INTERNAL ENERGY - Issues and REALITY
There has long been a confusion/misunderstanding about what internal energy is. There are lots of mystical claims out there and I am not going to waste your time repeating them. However if you look, you can also see that there are some people out there who can generate what appears to be an amazing force considering the fact that they seem to need extremely little effort to do so.
Now I am going to tell you that indeed the ability to generate such force is real - you can do so with very little physical effort - but I am also going to tell you that the claims of mysticism and chi are just plain nonsense – people believe this claims mostly because most people do not understand the way that real body mechanics work to generate such force.
Part of the problem is that the mechanism is a bit complicated to learn – actually more so than normal muscle use, so most people do not catch on to it as naturally as they use their external muscles. Therefore explanations – probably by people who also do not have a good understanding of physiology have used terms that were available, even if they could not be proven.
Add that confusion to the effects, which can be quite impressive, and it is no wonder that practitioners, who have practiced these techniques can make grandiose claims that do seem to be mystical.
Then, of course, there is the money ... MANY people make money off of selling mystical claims to people who are looking for either answers or shortcuts ... if they can teach you to do a trick and call it something mystical ... and especially if you do not understand the mechanisms of how you got it to work ... you will be a prime candidate to buy another trick ... and another and so on ...
However, as I said, there really is nothing mystical about internal energy – despite the claims by those who want to make the explanations complicated and mystical for their own personal reasons. By the way, I encourage you to check up on the anatomy and explanations I show so you can see the reality in what I say.
So as not to make this complicated I am also going to cut to the chase and tell you that the REAL secret of internal energy is actually the use of muscles that we rarely used, and then only slightly by the average person ... to generate force outside of our abdominal cavity. The trick is learning how to use the right muscles - in the right sequence and making them strong enough that they do their job easily.
WHY this works is simple to say but somewhat harder to understand and I will do my best here ... the real reason comes down to efficiency ... what this means is that when you use the right muscles you can actually stabilize your pelvis so that the other muscles you use are dramatically more efficient ...
Let’s take a different analogy to try and make it clearer ... if you kick when you are in mid-air you have some force ...but definitely not as much as if your other leg is braced correctly on the ground .... and in fact it is pretty obvious that the correct posture of your bracing leg makes a huge difference in the ability to brace the other kicking leg ...
in both of these cases it is not the kicking leg that you really changed but instead the stabilizer that allowed the kick to become dramatically more efficient.
Let me put this another way which may help explain what I am trying to say. We have all been told that to lift heavy objects we need to keep our back straight and use our legs. Well, a while back I saw an inventor who had created a device that hooked onto your waist like a belt but with a back support that kept your body in perfect alignment and made you use your legs, internal abdominal and lower back muscles to lift, not your arms. With this device on people could easily lift 200, 300 and even 400 pounds without much effort because they did not use their hands at all except to stabilize the object they were lifting.
Now lifting that much weight easily seems pretty amazing. Yet it was easily understandable to people watching because it was a device. No one thought it was mystical; they understood that the device was not generating the force, it was simply keeping you in the correct position so that you could generate that much force. Yet we are doing the same thing with internal energy. We are using perfect posture.
In fact done correctly, we are doing that device one better because we are actually improving our posture because we are adjusting our posture by sitting down slightly and rotating our hips to focus on the absolute center of our body’s gravity and internal muscles. Think about the top part of the pelvis – when the top part is “in front of” the femur, you have rotated the pelvis forward – when you “tuck your butt in,” you have rotated the pelvis backward. It’s the correct amount of backward rotation that brings the center of the body into line with its true center of gravity, which then makes generating force easier.
Thus it is no wonder that people who have learned this can generate what appears to be amazing force. Yet as you should be able to see, it is not amazing at all, it is just excellent body mechanics and the use of internal muscles.
Internal energy is pretty much the same thing ... you stabilize your internal abdominal muscles and you move in such a way that exploits the strength of these muscles and your other movements (pushes, kicks, whatever) become dramatically more efficient ... and suddenly you send the opponent flying ...
Magic? Of course not ...but that is because you understand. But if I had taught you a secret move and twist that you had to do before you kicked or hit that put you into the same position ... and then you saw the dramatic increase in force you very well would believe pretty much any claim I made that also showed the same increases ...
Yet once you understand you do not really need me or any mystical input anymore ... all you need is understanding and practice ...
Now the rub is how do you learn to do this?
Well the trick is that you need to relax your external muscles. Tip your pelvis in the most efficient angle and then use your internal muscles and your center of gravity rather than your external muscles (meaning outer body muscles like the muscles of the arms and upper back) to produce the force.
The other trick is that these internal muscles HAVE to be tightened BEFORE they are used as a base (stabilizer) for the other muscles -- if you do it the other way around you dramatically decrease the efficiency ... [yes you get some increase but definitely not as much]
please re-read that
So unfortunately for Mister 6 pack abdomen -- unless he has the internal muscles to go with that 6 pack which will stabilize the LOWER abdomen muscles giving his upper abdomen muscles something to work off of, his fancy stomach muscles may look good on the Movie screen but they really do little or nothing to generate force in real life ...
