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How mastering your Body-Mind as an Electromagnetic System changes how your Strike is Delivered
The first thing that you notice when you learn to present an “internal strike” is that your hand shape is different when making contact with the target. Your hand is more relaxed. The essential structure is there, but just more relaxed. This promotes both a different physical effect and a different kind of “energy” effect on the target.
1) Physical effect: A “soft” (but still correctly aligned) hands presents force that hits like a bag of marbles instead of a blunt object.
This excerpt from THE SEARCH FOR MIND BODY ENERGY describes the principle:
One definition most probably refers to an increased reliance on the use of sensitivity, which then merges with physical skill. It reminds me of a training point Ho Shen-ting taught me about striking with a relaxed hand. At first, the instruction seemed counterintuitive, but over the years, the point increasingly made sense. Any body part that is used in a tense way is little more than a cudgel, whereas a relaxed state — in this example, a relaxed fist — under stress brings with it the possibility of ever-increasing bio-mechanical ranges of motion. Even more significantly, a relaxed hand contacting the adversary offers the potential, through sensitivity, to instantly adapt and vary the strike against a human target.
In the example of the closed-but-relaxed fist, a relaxed punch can instantly adapt at the point of contact in ways that are minute, but also hugely effective. On one level, it converts the striking instrument from a cudgel to a sap or blackjack (a leather pouch, filled with marbles or lead, which police officers used to carry in the old days to “softly” break bones), while at the same time, a soft hand is better equipped to transfer what has been previously described as “information.”
2) Energetic effect: Few great athletes can strike in a remarkable way. I believe the explanation for some of these has to do with what the great Chinese internal martial art masters called Chi/ Qi. In those rare examples, no more than a light touch present a greater than obvious effect that drops or disrupts an opponent’s ability to function.
My experience with this effect includes occasions when I punched someone in the head with a very relaxed, close distance, “internal” punch. Although very little physical force was used and the punch was “pulled,” nevertheless, my opponent instantly dropped
to the ground as if he were somehow a machine that was suddenly unplugged.
These results seem beyond the understood rules of biophysics. There does seem to be a physical component as
part of the “internal punch” explanation. For example, the famed boxer, Mohamed Ali seems to have included something special that dropped his highly trained opponents without any obvious explanation. Some of these are in the following video:
