Flexibility & Qigong

[Anonymous]

Thanks guy.

[Anonymous]

Hey Taokua,

You raised another good point. That you want to stop turning before you feel tension and not slightly afterwards.

I’m used to regular exercises where you stretch until you feel a good amount of tension and then you stop. When we do these arts, we’re told not to push ourselves as hard. So I’d turn until I felt something tighten a little, then I would stop. I would stop well before I would have in regular exercise, so I thought I was doing a good job.

One thing that I accidentally stumbled upon when doing lots of swings was what happened if I halted my turn before I felt any tension. When I started to do the swings that way, it felt like my body started to relax. It’s like it no longer had to protect itself from the tug or pull that it knew was coming. Since it didn’t need to tighten to protect itself, it started to loosen and relax at a much faster rate!

This was funny, because at the beginning I was reprimanding myself for going too easy. Thinking that I was doing such an easy version of the swing because I only wanted to reach my goal for number of reps a day. But doing those easy super relaxed swings were what caused my hips to open up the most quickly! It was suprising when I stumbled upon it.

But upon further reflection I realized that this is something that Bruce has talked about many times. I partially knew what he meant but this was a deeper experience of the power of relaxing to stretch as opposed to streching to relax! Very cool

Janak

[Anonymous]

Hey Kevin,

Hip flexibility has many dimensions. We tend to focus a lot on the lateral dimension (twisting) but there’s also the forward dimension.
In my case, the part of my legs that is very stiff is the back of my thighs. That has always made it quite difficult for me to raise my feet in the air AND keep my back straight. So for example my Tai Chi kicks never go above my knees.

But recently with the various movements of Gods and also since I’ve resumed Bagua (in particular the second and third warmups : pigeon-toed kwa pump and forward spine-stretch), I’ve had very noticeable gains in that area. It allows me to sit on the floor while keeping my back straight in a much more relaxed way. And my Tai Chi kicks are slowly getting higher

Cheers,

Erwan

[Anonymous]

Hi Erwan,

Thanks for sharing your experience. Its cool to hear how the different practices effect the body in different ways. Bagua has always been something in the back of my mind that Id like to learn in the future. Ive done the basic circle walking from The Great Stillness but haven’t given it as much time as my other qigong practices. Its great to know how these practices all weave and help compliment one another.

Cheers,

Kevin

[Author]

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