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You might not know that I have a free YouTube channel with 100+ videos of varying length. Almost all of them present either novel drill ideas or background lectures on internal power (內勁) training. The channel has 4K+ subs, just below the monetization limit. It stays small because I don’t post very often - and, unfortunately, posting frequency is THE major factor in YouTube channel growth and thus monetization.

The good thing about that channel (unlike this Substack 😲) is just that it’s free. Here are some of my greatest hits or at least some of the more interesting productions. Note that in some cases, I’m showing what looks like straight physical work or (mild!) forms of athletic conditioning. Then you might think wtf isn’t this guy supposed to be all about IP? Yes, I’m all about IP. Whenever I put in a plug for something looking like athletic or physical conditioning, that’s never done for athletic effect. It’s only included if it somehow promotes or relates to IP cultivation.

Also presented here is a ‘new’ paid-sub-only free perk, it’s #5 in the list below, the long-form, formerly paid (Vimeo) tutorial film. You’ll see the private link in the list below. #9 below is also an amazing, frequently overlooked shocker. Well they all are.

Everything I do is solely for the magnification, potentiation, accentuation, maximization, fortification, exaggeration, proliferation, accumulation, multiplication, acceleration, invigoration, escalation, augmentation, exaltation, concentration and elevation of the whole-body, fully tangible Internal Power Experience.

I’ll leave to your expert judgment how these would be tagged: Good, Rad or Nutty:

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吹呴呼吸，吐故納新，熊經鳥申，為壽而已矣。此道引之士，養形之人，彭祖壽考者之所好也。若夫不道引而壽，無不忘也，無不有也。

Puffing and blowing, exhaling and inhaling, spitting out the stale and drawing in the fresh, bear-hangings and bird-stretchings — all for the sake of longevity, nothing more. This is what the practitioners of daoyin favor, the men who nourish the body, those who would live as long as Pengzu. But when a man can be long-lived without daoyin — forgetting everything, possessing everything - that is the Way of heaven and earth, the virtue of the sage.

— Zhuangzi

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The problem with my stuff, the IP training methods covered here, is they are both too subtle and also too simple. They aren’t large-scale big tent stuff. What people really want are visually dramatic ‘bear hangings and bird stretchings’ as Zhuangzi noted above. Preferably wrapped in pseudo-spiritual verbiage. Still though, I’ll continue to document the most surgically precise, most tightly focused methods here, for those who can use them now or later, whenever their body/mind is ready.

In this post, I’ll describe how the hand shape in a particular ZMQ37 subsequence changes as you turn into the move, and how that hand change is an exact mirror of a spinal process in the given technique. This process is actually universal in the form, but the subsequence I’ll go over here is the easiest way to begin to understand it. Later you can apply this method throughout your ZMQ or other Tai Chi training.

Most of you know about the characteristic ‘Beautiful Lady’s Hand’ of ZMQ Tai chi. Basically flat but slightly curved, relaxed wrist, palm and fingers. ‘Bent seeking straightness’ You might imagine this is just a minor aesthetic detail. Maybe it’s merely an overly precious artistic flourish. Or a cunning but arbitrary brand differentiator? It’s not. Nor is it some kind of combative street-ready fight-ender trick move. It’s a very powerful energetic tool/process.

When you really have the IP humming strongly inside, you can work with the hand energy directly and experience how the hand resonance can be exactly mirrored in your spine. Here’s how it’s done:

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[Read below for how the above Tai Chi ‘hold’ practice addresses the reader question]

Q: I really enjoy working your stuff and I think I’m getting somewhere along the lines you stress. But what’s the best quick self-diagnostic to check my progress?

A: Thank you for your Q. First thing is that ALL my stuff is designed to enable a kind of self-diagnostic, from the gitgo. The whole thing is entirely based on learning to perceive yourself, to use your own body and mind (the first and second “Rails”) as vectors into the “Third Rail” which is your Internal Power or etheric energy. In other words, by really digging into my deceptively simple methods, you should become your own internally barometric lab rat. So in a nutshell, all the development methods are also simultaneously self-diagnostic tools.

That said, there is one extremely simple self-diagnostic that I personally use a lot. I’ll pass that along and you can try playing around with it. If you have a copy of Bare Metal Minimality, flip to Chapter 10, which covers a couple of kick-holding poses from the Zheng Manqing Tai Chi routine (ZMQ37). One of those is Fen Jiao (‘Separate Foot’), which I’ve discussed elsewhere. That one is physically pretty easy. The other kick shown in the book is the heel kick, which is physically a bit more challenging. That’s probably why people tend to undervalue and under-emphasize it as a zhan zhuang method. Look over most popular zhan zhuang programs and you probably won’t spot this hold. But when done right it’s an extremely powerful generator.

More to the point, that heel kick is also a great self-level-checker. But only if you do it in a certain way, which I’ll describe now.

