When you muscle up or attempt to control your attacker's motion you essentially telegraph everything you're going to do. A great way of training non-intention is to be completely passive when you practice free-form sparring exercises such as Contact Flow, push-hands, or chi sao. Now when we say passive, we don't mean you become like a limp noodle. Your movements and reactions should be like spring steel or a delicately set mousetrap. It should take no more than a feather touch to set you off towards a strike-- or to completely change direction and abandon a blocked strike and flow into another opening.

Think of it this way: there's always someone stronger than you, and more than likely it will be your attacker. Why fight muscle with muscle? Think of a surfer: he cannot hope to change the direction of an ocean wave weighing 100 tons or more. He flows with it, skittering on its surface and instantly reacts to changes in speed and direction. The application for fighting is you must train your nervous system to flow through openings and find them unconsciously by feel-- and not exclusively by sight. For most of us, this requires a complete re-wiring of the nervous system.

Save Time--Train Wisely

This is what internal arts like Tai chi, Hsing i and Bagua attempt to perfect. In an art such as Ki Chuan Do however, instead of spending years and years on non-combative movements and forms practice, the proven strikes of World War II Close Quarters Combat are greased with the additional quality of sensitive reactivity. Developing this takes practice, but it is the same way a mongoose takes down a snake, or an agitated 14 pound alley cat can elude your grasp and rake your face to pieces despite your best efforts to throttle it.

To be completely passive, you have to remain in physical contact at all times (because in reality, if you have enough room to spar you have enough room to run-- real mayhem only occurs in close combat). At this point you "lose yourself and follow the other" (a tai chi maxim that is often ignored, even by advanced practitioners), letting all his energy direct your responses-- as if you're a turnstile and pushing one end hard whacks him in the back or as if you're Moe of the 3 Stooges telling Curly to "hit this" and then your hand spins around on impact and hits him in the head. What goes in here, comes out there. This way, you completely cut off your reactivity from your thinking brain. If you rely on eye-hand coordination to pick targets and openings you drastically increase your reaction time. This can be a critical flaw of external styles.

Never try to control or suppress another person's motion-- use it to power your own strikes back into him through folding, sliding, skimming and snaking into openings. We will constantly come back to these concepts in future articles and discuss drills to reinforce them.

Get Loose or Get Broken

You're 5 foot 10, weigh a well-muscled 200 pounds and can bench press 300. That's impressive... but meaningless if your attacker is 6'2", weighs 250 and benches 400. There's always someone stronger. Remember: stone shatters and water flows. You've got to be loose to survive impacts. What do we mean by looseness?

Looseness means the minimum muscular tension to keep you standing. The feeling is like a marionette on strings, a wet dishrag, a drunken chimpanzee, whatever. The point is, when you're hit, you feel like jello to the opponent, and your limbs bend like spring steel or a well-oiled mannequin. Using the opponent's incoming energy and reversing it, like a spring or rubber band, amplified by your whole body moving together in a relaxed coordinated way, you need to add practically no muscular input of your own. This keeps you responsive, sensitive and balanced, much more so than if you commit full muscular grunting exertion which over-commits your balance, tightens your muscles, and actually slows you down and makes you incapable of reacting to a change in your opponent's tactics, energy or direction.

There is a split second of full tension at the moment of impact of your strike in Ki Chuan Do (this is analogous to the snapping action of a whip-- or a sneeze, as we like to say). But since you can generate power with hardly any room or any need to chamber a strike with Dropping Energy (see the book Attack Proof), you telegraph nothing to your attacker. Obviously, these qualities of movement must be practiced conscientiously in a free form spontaneous way in order to become ingrained in your nervous system. Try to work these qualities into your next partner workout, but move slowly at first to get used to (what for many people) is a completely different way of training.