I’ve been doing a lot of Bagua lately, particularly just the basic postures, because that’s where the “magic” is I think. Forms are uninteresting. Repeat the same stuff, let the body change.
Anyway, upon encountering some unexpected physical, mental, and neurological effects I did a bit of searching and found a few interesting articles in my attempt to understand my new strangely addictive exercise hobby:
Not just a protective organ… - a description of what fascia can evolve into, more or less
Impacts of nerve stretching - different intensities and alpha brainwave synchronization
I could go on about this quite a bit, but I think these two contain the actual “sauce” of the Yijin Jing - which is not qi by a longshot. It is interesting to see the YJJ details timescales - they are slow, but muscle development is slow. Do all internal martial arts go to the same place? Maybe they do, but you hear taijiquan folks saying they didn’t understand something for 10 or 30 years - if that is true, I feel they may not be as efficient sometimes, but it may the fault of the approach of the student. Was there enough force and repetition? How important is paying attention to the muscles, tendons, and nerves?
Going back to the YJJ, is there any truth to messing with the bone marrow? Maybe not, but there are pictures of English longbowmen with heavily distorted skeletal structures. Maybe some practioners were bowmen, or maybe they did practice 10 hours a day or something wild, who knows. I can possibly see how a correlation/causation error could have happened there. I can buy the organ health thing though - if there is tendon development involved, they are supposed to contain a lot of nerves and transport a lot of fluids. Heavily investing in that could be a good thing, whether or not various exercises improve organ mobility (or whatever) or not.
But anyway, for me, we have a low impact exercise that can maybe increase strength by possibly 25% before accounting for muscle development, which it also helps with, because it’s heavily isometric - that’s cool! Lots of heavy things feel a lot less heavy, so we have something that works for not just “martial” applications.
The weirdest largest finding for me was that “whole body power” is something you can feel, how your arm starts to merge with your back, how you can move your hand and feel it in your leg, weird things like that. This is not the way I’m used to things feeling at all.
There’s a whole lot for me in practice about paying attention to your nerves and finding more nerves and that sometimes allowing you to work muscles better and with more force. Maybe this is how things work, I don’t know. Maybe nerve activation is important, maybe it is not.
And the whole “brain” stuff seems to cause perspective shifts more than meditation in many ways.
There are alleged meditative roots of Bagua that are often discounted, but there was allegedly an associated mantra that I think is interesting:
When Rotating in Worship of Heaven, the sound of thunder is everywhere and transforms everything.
Things are a bit hard to explain if you haven’t experienced them and some are kind of slow to unfold but they seem to keep evolving, which is really neat to watch. If anyone wants to discuss internal martial arts related stuff, I’d be quite welcome to hear from you.