Refer to the video up top. We have to get the physical framing right first. All the Ben Lo principles apply here as always, especially the first 4:

1. Relax

2. Body Upright

3. Separate Weight (obviously!)

4. Beautiful Lady’s Hands

The video shows a sample hold of 1 minute, entirely unedited of course, and no AI. You should work toward the physical capability to do this for up to 2 minutes, with no wobbling and no leg drooping, as I normally do. (If you want to incorporate such holds, on both sides, into a seamless full ZMQ37 form flow, see my video The Hot Zone for demonstration)

But now here’s the real inside baseball on this, the answer to the subscriber’s question above:

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I got the following somewhat ‘pointed’ but intelligent and well-observed query/comment from a long time subscriber. The point he makes about basically: what’s going on with all these GOAT’s I’m constantly touting as THE best thing ever? So I’ll address that once and for all now. Let’s start with his interesting comms, a somewhat larger Q chunk than I usually snip here:

Q: You’ve mentioned a number of goats over the years, could you blog a summary of current standings? I think some previous goats of yours were superseded. Or does each goat still stand in its own category? It would be nice to get a refresher, I always pay special attention when you flag the goats. For example, is repulse monkey a goat, or does the sword version of that supersede it (plum blossom something?)? Or does the doing any of friction step, repulse monkey, or sword monkey check off your RDA (recommended daily allowance of goat in that category)? was shiko a goat? there just seems to be a larger herd of goats that I can keep track of, and would like to hear your thoughts on which ones should be done daily.

For a long time I’ve noticed your claims of 10x amping when you do GOAT moves and other highlighted moves, don’t work for me (yet) in getting noticable amping. For example, doing ZMQ37 repulse monkey gets me better results (right now) than the sword version. I believe the reason is since my macrocosmic isn’t very open, holding the sword adds tension and impedance that prevents me from getting the extra amp that you experience, where as doing bare hand repulse monkey I can keep my body more relaxed.

In other words, i believe that all the times you’re claiming whatever GOAT moves or particular protcols for any particular move (be it yoga, Taiji, XYQ, etc.) really comes down to how much of the macrocosmic one has opened (widening all the energy channels of the body). when that widens, then any random move from any modality could seem to amp things by 10x, just because with macrocosmic orbit more open, qi just goes where the mind goes.

So you (Scott) pick up a sword, suddenly you feel 10x because the extra load from the sword also brings an extra amount of IP along with it. anyone else who didn’t open up macrocosmic enough, is not going to feel any increase. That’s my theory.

A: Good points, fairly posed! I never take offense to a solid logical question. And there is an interesting answer.

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“I reckon I’ve fought tougher men but I really can’t remember when. He kicked like a mule and he bit like a crocodile.”

— Johnny Cash

I got the following question from a very distinguished and martial-arts-experienced subscriber:

Q: I suppose if I had the chance of a relaxed coffee-&-cheesecake conversation with you, one thing I'd ask early on is: how do you feel ZMQ-trained IP contributes to Systema and vice versa?

A: I almost hesitate to answer, feeling that my thoughts on any such deep questions are bound to be, if true, already obvious and even clichéd to such a deeply thoughtful practitioner as him, or, if false, a total waste of all our time, not even worth keying in.

However he did ask, and as he is, in the words of Vito Corleone “a man to be respected”, I will throw caution to the winds and offer my simple-minded unvarnished take on that.

The main point I need to stress is that the IP stuff vs Systema are apples and oranges, chalk compared to cheese. Not only two different practices, for entirely different purposes, but actually belonging to two entirely distinct categories of practice and development altogether. And of the two, my IP work is the narrower.

But let’s back up a sec. Here’s my own, more foundational, QA:

Q: What is, by a very long shot, the most important attribute of all in ‘martial arts’ or in any kind of combative, defensive, or protective scenario? Far more crucial than any technique, skill, training accomplishment, supernatural power, natural talent, acrobatic fight tricks, hands of stone (manos de piedra), or anything else, in the entire field of martial arts or security studies more broadly?

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I’m well aware that nobody reads now. Only a vanishingly small proportion can stand anything longer than a fortune cookie now. Thus, there’s even more need for my occasional book reports here, to keep the dim embers of literacy alive til the sun may rise again shine again on books in some distant future epoch.

Given the situation, today’s target is really bizarre. It’s a book so distant from anything remotely relatable today that it may as well be Beowulf or Gilgamesh: ‘Of Human Bondage’ by Somerset Maugham. YAWN! And yet I find it strangely compelling.

It’s about 70% autobiographical, of the author’s young life up to about age 30, in Victorian and Edwardian England, up to just before WWI. Ward of his cold uncle after being orphaned, physical handicap, school days, overseas study in Heidelberg, painting in impressionist-era Paris, crazy love affair with psycho partner, qualifying as medical doctor, etc.

The strange thing about this book isn’t that it’s now totally forgotten on the dustbin of history, but that it was ever a thing at all. Can you believe it, this (superficially) super dull book was compulsory reading in my 7th grade (!) English class! Waaay back in the day. I don’t think there’s a 7th grader alive today that could make head or tail out of even the first page of it now. Not that we could either.

