Yiquan Pushing Hands

Yao's Yiquan Pushing Hands (Part1)
Boost your martial skills and get prepared for combat.

This article gives further insights on Yiquan Pushing Hands, one of the best ways to improve and check your martial skills and especially without hurting anyone: in traditional martial arts circle Pushing Hands were always considered as a "polite" way to express one'skills when reaching a high level. If you are serious in getting effective results in your Yiquan training, this article will help you to walk through major issues of Yiquan Pushing Hands but essentially understand its major modes of training.

It is currently well known that Yiquan has suppressed the system of "taolu" or predetermined sequence of movement to help the student to focus more on the mental aspect during his training. However, Yiquan system has still inherited from the traditional Chinese martial Arts, the pushing Hands training, called "tuishou" the major significant chain to the fighting stage called "Duanshou". Yiquan Pushing Hands or "Tuishou" is often underestimated by a practitioner willing to run fast in combat preparation. In fact, traditionally and this can be retrieved in any serious method of Yiquan such as for Yao Chengguang method, the training of P.H.takes all its importance just after achieving some mastery in the following categories of Yiquan exercises: - Post standing or zhan zhuang, - Testing force or shili, - Issuing force or Fajing, - Steps. All these previous categories bringing to the practitioner its specific ability(ies), let's see further: - zhan zhuang: in static mode, cultivating universal force in the whole body and contradictive forces, rooting ability... - shili: same as zhan zhuang but with larger dimensions and with step. - fajing: enhancing previous abilities to exteriorize them up to actual combat speed and power. - step: increase balance stability, weight transfer management for optimal universal power... From these abilities progressively acquired in training, the trainer needs at a certain stage to take them up to another decisive level: this is when Pushing Hands exercise, as a dual partner training, takes all its importance, bringing higher constraints to a practitioner previously training mostly alone by: - increasing physical resistance to his movements, - integrating another dynamics to overall movements due to this interference between two physical independent bodies for timing, distance management in conditions closer to real combat, - developing further abilities sensing with defined "touching" zones of the bodies... Training Yiquan Pushing Hands: Generally, you can find two major categories of Yiquan Pushing Hands exercises: - Single Hand P.H.category which can be divided in P.H. with fixed step and P.H. with step - Both Hands P.H. category which can be divided in P.H. with fixed step and P.H. with step Yiquan Pushing Hands - Single hand category: The importance of Single Hand P.H. is rarely well perceived by most practitioners, apparently simplistic and wrongly considered unrealistic to stimulate a combat in any kind, this general perception is mostly due to the ignorance of real abilities involved during this exercise. Most of all it is a synthetic testing exercise of all internal skills you've been training since your first Zhan zhuang standing. You'll start your training in Single Hand P.H mostly always from your posture of Yiquan Universal Combat Post. Then according to your teacher or training program: you pass through the previous major types of Yiquan exercises (Post, shili, fajing, step) but with the constraint of facing one opponent or at least an opposing power/pressrue on your body but also executing the circling exchange which is basically the way to integrate these major types of exercises while alternating the attack from both opponents. Yao Chengguang did a remarkable and generous effort to reveal clear insights of Yiquan Pushing Hands, making a sense for all the martial abilities acquired previously in a single exercise and leading one significant step closer to real Combat. More...