william chen in inside kung fu

[Ma_Xu_Zha]

did anyone read the article on breathing compression by william cc chen in the magazine? it was actually very good with alot of insightfulness.

ma

[TaiChiBob]

Greetings..

A good read.. and, his students are excellent examples.. by all accounting a superior teacher..

The compression explanation fits precisely what i have been trying to explain to my own students..

Be well..

[Empty Fist]

He also has an interesting article on his three nails theory. Check out his website. I've also attended one of his seminars. Well worth the time and bucks. What's amazing is that Master Chen is very humble person (and has a great sense of humor) despite the fact he is a living legend.

[wckf]

I came away confused after reading the article. Could someone here explain the breathing for combat part.

If I understand the article correctly, was Master Chen saying that
while regular breathing used in tcc will produce relaxation and chi flow it can not be used in fighting.

For fighting, he advocates compression breathing, is this not breathing when striking and fighting.

What are some training excerises for compression breathing ?

Thanks in advance

[Muppet]

Well, compression breathing requires a bit of explanation.

Regular breathing is how you're breathing now.

And unless William Chen is talking about something completely different, compression breathing is basically reverse breathing.

This is sometimes called "pulling chi from the air".

Start from a comfortable zhang zhuan standing position, and make sure you're standing correctly. The spine needs to be complete straight so that your lower back muscles are NOT contracting.

From here, what you're basically doing is sucking in your stomach muscle while inhaling air through your nose.

While sucking in the stomach, you're basically trying to force
the air to go DOWN below the crunch point. Do it wrong, and the air will go up and you will feel pressure in the chest.

When you start getting a handle on it, you'll notice that this air
will sort feel like a ball, with all of the air gathered at around
the dan tien level. If you don't have much body fat, you may even
see the rounded shape.

You probably want to haved stretched out your torso every which
way before you start this, and you don't want your abs to be tight
or else it's hard to suck in.

That's pretty much it. At first you want to take it easy and just
experiment and until you have enough motor control to make the air into a ball. Once the ball can get firm, it should be strong enough to offer all the support you need so that your lower back muscles don't NEED to contract in order for you to maintain structure at (you should feel pressure in your kidney areas).

Anyway, over the months, you slowly (and cautiously! You don't
want to damage your organs.) work your way to breathing in more and more and making the ball stronger and stronger.

And in tandem, there are chi kung exercises which work off of this reverse breathing and enhances and strengthens via various body contortions (bending over, bending backwards, turning the body sideways) and there are more martially-minded
exercises which work off of this breathing to train basic power issuing.

But imho, until you get this breathing right (and it takes practice), the rest is pointless.

Now the puzzling part: According to my instructor, this is an important but basic level of accomplishment.

He says that if you keep practicing, you'll get to a point where this sort of deliberate breathing is unnecessary. What I'm not sure about is whether he meant this eventually becomes an automated reflex with enough practice, or if the reverse breathing is a training exercise which can eventually be discarded.