Following the previous article, we talked about the inside hand and forward intention. Here we talk about the rest of the first section.

Because of the superiority of the inside hand,  we do the outside hand representative, subduing hand(fook sau) 3 times, 3 in Chinese traditional Daoism means infinity, we do it 3 times to emphasize/stress its importance. However, this is only a mindfulness exercise, in terms of body mechanics, whether spreading/inside hand or subduing/outside hand, they are exactly the same. In fights, there will always be one inside hand and one outside hand. Just when we practise form alone, we have no one to be our inside or outside, so we have to keep the idea in mind to focus on practising different things.

Why is the outside hand relatively weak? You can reverse the advantages of the inside hand listed in the previous article: harder to get ground power, and the angle is inferior. So, doing it 3 times will make it better? Definitely not, as mentioned above, 3 times is just a reminder, we have to understand why it is the weaker one, and repeat the solution, it’s for very practical reasons, not a kind of ritual dance for religious belief.

3 times and the same mechanics, how to make it stronger then? The answer is, retain the shortest line; we will fully reveal the relationship between inside and outside hand in the single sticky hand drill, here in form, all we need to do is strengthen the forearm(excluding the palm/hand) by stretching it, from the elbow to the wrist, bend the wrist, turn the palm inside, the shape looks weird, maybe even funny, a lot of people will guess how to use it in fights, no way, this is purely for exercise reason, how come it can be practical? By doing this, we make the linkage between the elbow and the shoulders more fastened, plus your stance, the holistic structure makes your forearm hard to be excluded by the inside hand, that’s it.

The final movement, and its shape is wu sau, guarding/protecting hand, it looks like we are praying, but this is also just stretching the forearm, differently, for defensive purposes, as its name is guarding hand. No matter inside or outside, we all need to withdraw/retract our hands eventually; however, remember this is called the forward intention section, how can we retract whilst keeping forward? The answer is this one. Even boxers know how to pursue the gap when you retract recklessly, so this should be easy to understand. Keep forward intention, even while retracting your fist, that’s called guarding. Physically retracting, mentally forward. So this one also needs to be practised very slowly, to remind ourselves, and we do this 3+1 times, after every time we finish doing a spreading and subduing.