Do you want to be soft?

Or do you want to be hard?

Or somewhere in between?

And no, this is not a post about erectile dysfunction…………..

Maybe its because I learned Tai Chi first that I somehow ended preferring the soft approach. However, saying that one wants to learn the soft arts won’t get us very far.

Why?

Tofu is soft. So is noodle, wet or dry. But have you seen anyone get hurt by tofu or noodle?

On the other hand take a strand of wire. A wire is soft in that it can be bent. Put a few strands of wire together and twist them together.

Now they are soft and also strong, resilient. I used to have a few bunches of these twisted wires from an engineering project but I threw them away due to the rust. However, they were useful for conditioning the body.

So to say that you want to be soft is meaningless unless you define exactly what this means.

A useful definition of being soft is to define it as follows :-

i) Bending with external pressure without collapsing
ii) Using sufficient and necessary (minimal) strength to perform the task

This definition allows us to examine what principles and training methods allow us to achieve our training objective to be soft yet functional.

First, we ask the question – what do we mean by using sufficient strength? For example, when performing the Sam Bai Fut section in the Siu Nim Tao are we using just enough strength, too much strength or even strength that is not necessary to do the movements.

From here we can work towards achieving the objective of using sufficient strength. If you are on the right track you will feel that your movements are effortless. Yet when pressured by your opponent your structure won’t collapse.

When your opponent’s pressure is very strong and causes your correct arm structure to deform do you resist or does your arm automatically bend with the force and move into another strategically advantageous position? If yes, then you are like a willow bending with the force and returning it.

This is only the first part of the learning of being soft. The second part is how to use softness to be hard or to focus or amplify the force that you can now harness by not wasting unnecessary strength.