Earth movements: the sand whirls exercise
After watching the first exercise of the water movements, we pass to a third one relating to the movements of the earth.
The practice we are going to describe has the intent to make our soft movements unstoppable (beyond the execution speed). To start we need:
- A vase / pail that can withstand a certain weight
- To start it’s good to a container of approximately 40x40x40cm
- An elliptical / circular based container is more indicated
- Enough sand or rice to fill 3/4 of the container
The exercise:
- We have to put the sand / rice in the container
- We have to position the container in a stable manner in front of us (it must not move)
- Let’s assume a stable equilibrium position (ma bu is ideal)
- The upper edge of the container has to be slightly below the height of our belly
- With opened hands, let’s slightly stiffen the fingers (elastic laying)
- We have to soak the fingers of the right hand and begin to draw circles
- We must use the whole body (to rotate only with the wrists is a waste of time)
- The muscle chain must start from foot, shoulders must follow the rotation
- The circles must be as precise and smooth as possible (we can follow the edge but without touching it)
- We can divide the time of practice in 4 parts, left / right hand and clockwise / anticlockwise direction
- The speed of execution may be slower or faster, the important thing is that it is constant, soft and uninterrupted (no scattered / jerky movements)
Variants and evolutions:
- The exercise can be performed with the foot, also involving the entire leg (the upper limit of the vase must be below the knee)
- We can gradually immerse more and more our arms in the vessel (but only if we can maintain constant the quality and speed of the rotations)
- After some time time we can take larger and larger vessels (up to 1x1x1m)
- With increasing skill we can choose different movements and / or combined with both arms / legs (more on this later)
Notes:
- Especially the first few times we must avoid to strain our body too much
- There is a similar exercise in water movements (we’ll see it in future)
- This practice develops a very high soft strength, we must be careful with our training partners
- This workout is not so much recommended for novices, it tends to be proposed to those who have already reached a fairly advanced level of 6DKF training
In the next article of this series we will see other exercises (fire movements).
Author: Master Kongling
Founder of 6 Dragons Kung Fu.
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