Okay. For the first "level" of the exercise you stand in a bow stance with your P'eng arm forward. Your partner runs at you from about 5 feet away or so, and pushes with both hands on your arm. You must use a fa-jing shake to bounce him away. The trick is that the force cannot go straight into him as this violates Taiji principles, and you must keep you back bowed and absorb the shock and send it to the ground so that you don't fall over. The shaking of the body causes the force to scatter, and because the shake thrusts your arm forward as well, he will lift off his feet a bit and go backward a bit. It's a bit like if you have a bicycle on its side and the front wheel is spinning. If you try to push straight in, your hands go flying off to the side.

It's the same with Ji. And in the third part, both partners stand still facing each other. Both P'eng arms meet at the wrist, and the other hand strikes the forearm near the elbow. Again, the force does not go straight forward, but a little to the side. If your right P'eng is forward, the force goes in a line sort of from your left hip to his left shoulder. It's like doing Lu and Ji from the form.

The exercise is not to teach any special techniques or anything. It just teaches you to brace up, get in there and fight. It just helps to raise the Yang energy. On top of that, the contact is rather hard, and conditions the forearms. One of the difficult things is to maintain your rootedness and not fall over. If anything technique-wise is learned from them, they would teach how to barge into a fairly overwhelming attack before he hits you and strike with P'eng, Ji, or An.

After training in methods like this, the tendency becomes to just barge into an attacker's space a split second after he even moves and strike. Some people look at people doing this and say that they moved before the attacker even threw a punch, but the Classics tell us "when he makes the slightest move, you move."

So anyway, it's not bouncing or stopping "power," it's just teaching us how to get in there and fight, and whether you just shake him up or send him flying doesn't matter.