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 – used because most people do not understand the real body mechanics at 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.
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. 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 use to generate force outside of our abdominal cavity.
The fact is that when you do use these muscles, you can generate very significant force which is different than most forces generated for several reasons:
1) You are essentially relaxed – in fact, you NEED to be relaxed to generate the most efficient force.
2) Very efficient use of your body mass to help generate force – This is uncommon because most people use muscle mass and not body center of gravity mass to generate force.
3) Small movements – often slight twisting (even forward to back) – can be coordinated to amplify the muscle force generated – an example of this would be fa jing. Thus, with what seems like next to no movement at all, you can actually send someone flying. But again, there is NOTHING mystical about this.
A good example of a practice of this is push hands. While definitely NOT the only exercise for this, if
done right you are able to push your opponent off balance with only minimal physical effort - sometimes sending them back several feet.
4) Because you are using bigger muscles.
Hopefully, you picked up the fact that I said Internal Energy uses internal muscles rather than external … Meaning that your internal abdominal and upper thigh muscles are the most important component of generating power rather than your external muscles, (meaning your upper chest and shoulder muscles).
Now this is NOT mysticism … however, it is poorly understood by most people, so there are many, many rules and exercises out there which supposedly help you generate this internal energy when in fact, ALL they are doing is getting you to relax your external muscles. Tip your pelvis in the most efficient angle and then use your internal muscles and your deep center of gravity rather than your external (meaning outer body muscles like the muscles of the arms and upper back) to produce the force.
SO the 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 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.
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 and then drop your weight down about 1/2 to 1 inch (opinions on how much varies – see below and there is a slight 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.
Again the REAL purpose of using these muscles is to tip the pelvis to the correct angle (and different schools have different opinions on which angle is best) so that you use your deep center of gravity and thus your whole body mass– not just your upper body muscles. Different schools also have different opinions on how far to drop your weight. Again most of these reasons are mystical but mysticism has nothing to do with it. You are just making your muscles work in a more efficient way and using your entire body mass as a force multiplier.
This, of course, can generate far more force than just your external muscles can, partly because your entire upper thigh and lower back muscles (more and bigger muscles than you normally use) and your entire body mass come into play in generating force.
A good example of this is the difference between a front or snap kick and a Chinese push kick. As deadly as a snap or front kick can be, the push kick delivers dramatically more force to drive your opponent back – easily driving your opponent 5 to 10 feet from a single kick. Yet to be able do the push kick, you HAVE to have a relaxed pelvis which that is not required in a snap or front kick. And to generate the most force, you do have to rotate your pelvis backward which initially seems wrong but the results are self-proving.
PLEASE NOTE: When I talk about rotation I mean a three-dimensional rotation – meaning up and down – not just right to left.
Let me put this another way which may help explain what I am trying to say. We all have 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 and 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. And 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 body into line with its true deep 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 use of internal muscles.
However, 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 through out our life. This unfortunately is the position that most people walk in, which can be seen both by how hard they step down 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 you would have dramatically better balance and as we all know better balance translates into the ability to generate more force – if 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 and generate force. 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. So walking becomes an even greater challenge. Again, learning to use these muscles requires patience, practice 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.
Finally, 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 eternal 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 overwhelm the internal muscles and lock them up which is common.
Unfortunately, I cannot give you a magic formula for how much backward tip the pelvis has to have to be the most efficient. In fact there is significant debate between styles on the most efficient posterior rotation of the pelvis. There is also debate on how to achieve this relaxed 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. It is just what feels the best to me personally.
In conclusion I hope you get the point 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 if you are getting the idea that internal energy is a combination of balance, mass and internal muscles, which then feed force to external muscles, you have the idea I am trying to convey.
So the best way is to find an instructor who will teach you correctly but I believe you should know the real reason why you are doing things … there is nothing mystical about any of this it is just different than what most people do.
Here are a few ideas – I won’t call them rules because they are variable to the situation but they are valid for learning to use internal energy type strikes. Once you have it down you can generate the force from lots of different positions.
Learn how to do a Chinese push kick … Learn it right from a qualified instructor.
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 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 requires you to use internal muscles with internal center of gravity you should be as good pulling as you are striking outward.
I hope that helps you to understand this complex subject
Bruce