Total bore, completely unsuitable for the kiddos even back then. If kids back then were presumed to have the lit chops to handle a book like THAT, the bricks in the wall could have leveraged such ability much more effectively (in terms of future bookish engagement) by requiring a rollicking good story like the proto-superheros in The Count of Monte Cristo, Kim, or even The Three Musketeers. How could Human Bondage have even been considered?

Anyway, so why am I even treating of this loser book? It’s because I love Maugham’s writing style. I adore it! His Asian stories are the goat of short stories, 24K toothsome textual nectar dripping from every word of South Sea classics like ‘Rain’ and even stories set in Europe like ‘The Lotus Eater’. It’s because he’s supremely lucid and real. He’s most like George Orwell in that respect. Orwell was more intellectual, much more political and analytical. But stylistically they both have the same unswerving commitment to clarity and straight unpretentious depiction of human reality.

And there are many quasi-philsophical throw-aways, which though not exactly deep but which I find charming. For example, we all live now beneath the looming shadow of AI takeover /replacement. Who knows how prescient a snip like this may yet turn out to have been:

He almost regretted the penury which he had suffered during the last two years, since the desperate struggle merely to keep body and soul together had deadened the pain of living. In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou earn thy daily bread: it was not a curse upon mankind, but the balm which reconciled it to existence.

Oh wait. Nobody now could make head or tail of that Biblical reference. Never mind. By the way, I don’t mean to sound like a literary snob. Because in fact I’m a gutter snipe in terms of modern, genuinely high-end experimental literature. Can’t stand the stuff. I’m a low brow knuckle dragger. I just love great story telling.

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I should have some kind of flagging or tagging system on these posts. This post here is one of THE most profound training protocols of all times and all places. Yet this will appear in the archive as just another of my 100+ regular posts dishing it out in this Substack. It should at least have a gold star or red banner or something.

My book ‘Bare Metal Minimality’ highlights one of the standard Yiquan drills: Divine Tortoise Rises from the Sea. Ironically, since current Yiquan lineages largely deny the whole phenomenon of Internal Power (reducing effects down to nerve sharpening or tendon sensitization or what have you), you’ll never learn this awesome internal protocol from them. I’m probably the only source of it at this point. Actually though, this can be a generic/universal protocol, but as always in life, CONTEXT MATTERS.

By initially framing this practice within the Tortoise drill, you give yourself the best chance of experiencing its incredible effects as quickly and intensely as possible. And that will generate the most important outcome of all: motivation! Motivation to work it more frequently and deeply within the Tortoise framing per se, and also, once fully understood there, to extend your experience of the protocol into other contexts such as your Tai Chi, Xing Yi, etc. So let’s go with the Tortoise framing for now, where it’s purest and most powerful.

The physical dynamic of Tortoise requires a blend of the usual omni-dimensional Yiquan kinetics along their standard axes of: up/down, left/right, forward/backward. All that is embodied in a kind of spiral vortex, practiced standing in one place for now. I introduced the mechanics in the book linked above, and I’ve also regularly posted refinements and extensions on it in this Substack.

If interested, please search the Full Metal archive for ‘Tortoise’ to see those commentaries. But today’s protocol can be applied directly to the base vanilla Tortoise mode, as taught in the book. Refer to the book for all the provenance and mechanics info, I can’t repeat the whole chapter here. However I have included below a brief demo video showing my teacher Master Yao Chengguang’s performance, for your edification.

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[SUMMARY: In answer to a reader question, I confirm the vanilla mode of canonical Santishi standing, and I then describe a god-tier read that will 10x the IP Experience of it]

[NOTICE: Stay tuned here for an extremely consequential upgrade on Bare Metal Minimality’s ‘Tortoise’ drill. Not lengthy, not complicated, not difficult to do - but one of the most powerful IP training reveals I’ve ever given out here. Coming soon to a post near you if you’re a paid sub]

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Q: I practice Xingyi and I like your straightforward descriptions of internal effects. I do Santishi, trying to follow what you quoted in your AXE book from master Guo: ‘The rear foot presses strongly as though you are going to leap off it across a ditch’. I want to understand and do that better. Does it just mean that you tense up your rear leg muscles more?

A: Muscles are part of the answer, in that your back leg will be physically working harder. But let’s rewind for a minute. The canonical instruction for Santishi is in AXE, saying the position is ‘Back-weighted: front 30% of your weight, back 70%.’ So you can start that way.

Here’s some further material from AXE on this point of the front leg status in Santishi::

“Your front leg now bears about 30% of your body weight. 30% isn’t really much more than just the leg’s own weight itself. It’s just a feeling that your body is mostly supported by your rear ‘leaping’ leg. The work is being done in the rear, by your rear leg and body weight lowering. But your front foot must be light enough to let them do their work together without interference. The way to achieve that rearward focus is to keep your front foot soft (relaxed) at all times. Let it lie flat on the floor, no part of it special. You’ll be surprised how it tends to tense up if you ignore it and let it do its own thing. While standing, occasionally check it with your mind, to ensure it’s always soft and relaxed. Remember it’s only bearing 30% or less of your weight, basically it’s supporting only its own weight, and it need not be super clenched up to achieve that.”

