STAND: Pound For Pound

In the BMM book, Chapter 6 Alternative Santishi. I introduced THE simplest possible version of martial standing. Martial in the Yiquan sense - uneven weighting of leg support. It delivers overwhelming IP ignition despite (or because) it eliminates the possibility of over tensing your shoulders. Most of the classical Yiquan zhanzhuang drills foster, or at least do nothing to counter, the tendency you’ll see in standing drills throughout the Qi Gong universe - tense shoulders due to overemphasis on armwork and arm shaping. Remember this isn’t a minor, parochial Chinese aesthetic convention. Japanese internal legend Sagawa Yukiyoshi constantly harped on the same thing: shoulders too tense.

The apex predator of zhanzhuang is clearly the OG of them all: Xingyiquan’s santishi. However, this form of zhanzhuang has the same fault for beginner students as all its descendants. Versions of santishi clearly “seeded” Yiquan and that in turn has influenced other longstanding traditions, including some strains of Chen Village Tai Chi. But santishi isn’t ideal for beginners (even though it’s the first thing taught in your first Xingyi class). Because even with classical santishi, with beginners, there’s the same problem of a tendency to over-tense the shoulders and over-emphasize the arms.

That’s why I introduced the arms down version in BMM as the absolute best for relative beginners. Huge bang for the buck which you can really feel tangibly.

But that said, santishi is still king of the hill in the advanced space, when it’s time to move on into deeper waters. The good thing is that once you’ve experienced how powerful and pleasurable standing practice can be, and you know you can carve out the minimal time to commit to it every day (just 2 minutes per side as in Chapter 6, though of course I do a lot more), you’ve then demarcated a space in your life and practice time slot that can be augmented as you develop.

The best direction for that development is towards santishi. The thing is that even if we hold the physical shape constant, there are still a number of variant ways to work it. I covered some of those in the more specialized book Advanced Xingyi Energetics.

Here I want to introduce yet another ‘mental protocol’ leveraging the same outer shape which I included in BMM, as shown at the top of this post. Here’s the description of the basic frame, with illustrations of each side, from my book AXE:

As it hints at the end of that clipped page, there’s still something missing, which is the mental dynamics. In AXE, I offer a number of options for that. But those are more specialized. After all, that book is aimed at true Xingyiquan geeks.

So below, here’s an alternative protocol, which is easier to mentally instantiate and control, suitable for BMM fans, and extremely effective in IP generation. You can experiment and choose which version works best for you