EFFORTLESS POWER.

The closest we come to controlling any action our body makes is in formulating the intention.

More old man stuff.

Concepts are abstract thoughts, as such they can, and do, mean very different things to different people, everything depends on how well we can navigate abstract thoughts.

The crux of this problem lies with intention.

If, for instance, I ask someone to move a knee, in general terms most people will move their hip to raise their leg so that their knee moves, and they believe that they have a measure of success in the objective.

But I did not ask them to move their hip, I asked them to move their knee.

Biomechanically it is not possible to move our knee without moving the hip so that can confuse people that are not very mentally adroit.

I am pretty sure that if we had a sensitive enough scanner we would find that we do in fact move everything when we try to move just our knee, so how do we understand this.

There exists a fundamental difference between what we think we are doing, about to do or have already done from what our Brain instructed our body to do.

We begin with a thought, in this case raise our knee, this becomes an intention which our brain turns into a chemical signal that instructs a myriad of body systems to do individual, unconnected actions that culminate in the raising off the knee.

The closest we come to controlling any action our body makes is  in formulating the intention.

Everything after that is not us, it is not under our control, it is as if we are governed by an outside operator, which is what our nervous system is.

I have experienced students that get embarrassed ,even angry, at the idea that they are not in control of their own bodies, which in no way helps them to understand the complexity of even the most simple actions.

If we can reach a level of acceptance that we are not in control it becomes clear that the best we can do is to send accurate thoughts to our brain and hope it does what we want.

If I am vague and my intention is to finish with a raised knee my Brain – Nervous System – Body team will do what ever gets the job done, and it may be done in a different way every time.

Raising my knee requires that I also understand what I do not want to do, like rotate my hip, or lift my foot, both of these actions will raise my knee.

This is truly weird stuff at first, but once we get it we see that it is not weird, or difficult or anything except being mentally deliberate and thinking clearly.

We all experience situations that frustrate us in training, we may even get a bit precious, but out of nowhere we do the thing as asked, almost without thinking and then we cannot understand how we did not see it in the first place.

This has happened to me many times and not just in Wing Chun, do not get me started about Golf.

If we stick with moving the knee, it is not enough for me to think about just moving the knee, I must actively be involved in bringing in other actions, my Brain – Nervous System – Body team take care of that even if I do not want them to.

Mentally paint a green dot on your knee and in your intention only move that.

Some things move, and some things get moved, understand which is which.

A final observation that I frequently remind you guys of is that what we do in training is only of any use at all in training, this is another somewhat abstract thought.

We all know that if we get in trouble we will do something inspired or influenced buy our training, because we will never be in the exact same place doing the exact same thing.

What we do out in the wild will be different.

In the same vein as “How long is a piece of string”?

How different does an action need to be before it becomes a different action?

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

The vision in the following video came from 2 separate training instances, There was so much more than what I have shown, so much great stuff but length wise the video would have done Scorcesi proud.

If we work on this stuff it will give us everything we need, and do it in just a couple of years not some decade down the road.

Courage, above all things, is the first quality of a warrior.