Bend and Stretch

[Anonymous]

I remember when I was first learning Tai Chi and Bruce introduced the distinction between bend and stretch and open/close. It was a long, long time before I really understood the distinction. I thought I’d attempt to describe bend and stretch in a slightly different way and possibly make sense of why it comes before open/close. I’d also add that IMO you can open/close a joint without being able to seperate out the bend and stretch. Hopefully this will all make more sense by the end of this post.

So, bend and stretch: Let’s talk about the easiest place to feel this and isolate only a single joint, the elbow. Every one can bend and unbend their elbow. Notice I didn’t use the word stretch. I’m making a distinction. When you use musclular strength, you bend and unbend. To bend the bicep muscle contracts and pulls the tendons attached to the forearm and the arm bends at the elbow. To unbend using muscular force, the tricep muscle (on the opposite side) contracts and pulls the tendons attached to the opposite side of the forearm, and the arm unbends. This is basic body mechanics. The entire body is setup this way, however it’s not always a simple as this.

One important aspect to remember is that when the bicep contracts, the tricep has to relax and allow the arm to move; otherwise, you feel resistance. If both muscles contract you create a lot of tension. If you can’t completely relax one side while the other contracts, you’ll have to expend some of your energy overcoming that resistance. You are muscle bound. You are basically fighting against yourself. In this method, the contraction is active and the relaxation is passive. From a purely muscular perpective you can only use half of your arm strength at any one time. If you can’t completely relax, you are using less than half your muscular strength.

So one goal in internal movement is to eliminate the wasted energy caused by tension and teach the body to relax when it is told to relax. Another is to loosen the tissue so there is no residual binding from injury for example. Still another goal is to use the whole body. We want to use both muscles simultaneously. So in internal arts, you want to use the relaxation response to drive the stretch instead of it being very passive like going limp. We want to actively make the muscle stretch or lengthen. That way we can contract the muscle on one side while driving relaxation through the other side. This is one way of thinking of these opposites as complimentary. They work together.

There is more synergy than that. The forearm muscles are attached to the upper arm as well. So when the bicep contracts the muscles in the forearm can also contract to assist in bending the arm. If you can drive the relaxtion through these same muscles when you are unbending the arm — now you are stretching, not just unbending. You can use bending and streching when you bend the arm and when you unbend the arm. You just have to realize that one side of the arm is bending while that opposite side is stretching. There are two segments bending and two segments stretching.

I probably went too fast. You have to think of unbending the arm as bending it from the point of view of the opposite side. The arm does not fold that way but the mechanics are exactly the same. This is important because you’ll need to tell the body to “bend” both sides simultaneously to close the joint and stretch both sides to open the joint.

So you can see that open/close is built on the principles of bend and stretch. You have to do both sides of the joint and both muscle groups at the same time. That’s why bend and stretch comes before open/close. That’s also why you can learn open/close before you really understand bend and stretch; you might no be able to isolate and control each of the four pieces seperately or in pairs.

Conceptually, this is one way a much smaller internal martial artist can overcome a much larger external opponent. someone who is moving using muscular force at best can only use half their muscle. If you can use 100%, you could be half the size and equally as strong.

[Anonymous]

Thanks, James. This is a very clear and useful explication of bend and stretch. I was lucky to do the whole heaven and earth learning sequence with Bill Ryan. Much of that was experiential rather than intellectual. In other words, we learned how to do it through a gradual process of adding and combining elements over a long period of time. I think readers will find this post a good supplement to the BMP text.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the feedback. It is particularly nice to hear that someone who has learned bend and stretch understands my post. It is really challenging to describe some of these neigung components especially in a short post without any pictures. I think if I could couple some of the descriptions with pictures, this could be much clearer.

I’d also add that how you “drive the relaxation” is the rub. This is where the concept of chi muddles things a bit. At a very basic level you could think of chi as all of the bio-electro-chemical processes that make the body function. Yi, chi, li would be a Chinese description of the chain. So the mind, yi, tells the body to do something, the nerves etc fire, chi, and make the body function or move exhibiting strength, li.

I don’t think it is a coincidence that the elbow joint has eight gates. Each is necessary to control the flows needed to drive the relaxation through one of the segments I described.

[Anonymous]

I found an interesting article yesterday, http://www.chuckrowtaichi.com/MuscularExtensionQns.html. In it Robert Chuckrow, PH.D. describes what he call active muscular extension, AME. He also wrote a book on this, Tai Chi Dynamics: Principles of Natural Movement, Health & Self-Development.

I haven’t read the book yet, but based on a quick glance at the material you can look at on Amazon, it looks like he is describing the same or similar experience that I found. I don’t think the muscles actively extend but they feel like it. At this point I just think you have to learn to consciously relax the muscles rather than have it be a passive, unconscious act. This opens the door to the next phase where the fluid dynamics aren’t interrupted and become accessible.

[Anonymous]

I think Chu Shong Tin eludes to that in his book. I was re-reading it last night and there was a part that described 3 types of muscle actions. 1 was contraction, 2 was constant length, and 3 was based on the 2nd but I can’t remember exactly what it said. It was a little vague. I’ll post it tonight if I remember.

[Anonymous]

“Medical research reveals that there are 3 sources – classified in 2 types, dynamic and static – for generating muscular forces. The first source is from contracting muscles, a dynamic type. The power it generates is the least of the 3. The second source is from maintaining a fixed length of the muscle that advances at constant speed, a static type. The pulling force so generated in the muscles is greater than that from contraction, added that a reactively resisting force is also automatically set in action at the same time – the greater pressure the muscle receives, the stronger the resisting force reacts, in significantly larger magnitude than the sustaining force effected from the first source. The third source is based on the second one. When the muscle has been lengthened by excessive pressure, it immediately gears up the resisting force as a natural reaction.”

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