Just work on it like that for a while. Get the feel of that. That passage describes the condition where only the weight of the front leg itself is directly supported by the floor, without any additional body weight. That puts the main body weight support into the rear leg, apparently fulfilling Master Guo’s instruction by default.

But you’re showing a deeper curiosity about it. So if you’re curious about the ditch-leap quote, there’s a specfic way to work more deeply and get the exact effect Master Guo was pointing to.

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[SUMMARY: I explain the incredible Internal Power amplification effect of a very simple basic (基本功) Shaolin drill. I also give background linking the drill’s underlying concept to one of the Aiki-body training exercises (鍛錬) passed down from Sagawa Yukiyoshi]

If you go deeply enough into Internal Power (IP) cultivation, whether via a Tai Chi set deeply specialized and crafted for that purpose (e.g. ZMQ37) or via the bite-size IP work laid out in Bare Metal Minimality, you’ll find that your whole body is transformed into an IP resonator or tuning fork.

From that point, almost anything else you do becomes a shockingly torrential power infusion conduit. That includes moves and work that is laughably elementary. Mere first-day beginner Shaolin warmups take on a completely unsuspected bizarro profundity.

One stark example of this phenomenon is the nothing-burger Shaolin slapping front kick calisthenic. This is literally a first-day (or trial session!) warmup thing. The Shaolin front kick, especially the Wushu version (as shown in the illustration above) is mostly for show and a bit of ballistic stretching. Unlike the amazing and much-beloved Muay Thai teep (Thai front push-kick, with its much more powerful dynamic vector), this calesthenic kick doesn’t have a whole lot of (read: any) practical usage in street defense.

However, the Shaolin has a secret identity as an internal wonder trick, which is probably why the ancients coded it into most of their basic forms. From there it trickled into all the modern Wushu routines, all unbeknownst to the shallow and vulgar Chinese Communist Party’s Wushu compilation and standards committees.

Below:

1. Description and my demonstration of the most effective and easiest way to work a version this optimized solely for IP whole-body perfusion

2. Explanation of the overlap with Sagawa Yukiyoshi’s Aiki-body 鍛錬.

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“Focus on the inner fire rising from your feet upward through your form until the body burns to ashes and only the Radiance shines on.”

— Vijñāna Bhairava Tantra

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People talk about fighters with heavy hands. It’s basically the same phenomenon called manos de piedra or “hands of stone” in Spanish, when speaking of some boxers who had this quality in spades, like Roberto Duran.

It’s great if you have that naturally, but if not you can go a long way towards it with Russian Systema training. That’s one of the fight attributes that Systema trains best. If you don’t believe me, work some simple sparring, even just under MOQ, with Vladimir Vasiliev, Kwan Lee, or Martin Wheeler. Feeling it will help you cultivate it.

But that’s heavy hands as a fight attribute. It’s trained with mental and physical relaxation. In Tai Chi, it’s also said that hands and arms of advanced people can feel heavy. Not the heaviness of tension, but a kind of ‘natural mass’, not entirely unlike the boxer’s penetrating hit. That’s cultivated through Tai Chi form practice, which combines relaxation with explicit internal power infusion.

The great thing about Tai Chi is that you can practice this consciously and deliberately without any distractions, just by relaxing your hands with mental infusion. Attention without tension is the key. Feeling and shaping your hands without any tension.

Over time your hands will feel expanded, puffed out, and filled with a hydro-electric type of living, reactive substance. That’s your IP (Internal Power). At first the power is only making a thin circuit, repeatedly cycling thinly through your body. But over time, the stream gets stronger, broader and deeper, to where it permeates all your tissues. You’ll feel this throughout your body but hands is one terminus or endpoint of the cycle - a destination for the flow, from whence it then starts its return. So you’ll get an extra intensity of experience there.

The above is conventional wisdom in Tai Chi. But what’s less often mentioned is that your feet operate the same way. All same. For some reason, people seem to have more trouble consciously feeling this, but it’s always available and operating.

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[SUMMARY: (1) A brief clarification for the ‘Yoga Third Rail’ asana naturally in a previous post; (2) A profoundly powerful further refinement to the Yiquan Tortoise drill introduced originally in the Bare Metal Minimality book]

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(1) CLARIFICATION: I recently explained one example of using unique ‘Attentional Protocols’ for transforming simple yoga asana into blowout engines of infinitely cyclic torrential internal flow. The example was based around dandasana - quite possibly the simplest and easiest asana in all of yoga.

