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LINEAGE
The Rose Li School
has its lineage from
one of the greatest
boxers China has
produced.
Read more.
Private tuition
Open access
LINEAGE
The Rose Li School
has its lineage from
one of the greatest
boxers China has
produced.
Read more.
This Manual 1 costs £25 and is available for download here.
We all comprehend knowledge at a particular moment in time through the filter of our own understanding and experience, so I therefore do not rely on the ‘it must be so because Rose Li told me so’ method of exposition. What follows is neither arcane nor mysterious, rather I use the means by which Miss Li taught me: cold logic and factual knowledge. Fundamental to the system taught within the Rose Li School is the notion of ‘releasing strength’. Other schools utilise the transliterations fa jin, fajin, fa chin or fa jìn, to describe this discharge of power. It’s the aim of this manual to explain the workings behind ‘releasing strength’ as taught within the School. Practice of this method of striking will allow you to strike optimally and with full power at a minimal distance from the target.
A note should be made regarding the title of this manual. There are no secrets in Nei Jia; the principles that underlie Nei Jia are simply common sense. However, if you don’t know or understand these principles then they are secret to you. One of the reasons our School is labelled Internal is that ‘outsiders’ cannot see what we’re actually doing; the essence of the Art is hidden. This manual goes someway in shedding light upon these hidden mechanisms.
The Nei Jia system taught within the Rose Li School has three defining characteristics:
• Reverse breathing
• Stretching ‘five ends’
• Spiral motion
How is reverse breathing so fundamental to the mechanism of ‘releasing strength’ and how is the lower Tan T’ien used within this mechanism? I’ll explain this by looking at the aspects of striking both outside and within the School. There’s a common saying in martial arts that strength is derived from the ground, is directed by the waist and is applied by the fist. Let’s use an example of a classic karate right punch to examine what this means. See the figure below: this is an example of a parallel or lunge punch (Oi Zuki).
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So the mechanism of this punch is:
• From a ready stance position, the body moves forward into a front stance, where the left leg is driven forcefully into the ground. The heels are flat at all times onto the floor. The right fist will be punching and the right foot is forward.
• The hips are thrust forward in line – square on. The body remains level, the upper body isn’t leaned forward. The weight is distributed approximately 70:30 with the majority of weight on the right front foot. The angle of the front (right) shin with respect to the ground is approximately ninety degrees.
• As the right ‘attacking’ foot begins to touch the floor, the right ‘attacking’ fist is strongly thrust forward. The elbow is kept close to the body and brushes alongside when going forward. The hips are rotated rapidly so that the right fist is thrust forward whilst the left fist pulls back to the waist. Newton’s Third Law (every action has an equal and opposite reaction) is utilised in order that the push into the ground by the rear right foot is transmitted into the striking hand. The rear foot must be turned in approximately forty-five degrees to with respect to the front to optimise the efficiency of the push.
• The rotation of the hips adds rotational energy to the strike. The emphasis here being placed upon the pulling back of the non-striking arm, so adding to the rotational energy of the hips. The moment (in physics, the moment of force is a quantity that represents the magnitude of force applied to a rotational system at a distance from the axis of rotation) generated by this movement is the most efficient when the striking arms are parallel. It’s this optimisation of moment that defines the characteristic parallel movement of the arms.
• As the ‘attacking’ arm nears full extension, the fist is rotated inward into the final position with the back of the fist upward. Body, breath and intention are all coordinated – the breath being forcefully expulsed by a contraction of the lower Tan T’ien.
Nei Jia utilises similar physics to the above type of strike but in a completely different way.
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