Twisting vs simply turning

[Anonymous]

Hi All,

I’m trying to get what Twisting is. Trying to get what it feels to do it. And trying to get at it from different angles.

One idea I got from watching Bruce demonstrate his arms twisting in DVD 4 of the XingYi set, I got the impression that Twisting is to simply turning what Mud Walking is to normal walking.

Another way of putting this would be the following : in turning, only the agonist muscles activate (those muscles that case the movement to happen), whereas in Twisting, both agonists and antagonists to the movement activate simultaneously in a soft manner, creating a bit of inner resistance that makes the movement more purposeful.

Third : It all seems linked to a feeling I initially got quite strongly while doing Cloud Hands : it seems like the part of the body that Twists starts acting like a sort of dynamo, generating some sort of magnetic field. Of course there needs to be several muscles activating simultaneously and rotating around a same axis for this effect to happen. If I simply turn (as defined in point 1), the “dynamo effect” doesn’t seem to kick in. When many parts of the body are Twisting at the same time, the “Dynamo effect” starts feeling quite huge, as if I was turning into one big power generator. It even gets to the point in Cloud Hands when tere is too much to handle and I have to shift to doing the moves in a sort of very gentle passive way (I call it “Yin Cloud Hands”) in order to smooth out and absorb all that’s been generated…

Any thoughts on all of the above ? Are those the sensations of Twisting (or am I doing something else) ? Am I going in the right direction ?

Erwan

[Anonymous]

For anyone interested in this topic, Dan Kleiman gave me a very nice answer in the QiGong section of the forum, as part of a reply to the topic Hands Position During Standing Dissolving (http://www.energyarts.com/forum/hands-position-during-standing-dissolving).
Thanks to him again for that piece of knowledge.

[Author]

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