Appledog wrote:
Anyways, I like your observations about silk reeling. It seems as if CXW, Feng, and a number of others have created silk reeling exercises, despite it being well-known that you don't really need to do them. I would ask, why don't you really need to do them, and if so, why then are they taught? Why the need to isolate it and create this framework of "silk reeling sets" or set exercises for it?
Second, there has been a running theme recently among several posters where people say that if a movement does not have a direct martial effect, or is not done in a "neigong" way, it is not useful. So I like what you said about tweaking for potency. What reasons could there be for practicing a move or a technique isolated from a more "resistive" situation? Also, what exactly are, if any, the martial applications of silk reeling? I can think of quite a few, such as monk ropes a tiger.
I could tackle this from a number of angles, but I'll just pick the simplest and most obvious. Don't know about what anybody else may have said about anything, this is my synthesis. I don't study Chen and my understanding of their silk reeling is rudimentary at best. This is my looking at it from my particular perspective, mainly Yang and Xingyi.
In strength training there is this concept of "Isolate then integrate". Individual exercises like bicep curls target specific very limited muscle groups to reach target strength or stability goals, and then train those developed muscles to work together.
For the sake of THIS DISCUSSION, let's shorthand that as an "external" approach, not to become baggage that is carried over into other discussions, just putting a tag on it noting one quality of this practice.
These sort of exercises are the same concept, but carried into movement first, and then strength.
Instead of isolating one body part, we are isolating one movement, one circle, one plane at a time, using the whole body, or at least a larger piece of it.
Once we have gotten an actual intellectual understanding of the circles and planes, burned in the neurology that operates it, and have conditioned the (initially very weak and overlooked) specific musculature that supports and motivates it, you can start playing with it and deriving the free circle and spirals.
If you just start imitating the outer shape of the movement without building the specific inner conditioning, you're not yet doing "it".
So instead of a spirograph or tank tread, you've got scribbles and a shopping cart with a wobbly wheel.
So if you have strengthened the inner connections and have internalized the paradigms of movement and sensation, THEN you can start having folks challenge that movement.
Everybody wants to jump ahead though, myself included.
I could get as deep as you like on the topic.