I need to clarify one smallish point. The illustration of that post (linked below) shows the performer (me lol) using straight arms. That’s fine, or you can allow your arms to bend more natually at your elbows. But the key point is, no matter whether your arms are straight like the pic, or somewhat bent, do not apply hard tension to press your flat palms into the mat at your sides. This is crucial. Establish a solid, firm-feeling contact of your palms and fingers with the mat, but do not use your arms to apply any further physical pressure onto/into the mat. Use your MIND alone to focus on the areas given in the Attention Protocol for this asana, then the IP surge will emerge naturally on its own. No excess tension.

(2) REFINEMENT: I introduced Yiquan’s amazing Tortoise Rises from the Sea drill in my book Bare Metal Minimality. I shouldn’t need to re-explain the entire drill every time I offer an extension. So please read at least the chapter in the book before continuing.

As you’ll know from the chapter and many other posts in this Substack, as you move between the advancing and retreating phases, one heel will always be slightly raised off the ground. It’s just creating a gap, it’s not stepping anywhere. You remain in-place for the duration of this static in-situ drill. But you will be continuously raising and lowering the front and rear heels in sequence. When your body weight is mainly to the rear, your front heel should be slightly off the ground. When your body weight is mainly in front, your rear heel is off the surface, back and forth.

The entire leg of the raised heel is as physically relaxed as you can manage. It’s not easy to get the hang of that. But here’s another thing you can work on concurrently.

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As you know if you’ve been following this Stack, I’m working on a very unusual new book. The working title is Yoga’s Third Rail: The Attention Protocols. It explains a deeper facet of yoga that’s usually ignored or totally unknown.

The first and second ‘rails’ of yoga are the obvious ones: mind and body. Those have been treated exhaustively by all the tens of thousands of yoga and yoga-adjacent practices out there. Usually everybody aims high - the Pantanjali yoga spirituality stuff, or else takes the low (but interesting!) road of strictly animal physicality - getting all the binds and balances in order to buff your butt’s contour.

But there’s one more amazing element: internal power (IP) in the formulation defined more practiality and experientially in Chinese internal martial arts training than in yoga itself. Sure, yoga teachers and authors sometimes throw the crowd a bone along these lines, with terms like pranayama, kundalini, etc. But none of that is a direct path to the real Internal Power Experience (IPE), which transforms energetic being into a 24/7 Niagara-like torrent of vibrationally streaming hydro-electric current.

For that kind of effect, you need to get beyond the conventional body-and-breath focus of normal yoga teaching. And that’s what my new book will teach.

The odd/surprising thing is that these energetic trigger effect are widely and deeply embedded in the simplest, “easiest'“ and most foundational poses of Hatha Yoga, as represented in Ashtanga Yoga’s 1st and 2nd Series. The more advanced work, such as Kapo or Karandavasana, are fun to challenge yourself, but for the 3rd Rail (energetic) orientation you needn’t concern yourself with them. The simplest asana set you up to work infinitely deeply.

But you do need to know each asana’s Attentional Protocol. That means you don’t just do the physical shape of the asana for five breaths, and then move on. As you do the foundational poses, you need to actively configure and move your mental attention. This causes the IP to move itself in conformance with the shape of your mind. It’s weird but it works.

I’ll be uploading preview chapters regularly here as they emerge. You’ll be getting a big time jump preview of this unique material. And don’t shrug your shoulders at that, because while yes, the book with all the material will eventually appear, but by subscribing here you’ll have had a 6 month to 1 year lead time during which you could begin working these. And since time is all we have, that training head start is 24K oro puro.

I’ll walk you through a very basic example here and now.

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I was a willow last night in a dream
I bent down over a clear running stream
Sang you the song that I heard up above
And you kept me alive with your sweet flowing love

— Heart (‘Crazy On You’)

[SUMMARY: I point out the extremely lopsided emphasis on hands in mainstream Qi Gong and related practices. Hand charge is a fantastic experience and must be continually cultivated, but the source is your feet. And here’s the thing - you can have as or more intense IP charge experience in the soles of your feet as in your hands. The one feeds the other. Headstand as whown above, when you know the internal trick of it, can ignite your feet in this way. But must you do yoga shirsasana or other difficult Ashtanga poses to feel the sole activation? Not at all. There’s a far simpler way to get the complete immersion of foot charge, which I discuss and demonstrate on video.]

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If you look at conventional and mainstream internal power methods, you’ll see a huge imbalance, with total handsy-ness predominating. Look at all the book covers in the graphic above. See how “handsy” all those covers are, the poses shown? And those are but a trivial sample. It’s hands all the way down.

But you’ll never get blown into orbit with IP until you activate the soles of your feet to the same degree or more. With the methods in the book Bare Metal Minimality, that will begin to happen naturally. One day, standing in line somewhere, waiting for something, you’ll just suddenly... notice it happening. So it isn’t strictly necessary to do anything special. However you can radically speed up the progress and the intensity of the effect. Keep in mind that many Qigong practitioners will never realize the foot power thing at all. Their practice may remain bound in the shallows of hand buzzes and palm warming forever.

