There Are No Secrets: Internal Arts Demystified

There Are No Secrets, Part I

There’s a misconception that Taijiquan and other “internal” martial arts allow frail old men and people with little muscular strength to absorb and dissolve great quantities of incoming force and generate immensely powerful strikes.

But if you’ve ever seen an internal fighter -- a fighter, mind you, not some nancy boy in silk pajamas and white aerobic slippers -- wearing just shorts and a tank top, you realize that the truly powerful internal strikers only look frail when they’re wearing a shirt and baggy trousers – clothing that masks the oak-tree thighs, massive calves and incredibly striated posterior-chain muscles running top-to-bottom of the rear of the body. And corded forearms. Western society has trained us to equate strength with bodybuilding, so we think a guy without massive shoulders and bulging pecs isn’t actually strong -- when true functional strength is found in the areas I mentioned.

Recently, someone also pointed out that one of the reasons the old-time Taiji fighters could honestly claim not to need any “hard” strength or weightlifting training was because they did grueling farm work everyday so they could have something to eat. That’s a better workout than anything you can devise in a gym. (There’s a reason Matt Hughes is pound-for-pound the strongest UFC fighter out there: when he’s not training for a fight, he runs a small, working farm.)

Or, as one teacher I met once put it: “Hah! You really think a Taiji fighter learns how to fight by doing those stupid slow forms or moving around with soft, relaxed push hands? That’s what they show YOU guys. Then they go home, shut the door, and really train.”

It’s too bad 99.9% of Taijiquan teachers and students today seem to believe that “There’s No Such Thing As a Free Lunch.” Milton Friedman could’ve set them straight.

There Are No Secrets, Part II

Xingyiquan is one of the most aggressively martial and combat-oriented of the internal arts. Taijiquan might stress dissolving and complementing your attacker's force, Baguazhang might stress flowing around it, and neither, practiced properly, lacks power. But only Xingyiquan's stated goal is "to strike once and make him vomit blood."

One of Xingyi's primary methods of achieving this is very similar to wing chun -- take the smallest possible dissolving angle, then charge straight in with strikes. And xingyi strikes generate power from a very refined method of whole-body stepping. It turns out, in the early 1900s, in the United States, there was a Xingyi master whose name is still well known to the general public today: Jack Dempsey. Check out his book about championship boxing, and in particular, his "falling step" punching method -- chapters 7 - 10. That's Xingyi. Dempsey writes about how the jab should not be a light "set up" punch -- the way most boxers today use the jab -- but a strike that can end a fight on its own merits. And, done his way -- the xingyi way -- it can.

(Note: I've written in the past that I feel wing chun is the martial art that is closest to perfect in terms of scientific, efficient combat. Well, while it's a good idea for any martial artist to see what else is out there and try other styles out, the only one that might also, in my opinion, be worth studying from a combat perspective, is xingyiquan. Same no-nonsense philosophy, but better emphasis on power generation.)

There Are No Secrets, Part III

I mentioned Baguazhang above. That's an art that has its own particular way of generating power. If Taiji power is a chain-link whip, and xingyi power is like using a fired cannonball, baguazhang power is like the coiled steel fiber cables that support suspension bridges -- the internal tendons and ligaments twisting and preloading to release tremendous coiled power. This pre-loading combat, it came to me -- and I stress that, not really being a baguazhang adept, I could be wrong -- just a pre-loading concept that Russian strength guru Pavel Tsatsouline uses to develop flexibility, taken one step further. At least, that's how it seemed to me today as I was fooling around with a xingyi/bagua power drill today.

Here's the idea. First, every time you move, one muscle contracts, and the other extends. For instance, when you curl your arm, your bicep contracts, and the tricep extends. Your tricep has an inherent resistance built in to brake your bicep muscle -- just in case.

This idea is combined with Pavel's flexibility exercise for bagua power generation. When Pavel wants to make a given muscle more flexible, he first overcomes its inherent resistance and tension -- the tension I mentioned in the tricep above. Then he stretches it. For instance, if you wanted to stretch your hamstring, you should first do a single, extremely difficult rep of a leg curl and load up your hammie. Then, in the few seconds after you release, your muscle will be able to extend further than normal, since your nervous system is temporarily offline a little. (Through constant practice, you thus reprogram your nervous system into accepting this higher degree of possible extension and become more flexible.)

So a baguazhang guy simply loads an opposing muscle (like Pavel does) so that it can relax even more than normal. The opposing muscle can therefore generate more power with less resistance. Simplistically speaking, if you have a strike that depends on tricep contraction, you would preflex the bicep so that when it comes time to release, the bicep can offer less resistance to the power of the tricep. What baguazhang fighters learn to do is to preload and relax entire chains of muscles -- instantly, at will, without actually moving -- before releasing a strike. The adept ones do it so quickly and unconsciously that there's no time lag, yet the power amplification is still there.

So there you have it. There are no secrets to power. Not even among the ancient masters.