LOTUS KICK: Uncut China White

BONUS: Video below in this post, showing me doing the Crescent Kick drill in the BMM book style (which was hard to show in print)

When I post here in this FULL METAL MAXIMALITY exclusive section, how can you know when it’s solid 24K gold? When is it uncut China White, straight from the continent? In others words, a keeper - worth deeply inhaling word by word and making your own, weaving it into your IP (Internal Power) practice starting today?

You can tell by your instinctive reaction. When your initial flash impression hits you like: ‘Meh… more cheerleading… nothingburger…’ THOSE are the hints that, more than a whole new exercise or a pic of me doing some yoga contortion that will turn out as seriously transformative. So watch yourself. Be sensitive to your first impressions and gut reactions. When you find yourself even slightly turning away from one of these posts as: ‘Awe man… just more mental stuff.. skooling us again to think this think that think the other damm thing….’ then you know The Power is playing one of its usual games where it frontruns the crown jewels, you’re blinded by the light. The IP is almost like a living thing, playing these soft psych head games to sideline the unserious. I know you really want dramatic new physcial drills. But you’ve already got the crown jewels in your hands if you know how to appraise them. And that’s what this Full Metal Maximality section lives for.

Anyway today’s entry is exactly one of those nothingburgers. So feel free to turn aside right now 😲

It concerns the Lotus Kick teaching of Bare Metal Minimality book (Chapter 11).

The great thing about this move/drill is that the physics of it, the mechanics alone, do most of the heavy lifting. Unlike the other drills where the mental component is essential, here sure it’s important, but the physical structure of this move create the Primary Teaching, which in this case is ‘Gapping’. Gapping is fully explained and exemplified throughout BMM so I’m not going to rewrite the whole book here to explain it. But you can easily verify from the simple illustration in that chapter that just doing the kick in a soft and stable style, at moderate to slow speed, and taking seriously the requirement that your foot must brush both hands - just those mechanical strictures generate the Gapping effect for free. It’s a very special drill in that way. See the circle in the pic below? That’s the Gap of Gapping. Setup for you automatically on every rep just by doing the base move. It’s the internal protocol equivalent of an automatic pinsetter machine in a bowling alley.

But I bet you’re overlooking this move because (a) it seems so humdrum, everybody already knows this from the ZMQ37 form, what more could it offer? You know it all already! And (b) for some people (and this I am sympathetic to) the emphasis on fully connecting kicking foot to hands is a little out of reach for some people, just physically.

Even so, you should work toward it. This is a drill that gives nothing up to the casual practitioner but rewards its Ride Or Die devotees richly.

So, yeah that automatic formation of the Gapping Effect is the initial bonus feature, but the rabbit hole goes a lot deeper. Let’s now peel down one more layer of the Crescent Kick Onion, and turn up the stage lights.