If you combine true IP practice with yoga, there are a lot of poses that will trigger extreme foot charge effects. For example, the headstand I’m pictured performing above, and this one among many others:

But without specific IP protocols, yoga practioners will never experience this foot activation, and mostly not even hand activation, or whole-body either. It’s because you need to work a specific kind of deeply mindful relaxation, which has nothing to do with the physicalized flexibility of yoga. However, strangely enough, the potential to use yogasana for this does exist. It’s genius level stuff buried deep in certain asana, just needing correct instruction to activate. That’s what I’ve got in-progress now, my next book Yoga’s 3rd Rail: The Attention Protocols.

But for most people right now, even the relatively straightforward yoga poses like those shown above are challenging. Fortunately you DO NOT NEED THESE to experience nearly maximal foot activation. They are just “fun to have”. The drill below is all you need to get started and go far.

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(Above: Head trainer of WBA champion Takashi Uchiyama working mitts with me, years ago)

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I have boxed for a long time, just gym and sparring work, not as competition. I’ve been interested in boxing and working on its methodology and technique since I was a teen. My primary overall interest is the Internal Power experience, in and of itself, as an amazing human phenomenon that needs no other justification other than art for art’s sake and the journey is the reward.

However, I’ve always had a secondary curiosity of whether, and if so, how, IP could be applied in martial arts. Though not my main focus, I’ve explored that angle whenever possible. Hence my dabbling in boxing and lots of other stuff. I feel I still haven’t solved the final puzzle of how the potential alpha of IP fits in with the beta of normal combat sports’ athletic foundation. But it’s been fun trying to find the fit.

I’ve spent long stretches in Tokyo. While there, pretty much every weekday afternoon for months at a time, I trained at Watanabe boxing gym (Gotanda). That was the home gym of WBA champion Takashi Uchiyama (’KO Dynamite’). I became friendly with him. Now here’s the thing: Uchiyama was a supremely talented boxer. But he himself acknowledged that he had a super effective trainer, there at Watanabe. It wasn’t Watanabe himself (the owner), but a trainer there solely dedicated to Uchiyama, who after all was a major star with an insane undefeated streak.

This trainer didn’t look like much. Very unassuming and modest. Such a gentleman! But Uchiyama worked with him only, on fundamentals. He wasn’t available to work with ordinary gym members. But, maybe just because I hung around so much, or maybe as I was one of the rare foreigners there, he would work with me regularly. I used to go in daily, do (1) a bunch of intense warmup stuff (rope, shadow, bags), then (2) work with that trainer, then (3) hard sparring with whoever was around.

This trainer (shown working with me above) is the one who developed and brought to final perfection Uchiyama’s amazing signature KO move, which was a low-left shovel hook. In other words, the dreaded liver shot. Of course everyone knows about liver vulnerability. Sounds easy right? Yet it isn’t easy at all to regularly drop the opposing fighter instantly to the canvas, scoring an instant KO against an elite fighter with that, as Uchiyama did on the regular. Thus, most people are just head hunters. But Uchimaya got it done with that awesome shovel hook.

Anyway it was a great environment. Watanabe in Tokyo and the Wild Card club in Los Angeles were the two best of the many boxing gyms I’ve hung around on a sustained basis.

Here’s a brief clip of Uchiyama sparring at Watanabe, same place where my clip above happens. If you have eyes of a boxer, you’ll see the quality. I’ll leave as a test for the viewer’s boxing eyes which fighter is Uchiyama. 😅 And he’s being restrained for the press media moment. He was an absolute beast.

If you’re interested in my deep IP research and incredible drills, switch to paid membership on ‘Bare Metal Maximality’ section of this Substack).

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Everyone’s heard about Conor McGregor’s absurd outcome in his recent UFC rematch with Max Holloway. Fight ruled self-inflicted TKO at 69 seconds in, due to Conor’s knee blowout at about 15 seconds in. Much ink has been sprouted on this, with lots of commentary about ACL, meniscus, aging, HGH, TRT, steroids, pre-existing injury, surreptitious fight week clinical visits, being paid just to show up, quitting and scamming the fans, etc. etc. Then there’s lots of opinions about him as a person, lifestyle, criminal charges, whatever who cares, I’m not getting into that at all. Anyway I’m not a particular fan. I’m just going to make a trivial technical point.

McGregor has claimed that he had no pre-existing injury. Not sure about that - probably every long-term athlete has some stuff going on. Leaving that aside, one thing strikes me very forcefully: in all the videos I’ve seen, whether backstage pre-walkout, fight week, overall fight camp, etc. there’s been many samples of him doing that exact same fight-opening jump kick. Energetically, competently, no big deal.

So how could it go so catastrophically wrong? In my opinion, it went so badly wrong because it always went so perfectly right. In every sample I’ve seen (you may have seen others), he lands the kick perfectly on the mitt or pad target being held by the trainer. I’ve not seen even a single example of training for miss or failure.

