Xinyi standing posts

[lloyd]

Has anyone heard of standing posts in Xinyi Liuhe/Ten Animal/Muslim Xingyi.
I have talked to several people who practice Xinyi but very few have heard of them.
I know a guy who saw a man training Xinyi Liuhe in a park in China and the man told him about them. They are supposeed to be trained the same way as Dun Hou Shi in Dai Shi Xinyi: three years of standing and two years of walking.
Maybe I heard it wrong?

Thanks!

[Kevin Wallbridge]

In the Xinyi taught by Yu Hualong of Shanghai (Lu Song'gao's student) there are no formal standing exercises as far as I know. Postures of the style may be held to build power, but this is not usually done like one might hold santisi, for example. The posture may be held for just a few breaths before moving on. Emphasis in the style is weighted heavily towards the ability to change energy very quickly, and so the training method reflects this.

"The heart of the study of boxing is to have natural instinct resemble the dragon" Wang Xiangzai

[lloyd]

Do you think that training different postures the same way as santishi would be against the nature of the style?

[Kevin Wallbridge]

Well I asked my teacher last night about post training in Xinyi and he said that there is a practice called the three posts.

The first is the posture Bear-Leaves-the-Cave, the basic starting posture of the style. Its much more contained than Santisi, with almost all of the weight on the back leg and the front toes lifted. The front shoulder turns foward and the front hand hangs low to guard the groin. The back hand is held loosely in front of the heart.

The second posture is Dragon-Body-in-a-Running-Step. The third posture is Eagle-Seizes, which is the closest to Santisi in appearance.

While these are a part of the style they are definitely secondary to the training of individual animal drills or the Ten-Big-Fists. In Xinyi the emphasis is on swinging the structure through the opponent and rapid change. As post training is good structure work I wouldn't say it was counter to the nature of the style, however, it isn't a core aspect of training.

"The heart of the study of boxing is to have natural instinct resemble the dragon" Wang Xiangzai

[lloyd]

Thanks!
I think I saw these three posts in Joe Crandall's translation of Pei Qirong's "Henan Orthodox Xingyi Quan". There the Eagle-Seizes posture is there called Santishi. The postures are only quite briefly described. Later in the book it is said that Eagle-Seizes is like a small Santishi.
So probably Xinyi doesn't incorporate post standing the way it is done in Yi-quan, where beginners start with them. One Jarek's article about Che style Xingyi said something like too much standing can be bad for health, because one can lose good structure and so in Che style they don't do much of it.

[stephenchan]

lloyd:
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>
So probably Xinyi doesn't incorporate post standing the way it is done in Yi-quan, where beginners start with them. One Jarek's article about Che style Xingyi said something like too much standing can be bad for health, because one can lose good structure and so in Che style they don't do much of it.
[/quote]

Li TaiLiang studied Dai Family Xinyi, as well as Che family Xingyi and he showed us some standing drills (I don't know if they were Che or Dai family). Dun hou shi is meant to train shu/zhan (shrinking/extension) of the body using dan tien power. The standing postures that he showed us that struck me as interesting were monkey posture and tiger posture. You can think of them as extreme shu and extreme zhan - they basically setup the proper posture at each endpoint of a shu/zhan cycle.

After learning these postures, it occurred to me that the Yi Quan postures, "riding the tiger" and the dragon posture could be used for the same purpose.

--
Stephen Chan

[lloyd]

One of the reasons why I brought the subject up was that I heard about a Xinyi tape made in Japan (featuring Feng Zhengbao) and it is supposed to contain standing too. I haven't seen the tape, but it seems like it's surely isn't a key issue there.

I was wrong, by the way, saying that Eagle Seizes was called Santishi. It was called Eagle post and it is supposed to be done like Santishi, but the position of the hands was not specified.

In the book the names are Bear, Chicken and Eagle. There is no sequence of practice in the book, but I think there must be a certain sequence for practicing them.

AFAIK Dun Hou Shi comes from Dai Shi Xinyi and it is not practiced in Che style. I have no personal experience with these styles and all my information comes from reading.