cool. looking forward to meeting in person.

I'd suggest that it's all about the spinning hands. It is a way of understanding the point of contact and how to keep it while it changes.
If you can keep the point then it's very difficult to be pushed/pulled, hit or kicked. Also when you're trying to bridge the gap, you mirror, which is in a sense spinning without contact.

Could you explain a little more about what you mean by bridging & mirroring? You're basically describing the moments just prior to establishing physical contact with the opponent/partner?

Peter

Hi Peter,

Yes. Master Sam has said that in effect you are already in contact and looking for the center of mass. So that when you land you immediately capture their center of mass.

Mirroring and bridging are terms used to describe strategy to unify yourself with your opponent.
Prior to the physical point of contact if you follow your opponent's movements in a mirror image it helps you to recognize your opponent's posture and usually leads to an opportunity to make physical contact while in the meantime you syncronise with their movements setting up the potential to take control.
Once you have a sense of your opponent's posture and limits etc. bridging is the process of closing the gap in order to make physical contact, at which point the objective is to control your opponent. There is a little bit on the subject in the System guide pg 21.
Shadow boxing is a form of mirroring but solo. It's very good for checking your own posture and structure. I've got a favorite park I go to to train at sun rise and use the first shadows against a wall to train postures. It gets a bit obsessive (:p) but with the lines in the brick work you can get a very good idea of your vertical and horizontal structure, limits of movement etc. I've found it is very good for checking yoga asanas as well.

Train well and best of the Season and regards to everyone on the Forum.
Chris

Ashe has posted some nice training clips on YouTube, and today I was inspired by a couple of his clips which explained how to combine spinning hands with stepping as partner exercises. For example, combining Bagua stepping with the 5th cycle of spinning, or combining side-stepping with the third and fourth spinning cycles.

Tonight we had our final class for the year, and I thought I'd like to try out some of the examples demoed by Ashe in the videos. The partner exercises which combined stepping and spinning actually worked out very well, and everybody was enthusiastic about the exercises and highly motivated to train the different combinations.

Thanks Ashe, for the inspiration!

Peter

well just keep in mind that i just barely started training moving step spinning hands so that video will probably date ut'self quite quickly. (i'm student level 5 training for 6)

We did 2 hours of spinning last night, and I'm pretty exhausted today. Having a variety of spinning partners seems pretty important, since each person has a different energy and seems to attack different weaknesses in one's own structure and technique.

On a side note, it's winter here in Vienna, and the training room can be rather chilly. By the middle of training, the guys were saying "turn off the heating!" and I noticed that all the mirrors had fogged up. That's never happened before.

We alternated the spinning with sticky hands training in order to have an occasional breather from the rigors of spinning hands.

Peter

that's what its like in the Sifus basement during the intensives.

getting close now! :clapping:

That's great Peter. Sounds like you are putting in the effort, good work:clapping:

When Franky (sikung's brother)came over here the first time, he got us to spin for an hour before training anything else. That style of training lasted a month and we trained 3/4 times a week. There is something in high reps that seem to help awareness and relax the shoulders, they get too sore to hold on to;)