But the landing angle is heavily affected by whether or not you connect solidly with a target that interrupts the kick. I think he never experienced missing it, and didn’t deliberately create that, thus when Holloway stepped aside and it didn’t impact, McGregor landed wrong and the knee gave out. Just that simple.

It brings up a more general question: should one train for failure, just to cover all bases? This case suggests the answer’s yes. Or maybe just train for reality, have the trainer move around more naturally. Then sometimes you’ll hit it and other times not, you’ll get the full natural variety without deliberately setting up failure scenarios.

In the case of some types of round kicks, this is a particularly relevant/sensitive question, because they don’t have natural stoppage of momentum as front and side kicks do. When we shadow box in Muay Thai, we do throw ‘air’ round kicks and many people spin completely around on those.

[SUMMARY: Here I talk about the right way to use breath integration for internal power training, the breath method itself and the best physical framing within which to practice it, which is based on Ashtanga yoga - but only when performed as an IP-Centric regimen.]

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There are tons of fantastic breathwork protocols around. They are all great for a huge variety of purposes - athletic, combative, medical, spiritual etc. I have researched, learned, and practiced a big representative sample of all flavors, from all corners of the world. A small sample of what I’ve covered includes Ashtanga pranayama, Kundalini yoga / Breath of Fire, Nishino Breathing Method, Systema (Russian) Breathing, various Daoist methods, and of course the more straightforward coaching of breath for boxing and other conventional sports.

All that is great. Those methods cover both physical and spiritual dimensions. But Internal Power (IP) is different. Though related to body and soul, it’s a distinctive and unique power domain. In fact, none of the methods above is truly optimized for IP. I don’t think the people who created and who teach those methods are really taking IP generation is the single goal of their Prime Directive, as I do. Not a question of better/worse, just differing focus.

So thru that lens, there is in fact a way to use breath for IP cultivation. I don’t emphasize this at first, because most people default to working with breath mechanically. And it’s fairly straightforward to focus on that, which can overtake your original goal of developing the ‘etheric energy’ charge/blast of IP. In the beginning, before you’ve begun to feel the IP surge, stream, and stage on-demand or always-on, it’s best to forget about breath control and breath coordination, because at that early stage that leads you back round to your default setting of physicality above all.

IP is transcendant, beyond the physical. Yet it isn’t airy-fairy word-spray “spirituality” either. It’s a real power which is anchored in, but not identical to, the body and mind. I call it the Third Rail.

However, once you do have a good non-breath dependent control of a strong IP faculty, you can then start to work with breath in a certain modality to greatly strengthen and augment the IP. And (here’s the point of this post at last) certain simple yoga asana are ideally suited for that kind of breathwork.

I’m writing a new book about this topic (Yoga’s Third Rail: The Attentional Protocols), which I previewed a little in this recent post linked below. You can get more of the general flavor and purpose from that. But in the rest of this article, I want to get fully specific and lay out for you, before the book comes out, the precise method of breath that triggers the IP surge with many Ashtanga yoga asanas, and also offer you the best asana to begin to experiment with that breath protocol.

First, the asana. The best asana to begin experimenting with is Downward Dog, as shown at the top of this post (photo from my book ‘Bare Metal Minimality’). In Chapter 8 of the book, I give the full rundown on the pose and the basic physical structure, so I won’t repeat all that here. But you do need a minimal level of quality in your physical pose itself. Once you can execute the pose more or less cleanly, about up to the simple minimal standard I’m showing in the downdog photo above, you’re ready to apply the IP breath protocol.

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A long-ass time ago, I used to train with a Chilean martial arts group in the high cordillera of the Andes. It was a total blast of fun. However the sun down there is super intense! I think the natural UV shielding is deficient there or something. Thus my skin got all effed up. To this day you can see the damage.

Yesterday, while rambling around the Rainier foothills and fire lookout stations out there, I took a selfie. Thence you can clearly see the facial damage. So be careful if exposed down there.

[SUMMARY: I discuss the proper stages and ordering of running IP charge in your hands relative to Tai Chi form practice. I also discuss a key factor in triggering and maintaining the 'IP ‘charge that makes this practice worth doing at all]

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There’s a simple sequence for getting the most IP charge from Tai Chi practice. Here’s how simple:

1. Do your form (preferably ZMQ37)

2. Stand in Tai Chi Qishi (太極起勢 starting pose) for at least ten minutes at the end.

This is how we practiced the form in every session taught by Master Benjamin Lo. At the end of the continuous (non-holding) run through of the form, there was always that final Quiet Standing period. Note that Qishi is naturally the final pose of the actual form, so this just requires that you remain stationary exactly where you end up anyway. At first I thought, as maybe some of you guys still might, that this was just a pro-forma, vaguely spiritual Zen-flavored cool down. I found it boring but tolerable, just a break til we got to the real heart of the matter - which to me was the form-based long static hold of positions (like Play Guitar etc), and of course Master Lo’s signature push hands training.