So again, reality is that it is nothing more than the muscles you are using, but as they are different than the muscles we normally use to generate force, some principles come into play here:
First off the first group of muscles that you are going to be using to properly align the hip are called the iliacus and psoas major muscles frequently known as the iliopsoas group.
yeah yeah yeah .,.. long medical names ... you can look them up or here is a small picture.
What I am talking about are the long muscles that go from the lower vertebrae (lumbar vertebrae) to the hip and some even through the hip to the inner part of the thigh ... when these muscles are tightened your pelvis becomes almost rigid so that it is a VERY strong base for other muscles to push off of.
What you need to do is to use these muscles to rotate the hip backwards so that your center of gravity aligns with the real center of mass of your pelvis – ok, it is hard to know exactly how much forward or backward rotation is best and of course there are different opinions on how to position yourself in that position .
Now I will tell you that while that may seem like both a simple statement and obvious there are major disputes between whole styles of martial arts over just this part of the question ... and I am not aware of any scientific study that show what exact angle is best nor exactly how to get there ... but I personally think that it is even more complicated as I believe that angle varies based on your other physical attributes (and sex of course) ...[more on this in a bit]
I personally rotate the front part of the pelvis somewhat mildly upward and posterior ...how much? ... the truth is that I do so to the point where it feels right ... and I know that is not a good answer but this where practice and experience come in .. you literally have to practice not only getting into this position you also have to practice pushing (and or kicking) from this position to get it right.
There is also very significant debate on how much and how to achieve posterior rotation with some styles going so far as to have the coccyx rotated up and forward as much as possible. Personally I choose a point just behind the middle point (in the rotation) but do not have scientific research to prove this is the best angle. This is just what feels the best to me personally.
ONCE you have the correct angle then you drop your weight down about 1/2 to 1 inch (AGAIN opinions on how much varies and there is a difference between the amount needed by males and the amount needed by females) and then use your pelvis and lower back muscles and your ENTIRE body mass to generate force rather than just your arm, shoulder and chest muscles.
PLEASE NOTE: When I talk about rotation I mean a three-dimensional rotation, meaning up and down, not just right to left.
Again most of these reasons are explained by mystical terms and concepts - in many styles - but mysticism has nothing to do with it. You are just making your muscles work in a more efficient way and then using your entire body mass as a force multiplier.
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Unfortunately learning how to do this correctly is not instinctive because people do not walk around with their hips in the proper angle to generate force, nor do they lift or push correctly. We all learn the wrong angle to use and learn to use external muscles rather than internal muscles to generate force as we grow up. People actually learn (as a child) to tip the pelvis forward to start moving by generating a slight falling motion and we wind up using this inefficient angle throughout our life. This, unfortunately, is the position that most people walk in, which can be seen both by how hard they step down, their bouncing gait and also by their relatively poor balance as they are walking.
Over our lifetimes we get considerable practice using this inefficient method of walking and generating force inefficiently to the point that most people never realize how wrong it is. So they go through life using forward pelvic tilt and external muscles to do everything.
NOTE: if you walked like you were walking on ice your whole life you would have dramatically better balance and as we all know better balance translates into the ability to generate more force if for no other reason than you have a more solid base to push off from.
But to do things efficiently takes considerable understanding and practice. You literally have to relearn how to stand, walk correctly to generate force efficiently. So it is no wonder that people are not naturally good at it and require training and are impressed by the force that someone who does it right can generate.
Another complication is the fact is that these muscles have to be partially relaxed to be able to move as you cannot move forward or even rotate unless you do so. So walking becomes an even greater challenge to learn but one that is definitely part of the key in learning how to hold your pelvis correctly. Again, learning to use these muscles requires patience, practice understanding and time.
Another factor is that when you are in the proper position (and by this I do mean the proper angle of the pelvis) movement, even slight movement, becomes the mechanism of force generation (even breathing can shift the focus of muscles) inside the abdomen and thus changes force generation. So you do not need, nor do you in fact want, overly large body movements. You want to keep your pelvis relaxed and also keep control of your BODY center of mass. Doing this is called being centered (sometime called being rooted) and it definitely will decrease your loss of balance if you are pulled or pushed.
AND you need to note that when I talk about using your internal muscles I do not mean we are entirely giving up your external muscles. It is just that whatever we do with our external muscles has to be coordinated so that they are ADDITIVE to the force generated by our internal muscles, not subtracting from them (because they changed the internal rotational balance) or overwhelming the internal muscles and locking them up which is common. In fact, as I said, the external muscles use the internal as a base to work off of.
Ok, for those of you that caught the term of the FIRST group of muscles I used above this is the rest of it ... just like the internal abdominal muscles stabilize the pelvis bringing it into proper alignment and producing more force there is a second group of muscles that you REALLY need to be able to stabilize the pelvis muscles from moving when you put force on them.
