THE METAMORPHOSIS OF HUEN SAU.

I thought “If I had only known this from the beginning it could have saved me years”.

Back in the day when I first began working on the Biu Gee Form it was Huen Sau that turned the light on.

It was Huen Sau that helped me realise that the three individual Forms, Sil Lim Tao, Chum Kiu, and Biu Gee were in fact just sections of the ONE FORM.

I thought “If I had only known this from the beginning it could have saved me years”.

Huen Sau was the first structure that I recognised moving through the Forms, ever-changing but always the same.

In S.L.T. we are stationary, in Chum Kiu we are shifting, in Biu Gee we are rotating/pivoting, and in the Baat Cham Dao, we combine all three aspects into one smooth functional action/movement.

It really was a ‘lightbulb moment’.

When we first encounter Huen Sau it is just the flexion of the wrist keeping the hand flat as it was at the end of Taan Sau and then a 90-degree rotation of the Radius/Ulna, we point to the ceiling, then point to the floor, so simple.

The ‘Ah Ha’ moment for me in Biu Gee was understanding what the fingers were doing, maybe I had been told before and simply missed it, but none of my training partners was aware of it either.

When I told my Sifu he said yes he told me before, then he laughed and said that he had missed it as well in his training.

I think that the main thing to stay aware of is the feeling in the fingers, they should be alive but not tense, just like when pointing at something, we can feel the tendons full of vigour but the finger is not tensed to the point of bending, in fact, if the hand is cupping in any way at all even minimally, or the fingers are bending this is incorrect.

The upper arm remains in its position parallel to our ribcage and is not directly involved in this action, the rotation of the forearm is only the forearm, the Radius crosses over the Ulna, if there is no unneeded tension the Elbow will flex naturally as the Hand rotates.

This is pretty much how we would pick up a dropped pen from the floor.

I have said many times that “what the arms, hands, wrists, and fingers do in the S.L.T. First Form is the same as they do in the Chum Kiu and Biu Gee, for me, the action of Huen Sau really brought this home.

CHECK IT OUT.

WHEN YOU UNDERSTAND, THINGS ARE JUST THE WAY THEY ARE. WHEN YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND, THINGS ARE JUST THE WAY THEY ARE.

ZEN MAXIM.