What I’ll say here applies most directly to the ZMQ37 version of the Yang Family Tai Chi form, but you may be able to carry a lot of it over to your own preferred variant. The key differentiator is the so-called Fair Lady’s Hand shape (美人手). The FLH isn’t arbitrary styling. It’s a crucial facilitator for best results. But if you really hate that idea, you can still crank up an attenuated version of this work even without that.

An IP-Centric Tai Chi practice session should be like cooking a turkey. There’s a phase (1) you pre-heat the oven, and then there’s phase (2) the actual cooking.

Doing this standing thing is simple enough. I mean, that’s kinda the whole point. There are many other kinds of standing internal work, zhan zhuang. Tons of them like post standing in Chen Tai Chi and Yiquan, where you have your arms up in a circle/embrace, or even the Santishi of Xingyiquan. And any Tai Chi posture can be held for internal work. But all the above versions require some degree of arm and shoulder tension.

That’s the one key difference of them vs Qishi. People deny it, but mostly we are tense after a few minutes of doing those others. And you need to stand for at least 10 mins after doing the ZMQ37 form to really cook yourself. The arms in ZMQ Qishi mode are about as relaxed as they can possibly be, given we do need to retain a minimal scintilla of mind engagement to attract and activate the IP.

This is so crucial! Now, what I’ve already said above should be enough to both teach and motivate the practice. But there are a couple more key details you need to really spark this up.

Here’s what you need to do:

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[SUMMARY: In this post I review and extend the ‘Friction Step’ and ‘Alternative Santishi’ drills from the book ‘Bare Metal Minimality’ (Chapters 2 and 6), showing how they can be jointly practiced for greatest IP charge maximization. I described a count-based regimen for max IP per minute spent drilling. I include text description, and video of my full teaching of these drills in recent live IRL seminar.]

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In terms of ROI, or bang for buck, or ‘power-charge-per-drilling-minute’, the best IP drill known to me is my book’s specially tweaked version of the Friction Step - when combined with the closely related ‘Alternative Santishi’.

If you work this diligently, and by that I mean time it via calendar (consistently a few minutes every day) not clock (multi hours per day), your forearms will eventually swell up on-demand with bristling IP ‘charge’ - packing your forearms and spreading down through your hands and up to your upper arms, shoulders and neck.

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My book ‘Bare Metal Minimality’ has a drill (#12) teaching a good way to ‘surge’ IP from your legs and waist into your arms and fingers, at real-time speed. As usual, I’m not claiming that this ability will make you Iron Mike or anything so street-real as that. Street and sport combat are very complex and highly personal topics for which you’ll have to put together your own custom solution. However, if you practice the Internal Power Experience (IPE) for its own sake, this drill is a great one to try.

Please approach these resources in three parts:

1. The Book Chapter: Please read or re-read Chapter 12, ‘Stationary Splitting’. This is a variant of the most basic ‘walking strike’ in Xingyiquan. In this case, we work it in-situ, without the walking, but with the same energy transmission from lower body to hands. It’s important to read this, because there’s a very important point in there which I don’t cover explicitly in the rest of this tutorial.

2. The Video: Below I’ve linked the relevant sub-session from my recent California seminar on this drill. The drill has several segments:

   1. The Undisputed Master: The video opens with a very brief old video snip of classical Xingyi Master Wang Shujin performing the full move ‘Splitting’ (劈拳) including the walking delivery, which is the normal way to practice it. However, you can best learn to to channel the energy by working the stationary version, and then transfer your understanding into the full walking dynamic. You will see from this old clip how a real master performs the technique, simply, crisply, without the shoulder-tension ‘wagging’ at the end of the strike which many performers now display. Master Wang’s technique is the perfect classical Xingyi standard of ‘一起一氣’performance - everything culminates at once, together.

   2. The Teaching: Then you’ll see my somewhat rambling but hopefully intelligible presentation of the basic mechanics. Those are shown in the book, but seeing it in live action mode may be helpful.

   3. The Wrist & Forearm Internal Drill: At one point, I show and tell (pointedly emphasize) the key energy dynamic of Xingyi splitting, which is the activation of the daling (inner wrist) point at the culmination of the strike. Eventually you’ll really feel the power jamming through your wrist and hands if you work this seriously. I also perform a simple sort of diagnostic micro-drill to hopefully get you feeling some semblance of this effect (which is also shown in another book Juice: Radical Taiji Energetics).

   4. The Tai Chi Version: The video also includes a brief segment showing Tai Chi master Professor Zheng Manqing’s performan of his ‘Repulse Monkey’ (倒攆猴) move from the ZMQ37 form. This shows Professor Zheng triggering exactly the same energetic activation from the daling point in his relaxed wrists, but with a softer, slower physical dynamic. It’s not the same framing, but it’s the same internal protocol.

      

      

3. The Transcript: Finally, I’ve included a full written transcript of the seminar session (video) at the bottom.

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