Internal Martial Arts, In My Opinion

It’s pretty easy to be quizzical when looking at videos demonstrating “Root”. It’s very common to see Taiji instructors and “masters” demonstrating their ability to not be pushed over as a sign of their high level of skill.

There’s a lot of stuff to unpack there, but the simplest question is just “why should that matter?” After all, in neither striking nor wrestling is it super important to not be pushed over by multiple people standing in a row. If I can’t push you over, I’ll just punch you in the face or pick up your leg.

From what I’ve learned, this confusion arises from the fact that both this question and these demonstrations miss the main point of “rooting”. People talk about “developing a strong root” when rooting is not about strength. It isn’t about being so powerful that you’re immovable; rather, it’s about creating the illusion that you’re immovable. Rooting is a skill. 

As Xiang Kairan described it in 1936: 

I once saw a martial arts master who, with both feet standing or even with one foot raised, had five or six strong men push and pull at him, but they could not move him. The spectators were all surprised by how solid his stance was. The raised foot had nothing at all to do with it. It was entirely based on the alertness of his waist and thighs. He was able to lead the strength of those men into a state of emptiness. The Taiji Boxing classics [Playing Hands Song] calls this “guiding him in to land on nothing”, though the technical term is “neutralizing energy”.

This is the skill of rooting: “alertness of the waist and thighs.” Though conditioning is important, the main component is sensitivity, the ability to feel force as it comes in and adjust your positioning in order to neutralize it. 

This is why demonstrations like these 7-on-1 above misrepresent the rooting skill, though. 

In the video, the teacher instructs the student to put his hand on a particular spot and push in that direction, sets himself in a position that structurally nullifies that direction of force, and then shows that even a lot of people pushing on that direction can’t topple him easily. 

Well, cool, but we’ve known that strong shapes can bear a lot of weight for a long time; that’s pretty much what architecture is about. The real skill of rooting, the real test of “alertness” happens when that force suddenly changes direction. Would a person pushing on the teacher’s back still feel the same solidity? From a side angle?

That is an applicable skill, especially when you look at it less as “not being moved” and more as “controlling your movement.” If you can use this alertness to change your weight position in attentive response to the force being applied to you, then you can keep yourself from being yanked around in the clinch, or maintain your stability when someone tries a takedown. 

The symbol I use as the profile image for this blog is a guiding philosophy of organization that I use to train. I call it “The Three Aspects.” The symbol’s made of three parts: 

| O -

the vertical line is foundational, the circle deals with surroundings, and the horizontal line takes direct action, all as one whole. This manifests on several different levels, but I want to talk a bit about how I view one of them: Spirit.

The three aspects of the Spirit, for me, are composure, resilience, and resolve. 

Composure is the level of clarity and calm you have at the base of your emotions - not to be without emotions, but to keep them from hindering you.

Resilience is how well you maintain that composure under stress, in adversity, and under aggression.

Resolve is how well you project that composure when taking action.

In martial arts, spirit of this type needs training just as much as your body and mind do; no amount of technique or conditioning will be very useful if you fall apart under stress. Yet this is exactly what is neglected by traditional schools when they forgo sparring , or even when they promote sparring but forgo inter-style sparring.