Internal striking

When it turns to "internal" striking, as opposed to "external" striking people get very silly. Give some people the opportunity to double-back flip and somersault at the Masters touch and they'll take it. Which is why it's difficult to talk about "internal striking" without images of these gullible fools springing to mind, but I'm going to try to do it anyway. It's also worth remembering that all of what follows matters not if your aim is to simply knock out a drunken attacker outside the pub on a Friday night. Just hit him. Hard. So, with that caveat in mind let's venture further down this narrow, but very interesting, avenue....

Image via Wikipedia

The first thing to remember when talking about internal striking methods is the old addage "you can't use Li, you can't not use Li".

Li is a Chinese word that means something close to "physical strength".

The less Li that you use (i.e. raw physical strength) the more "internal power" (Jin) you can deliver into the strike. From my understanding you need to have "built up" enough Jin in the body first to be able to have something to deliver into your strikes once you're not delivering just raw physical strength, but the old saying is pointing out that you still need to have some Li in what you are doing - with the "internal arts" it's internal and external in harmony, not internal without external. It's this harmony that is required to deliver an internal strike, not just internal on its own - in which canse there would be no movement at all!

Once you've got a feel for how this works you canstart to play with the admixture of Jin and Li, reducing the amount of Li untli you get a more and more "internal" strike where what appears to be a very small movement can have a relatively large effect on the opponent. The practical applications of this should be clear - the smaller the movement, the less committed it needs to be. This is the real advantage of learning an "internal" strike - it's not that its more powerful than a normal strike, but that its less committed, which means you can apply it in ways that wouldn't be possible before.

Just for fun (because this is going beyond what is necessary for usage) you can play about refining and refining this admixture of Jin and Li to produce results that can be surprising. I have done a small amount of training in this area myself. A tiny amount. If you watch the video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-C0yw_8fidM you can see me doing a bottle break at the end. From a seemingly light palm strike, the bottom of bottle blows out. Unfortunately whenever you break anything these days you illicit responses of "fake", "circus tricks" and the like in the same way that yobs make Bruce Lee noises at people trying to practice Tai Chi in a park, except that in this case the cat calling is usually by other martial artists who somehow feel threatened by people doing what they presumably can't. Yes, it's done "for show" (it's in a demo done for charity!) and bottles don't hit back, but there's actually something very subtle being displayed - a relatively light palm slap can blow the bottom out of the bottle - how is that possible? (Note, unlike all the videos of how to do it on the Internet [by filling bottle with water and banging hard on the top to use air pressure] , our bottles are filled with water and we've put the tops back on, so it's not air pressure - the exact physics of how it works are a mystery to me, but it's a great tool for working out the correct feeling of it working, and gives you reliable, repeatable, consistent feedback, unlike humans - who all react differently when hit).

It's done by removing physical effort and focussing on increasing the 'quality' of the power used- putting your Yi into the equation, reducing the % of external (Li) and increasing the % of internal (jin).

Tackling a bottle with the top on, you can't use air pressure in the same way. If you're a real tough guy you can just hit the bottle really hard and the whole thing will shatter, but you can break bones in your hand doing that, and also cut yourself - at the least you'll badly bruise your hand. In contrast what we're looking for here is no damage to the hand, and the bottom of the bottle blown cleanly out - no cracks down the side. Notice that in the video I linked to the whole bottle shatters - he's using air pressure and physical strength - Li. Cracks down the side indicate too much "li" in your strike - you need to pull it back a bit in the mix until you can get it just right.

The way I'm doing it in my video is not amazingly good either - I'm on the right, my arm takes a big looping circle - if I practice more I should be able to make that circle smaller so that it looks like you just hold your hand over the bottle then drop it, so it only travels a few inches. More like my friend is doing it, except he's maybe being a little bit more 'physical' than me. Doing it in front of an audience I wanted to do it in a way I knew would work first time, rather than making it even more difficult for myself. It took a lot of practice to build up to the point where I felt confident I could make it work each time - like everything in internal martial arts, it's a feeling. If you want to reproduce that feeling consistently you have to practice it a hell of a lot. Of course, with limited training time it was quickly apparent to me that if I spent all my time training that and getting better at it then all the rest of my training suffered. Having to do it in a demo was quite a good motivator for getting good at it, but after the demo I stopped focussing in that area. I imagine that somebody who has all the time in the world to focuss in that area could end up achieving something very special, maybe even hitting people with tremendous force with what looks like a light tap of the fingers...