Dropping Your Weight in Chum Kiu.

One problem a lot of people suffer from when doing Chum Kiu is that they loose their upright Structure and Vertical Spine, usually they get a bit soft and squashed in the Middle, I have seen this in people that have been training even longer than me, so what is going on, why is it so hard?

I think that as usual the problem is with the Words used to explain what should be done, or rather the understanding of the Words used to explain what should be done. 

Drop your weight!!

What does this really mean?

From my observations most people take it to mean drop your weight to the Floor, or at least into your Feet, and this is were the trouble starts, Chum Kiu is mobile, dropping all your weight into your Feet is not likely to make you move easier, on the contrary it will make it even harder to move, especially Pivoting.

So where do we drop it?

In reality we drop it nowhere in particular, we just drop it.  If you drop a Cup or a Book it may land on the floor, but if there was a Table or something under it you would drop it on the Table or whatever, landing has very little to do with dropping, in fact once the object has landed the drop is over. Once you have dropped your weight into your Feet all you have is heavy Feet.

We need to find a way to allow the things we drop to stay in free fall and not land at all, almost as if there was a string attached to them so that they are both falling and being held in space. Visualising the Concept is so important to moving forward in Wing Chun, if you can visualise it then at some level you understand it.

We are all very different with different powers of imagination, different references that we use in our imagination so it is up to you to film your own Movie, the one you will play to understand the concept, do not blindly accept someone Else's description of events, start from there and then see if you can find a better way to explain it to yourself.

My own movie of this is that my Spine is a Ladder with tens of tiny Rungs, I drop the weight from the top Rung only down to the one below, this begins a Cascade that sends the weight of the lower rung on down to the one below that and so on until my upper body is in my Pelvis. Once my weight is in my Pelvis I imagine that my Pelvis is a Plate and that all of my Body above it are other plates that create a "Stack of Plates", in the "Real World" when you pick up a "Stack of Plates" you only really pick up the "Bottom Plate" you only ever move the "Bottom Plate" and the rest just go along for the ride, at most all we do is make sure that the Stack is kept vertical by monitoring the middle of it.

This is my movie, words are a poor Tool for describing Feelings and it may make no sense to you, but even disagreeing with this will give you somewhere to start.

Motion Defeats Strength! So if in doubt MOVE.