A LITTLE-KNOWN SECRET OF THE NEIJIA

 by Yang Xuangxing

Many people say there are no secrets within the martial ways and to some degree, that's true. But there are numerous principles that have been forgotten or ignored and they have, in a very real sense, now become “secret.” One of these has to do with what I term “tendon power”, which is utilized by all of the traditional neijia (internal styles of gong-fu).

One of the main reasons that neijia stylists of the past were capable of emitting such great power is because they didn't rely on the use of the larger, overt muscles; they utilized “tendon power” instead. When a muscle is contracted, it stores (potential) energy and then when it is relaxed, it doesn't release all of the energy...in fact, muscle tissue releases significantly less than 100% of the stored energy. However...if a tendon is stressed (which causes it to gather potential energy) – and this doesn't necessarily involve any muscular tension – it will release nearly all of the stored energy! The blow will be substantially stronger than one which relies primarily on the use of the larger muscles!

Within the neijia, there are training routines that teach students how to do this. Initially, the movement(s) are rather obvious but with practice and time, the initial movement (stressing of the tendon(s) becomes all but completely unnoticeable. Students must also learn which tendons are to be stressed for certain movements/techniques and exactly how and when the energy that they have stored is to be released.

My teacher didn't teach this material (which is one of the phases of learning to apply authentic silk-reeling power) until a student had been training for some considerable time. I did the same thing up until a few years ago when I decided that this material should be presented much earlier in a student's training.

Over the years, I've noticed that very, very few neijia practitioners (including instructors) are even aware of this (and other) critically important principle. If this principle/technique isn't properly applied (or applied at all), application of chansi-jin (the legendary silk-reeling power) is simply not possible. This is one of the reasons I wrote “REFINING JIN.”