all limbs and body in harmonious and correct positions. He could sit for any number of minutes this way. Naturally you’d assume that his ease in that position was due to the chair support.
   
   However he would then prove that one can, and should, maintain all principles with the exactly the same casual, elegant, non-strenuous ease that the chair support version enables - even without the chair! So Ben would push back the chair while otherwise remaining precisely as before - no change. Showing that the correct configuration, with relaxed, upright body, no distortion or deviation, is possible even in the lowest, most strenuous setup.

   
   Now, I’m not any kind of master near Ben’s level. However, by seeing him do that so many times, I can at least mimic it crudely to give you the idea. Checking yourself now and then with this chair/no-chair mode is a good way to keep it real. I don’t have film of Ben himself showing this, but my version below should kind of give you the rough idea. Again, it looks somewhat different from the Professor’s version above, partly because I’m not a super master like him, but also because my version is modeled directly on Ben’s teachings to us fallen mortals, where he emphasized sitting lower, and a few other very minor variations - mostly to make it tougher and burn hotter:
   

4. So all that above is good general training. However, this whole discussion began with a question about IP leg training, specifically. And the above principles can be pushed even further for that purpose. Here’s how it’s done: