I Liq Chuan (ee lee chwen) means “mental-physical martial art”. We often refer to it as “The Martial Art of Awareness”. As a system of martial arts training, the curriculum has three main sections:
- Philosophy, Concepts & Principles
- Solo drills
- Partner Training
Philosophy, Concepts & Principles
I Liq Chuan is not just about self-defense techniques. We say that “we are not training to be the best, but to bring out the best in ourselves.” You could say that self-improvement is our most important objective.
In other words, we are using martial arts as a tool, not as a goal.
Training martial arts “as a goal” means that self-defense is your primary endpoint. You only care about what works in the ring or on the street. While this has the benefit of ensuring that you’ll be the most effective fighter that you can be, it doesn’t mean you’ll be the most effective person you can be. The application of what you develop in training narrows down to just a very narrow slice of possible experiences.
If you’re a professional fighter, law enforcement, or security professional, this approach makes perfect sense, especially in the short term, where maximum usable self-defense skills in the shortest amount of time is imperative. However, for the majority of people, with no urgent need to defend themselves, we can go a bit slower and a bit deeper to understand the principles.
To put it another way, a technique is like knowing how to use a fire extinguisher as the quickest, easiest way to put out a fire. Understanding the principle is knowing that a fire needs oxygen to burn; take away the oxygen, and you put out the fire, and there are many ways to cut off the oxygen to a fire, for example. The fire extinguisher is quick and easy, but understanding the principle is adaptable to more situations. The principles, once mastered, will make the same person a better fighter than they would be if they only knew techniques.
The Martial Art of Awareness As A Tool
Coming back to the idea of martial arts as a tool, as opposed to a goal: when you train martial arts as a tool, rather than developing skills that have a very narrow application, we develop skills that have very broad applications. We use the body (physical) to train the mind (mental). In other words, through the practice of martial arts, we cultivate wisdom.
The philosophy, concepts, and principles are like a compass guiding all of our training. They teach us to look closely at ourselves. Through careful observation, we learn to see things more clearly, and we learn how to remain calm (i.e., “still and clear”) under high-pressure situations (like a fight).
Stillness and clarity are skills that can be applied in any situation. In short, I Liq Chuan emphasizes an approach based on mindfulness.
Solo Drills
The Basic Exercises of I Liq Chuan
The second section of The Martial Art of Awareness is all the solo or individual training (basic exercises). We describe this section of our training as “unification of mental and physical”; you could say it’s the process of “uniting mind and body as one.”
Basic exercises help us get our body organized and integrated; they develop fundamental motor skills around three essential qualities: power, balance, and relaxation. At their core, basic exercises are a process of exploring how your body moves in three dimensions and its relationship with gravity.
All martial arts make use of some kind of basic exercises practiced by one’s self or under the watchful eye of a coach. Western martial arts like boxing will make use of solo drills like shadowboxing, hitting the heavy bag, or working the slip bag. The purpose of basic exercises is to take complex motor skills and break them down into their core components and drill them repeatedly over time to improve neuromuscular efficiency. To put that more simply, we learn to move better and with less effort.
Although kung fu, or Asian martial arts in general, are often more well known for their forms or kata, basic exercises are actually considered to be more important. Basic exercises are referred to in Chinese as jibengong (基本功). The term jiben has the Chinese word for “root,” and altogether means “fundamentals” or “basic skills”. Forms should just be demonstrations of motor skills developed through basic exercises the way the performance of a complete song is the result of the practice of more fundamental musical skills like scales.
Balance To Change
Tai Chi principles teach us that change is the most basic quality of our experience. The highest goal of Tai Chi then is to “change with change”.
In a self-defense scenario, we’re looking for the ability to easily change directions.
Although we need a certain amount of tension to exert force, it’s tough to change direction when we’re stiff, or rigid, therefore it is important to learn how to maintain relaxation during movement. Relaxation also helps us to conserve energy.
Find Your Center
Self-defense situations are dynamic and unpredictable. An attacker will not simply strike once, and then pause mid-motion for you to launch your counter-assault as we see in so many bad martial arts demonstrations. They will change level, change direction and use multiple attacks from different angles. We must have balance to change with change.
Although when children are young, we often teach them they are not the center of the universe, from a practical point of view, we are the center of our own experience.
Balance comes from the center. However there is not one center; the mind has a center, the body has a center, and true balance is not just “50/50” of two different things. There is a synergy in true balance that comes from the partnership of opposites, like “one long and one short”, or “one heavy and one light”, or “form and formlessness”.
The Martial Art of Awareness: Mind & Body As one
The mind is formless, the body is form.
When mind and body are one, people are capable of amazing things. In modern terms, we often refer to this as a “state of flow” or “being in the zone.” Synergy is an outcome above and beyond the sum of the whole. Conversely, 0.8 x 0.2 = 0.16. If you’re like me and not very good at math, let me emphasize the obvious here: 0.16 is less than either 0.8 or 0.2.
Practically, what this means for our lives is that when we operate at a fraction, outcomes are less than the whole.
Most of us spend the majority of our time operating by fractions, particularly in today’s distracted, digital world. When we’re eating and scrolling on social media, for example, we neither truly notice and enjoy our food nor actually process what we’re seeing on our phones or how what we’re seeing makes us feel, which can, in turn, affect how much we eat. It becomes a vicious, negative feedback loop.
However, when we bring the mind and body together, a state of stillness and clarity arises. We can see more and do more, perhaps even much more than we ever thought ourselves capable of.
Partner Training Drills of I Liq Chuan
“Everybody has a plan till they get punched in the mouth.”
Mike Tyson
Basic exercises improve balance and coordination, but by themselves are not enough to learn how to fight. In the words of Bruce Lee, “You cannot learn how to swim on dry land.” Throwing a ball, carrying a bag of groceries in from the car, or lifting a child off the ground are all applications of force, and likewise, hand-to-hand combat between two (or more) people simply boils down to the application of force, which we perceive as pressure.
So then martial arts, at its core, is simply the study of force, or pressure: how to apply force (offense), how to deal with a force being applied to us (defense), and how to create the most force possible (power).
In Chinese kung fu, we use the term san da, or san shou, to describe “free fighting”. The Chinese word san means “scattered” and has the sense of “chaos”; it’s a recognition by the old masters that real fights tend to be messy and chaotic. Only choreographed, cinematic fights look pretty. Real violence is ugly and messy, but within chaos, we can find order (principles).
Any good martial arts system takes the chaos, scales it down into simple drills that focus on principles, and then progresses the drills back to more and more free, real-time applications that more closely resemble the chaotic messiness of a real fight.
The Martial Art of Awareness uses two different types of partner training to study pressure: spinning hands and sticky hands. Both spinning and sticky hand training have multiple stages and almost endless possible variations.
Spinning Hands
Although in combination, our arms are capable of an amazing variety of movements across multiple planes, if we look closely, the arm is only capable of five basic movements.
- flexion (open)
- extension (close)
- adduction (close)
- abduction (open)
- rotation
We can move the arm above our heads, which is technically referred to as flexion; we can move the arm downward and eventually behind the body. This is referred to as extension. Flexion and extension happen on the verticle axis.
We can move the arm in, across the body, which is referred to as adduction, and if we move the arm out, away from our body, this is referred to as abduction. Adduction and abduction happen on the horizontal axis. As we can see from the diagram above, with the shoulder joint as the fixed center, we get a kind of cross; we can move up and down and side to side (or you could say in and out), and we can rotate from the center of the cross.
Only Two Circles
Subsequently, if we look at a complete cycle (i.e., full range of motion, in sequence), we can reach
- up
- in
- down
- out
Or we can go in the opposite direction and go down, in, up, and out. This gives us two basic circles of movement, one from out-to-in and one in-to-out. All upper body movements come from just these two circles.
When we look at some different types of punches, a hook, a cross, and a haymaker are all examples of “out-to-in,” whereas a straight punch, a jab, and a back fist are “in-to-out.”
With this in mind, we’re just training these two circles and how to maintain the right pressure throughout the entire circumference or range of motion. We call it spinning because we’re turning the circles over and over again. It’s a process of repeatedly looking at the change.
It’s All About Pressure (& Space)
Spinning hands helps you to develop the right pressure; right pressure has the effect of a virtual sphere, a quality of roundness. It’s the pressure that keeps your opponent from being able to hit you while at the same time creating the space for you to hit your opponent. We refer to right pressure as “fullness.”
In meditation, we look at the continuous rise and fall of the breath, which we know by the change in pressure in the body. Likewise, in spinning hands, we are repeatedly observing the “rise and fall” of pressure on the point of contact with our partner as we move continuously from in-to-out or out-to-in. In this way, spinning hands becomes a dynamic, moving meditation.
Sticky Hand
Learning how to maintain the quality of a ball or sphere is necessary, but by itself is not sufficient for self-defense. The final, objective outcome of effective self-defense training is the ability to finish a fight. Just as in sports, defense alone will not win the game. You must score points (and more points than your opponent) to win.
I Liq Chuan sticky hand training develops four fundamental qualities for self-defense:
- flow
- fend
- control
- freeze
Flow
Flowing means “to be with.” It comes very much from the quality of mindfulness and being present. In the context of The Martial Art of Awareness, it’s neither anticipating nor catching up to your training partner. With regard to pressure, when we touch our training partner, we neither resist nor allow any gaps to happen. The pressure should neither increase nor decrease. However, there is a “minimum viable pressure” that must be maintained at all times. Contact is not enough; there must be connection. There is much more that could be written technically about flowing, but we’ll save that for our members-only area.
Fend
After we develop some flowing, we must bring the quality of the ball back into our training. When we fend, we learn always to keep the quality of the ball between us and our training partner as they move freely and try to tap our bodies. It’s a dynamic, spontaneous application of maintaining the sphere of fullness; it’s a more actively defensive level of training.
Control
As we develop more skills, we can make the application of the ball more precise and further restrain our training partner’s movements by controlling both their hands and their balance. When someone is fighting for their balance, it’s hard for them to fight you. The central nervous system shuts down the ability to generate power when it thinks we’re falling and acts reflexively to try and regain balance as a first priority. By continuously manipulating our partner’s balance, we’re essentially putting our training partner into a perpetual state of falling. This is control.
Freeze
Freezing could also be referred to as “jamming.” If we compare it to firearms, when a weapon misfires, it’s temporarily unable to function until we “clear the jam.” Freezing your training partner is similar in the sense that our application of pressure is so precise that they are temporarily “unable to function” with regard to effective attack and defense.
Another way of thinking about freezing is that you are put into such a perfect state of balance that any movement away from that position puts you into a state of imbalance. You could think of it like someone holding you in place on a tightrope. As long as they’re holding on to you, you’ll be fine, but if they let go, or you struggle to get free of their control or try to attack them, you’ll only succeed in making yourself fall off the rope.
In real-time self-defense applications, “freezing” might only last for a split second, but it represents a brief moment of time when you are completely free to attack your opponent “at will” while they are briefly “immobilized”, which translates into a tremendous advantage for anyone who has that level of skill.
Conclusion
Let’s review; all martial arts train three things:
- Power
- Offense
- Defense
I Liq Chuan’s two-pronged approach to developing these qualities is unique, focusing on “cause” rather than “effect” and deliberate, mindful action.
Our basic exercises bring mind and body together; they teach you to look within, to know yourself. They help develop coordination, balance, and, most importantly, mindfulness. When you know yourself and understand both your strength/power and its limitations, you can use yourself skillfully.
At their most basic, the skills of both offense and defense just come down to pressure.
Defense is based on “fullness” or maintaining the qualities of a sphere. Offense comes from recognizing the “empty” (gaps) or penetrating the opponent’s sphere.
I Liq Chuan uses partner work called spinning hands and sticky hands to learn how to recognize, maintain and use the right pressure, distance, and angles.
The Martial Art of Awareness is a good tool for developing mindfulness because a gap in your awareness is a gap in your defense. When you get hit or lose your balance, you know right away. You get instant feedback on your progress. Fullness is “yes” or “no.” You can’t fake it.
In the end, everything circles back to that first component of the system, the philosophy, concepts, and principles. It’s about “knowing.” When we move, we know. We are aware. We are not simply reacting reflexively.
Knowing from the present moment is not just a sterile, intellectual grasp of things; it’s understanding. Understanding is wisdom. Overall, that’s our primary goal for training I Liq Chuan; to use martial art as a tool to cultivate this kind of stillness and clarity.
So, in other words, we’re using martial arts to train the mind.