Now this is a group that is rarely taught about ... many advanced schools teach some version of stabilizing the iliopsoas group but extremely few ever teach to stabilize these back muscles properly ... if you look at this picture you can see some muscles called the erector spinae muscles ... however the picture is somewhat deceptive as it only shows 1 layer of muscles of the back and gives the impression that they are long muscles ... these muscles are in fact made up of thousands of smaller parts that lock to the lower vertebrae and stabilize the spine - SO THAT THE iliopsoas group itself has a stable base to pull on.
Here is another picture - one that shows a deeper layer look at the muscles that stabilize the vertebrae.
The fact is that you need to stabilize these muscles so that that upper layer of back muscles can do their job -EFFECIENTLY- so that they can stabilize the iliopsoas group and so on ... it is starting to sound like one of those Christmas songs ...
However you can see that the issue is, again, still just one of stability ... because with stability comes the ability to center your gravity AND KEEP IT THERE -- even through movements.
Ok, so how do you stabilize these muscles? Well, here come the opinions again ... because I have seen all types of workouts that supposedly strengthen your back .. yet even some of these people get hurt doing things - sometimes small things - that cause their back to have problems.
MY opinion is that it is the lowest - smallest group of back muscles that is the most important - see the last picture above - and that this provides a base for all the rest.
HOW do I think you should stabilize this? Well, the exercise I keep teaching - and here I will try to explain knowing that it is hard to put it in words without showing you in person.
Stand with your feet SHOULDER width apart ... (not wider as in some styles) ... Do this slowly - it is not a race and you will definitely get more gain out of slow movement than fast ones and have less chance of hurting yourself.
1) Rotate both toes/ feet so they are looking 45 degrees to your right.
2) Keep your back straight as you bend your knees and get as close to the floor as you can WITHOUT putting strain on your knees!!!! [Don't be macho and blow out a knee here!]
3) While bent down rotate your feet / toes to 45 degrees to your left.
4) Stand up - KEEPING your back straight ...
5) Bend back down keeping your feet at 45 degrees to the left.
6) While bent down rotate your feet / toes to 45 degrees to your right.
7) Stand up - KEEPING your back straight .
You have now completed 1 rotation.
You should feel it in your anterior (front part) of the thighs and the (back) posterior part of your pelvis ... lower lumbar region ...
Start with 3 or so of these exercise once a day and build up (SLOWLY) so that you can do 10+ full rotations twice a day ...
Remember do not go so low as you put strain on your knees it won't help if you damage your knee muscles ...
Here are some other ideas to learn both how to increase your muscle strength and also to learn how to use this strength in combat effectively!
a) Learn how to do a Chinese push kick. Learn it right from a qualified instructor - practice - it will definitely strengthen your legs!
b) Again- keep your back straight ... stand in a back stance (back foot at 90 degrees from the angle of the front) ...now shift you weight to put all of your weight over your back foot .... you should only have heel pressure on your other foot ... lower your center of gravity about 2-3 inches - keep it there for several seconds and come back up - again do it slowly ... [you can let your heel slide in and out - all it is at this point is a stabilizer] ...now shift to the other foot and do the whole thing again ... both legs makes one rotation - don't just practice one side!!
These two exercises WILL strengthen your leg and thigh muscles and even somewhat your internal muscles ...
Other rules in general to maximize efficiency are:
Keep your elbows IN when you are pushing or striking. Do not let them drift outside your shoulders!
Do not follow through any push or strike past the midpoint of your feet/center of gravity ... if you extend your center of gravity past the midpoint of your feet, you dramatically lose both balance (thus stability) and power.
Learn to ROOT! Work on it! Have your training partner try to upset your balance.
NOTE: there is a HUGE difference between getting you to move and getting you to lose your balance. If I push you across the floor but you never lose balance, you are ready to strike me with significant force any time even during the push. If you are off balance you cannot strike back until you sit back down.
Practice Push Hands but extend the draw portion! Remember that because internal forces require you to use internal muscles with internal center of gravity you should be as good pulling as you are striking outward.
In conclusion I hope you see that there is nothing mystical about internal energy, it is merely poorly understood mechanical forces at work that can be harnessed IF you do it correctly. The obvious idea behind using internal muscles is to be able to use your whole body (muscles and body mass) as a force generator rather than merely a single group of external muscles. Using your internal muscles will cause this to happen naturally whereas using your external muscles as the primary force generator will not.
So the best way is to find an instructor who will teach you correctly – however, as I noted, "correctly” varies based on style and opinion and I believe there is quite a wide variation that if practiced do about the same thing ... so one way is most likely not better than another - it is far more important that you do some “way” but an instructor will speed up the learning phase (well, if they are a good instructor that does understand what you are really doing ... but by now you should know what to do. You are just looking for someone to observe and ensure you are doing things correctly ... or possibly some advance exercises when it gets to be time for them]
I hope that helps you to understand this complex subject and that I have given you a basis for starting some exercise if you want.
Bruce