Every day more and more people are discovering the ancient practice of standing and incorporating it into their daily practice to improve their health, energy and self-defense skills.
Literally millions of hours are being invested in standing practice every week by people like you and me who are interested in getting results.
Unfortunately, many practitioners are missing out on the real benefits standing practice offers because of mis-information, missing information, lack of qualified instruction or all of the above.
Let’s take a look at the most common errors and misconceptions out there. If you are experiencing one or more of these issues correcting them will have a dramatic impact on your practice and achievements.
Problem #1 - Too Relaxed
The most common problem with standing practice I encounter these days is a collapsed frame. Often practitioners hear relax, relax, relax as the way to approach standing. While relaxation is very important, what to relax and how to relax are often missing bits of information. Without those bits it can be challenging to understand Standing.
The Method calls for a balance between the tense and loose not all of one and none of the other. Connective tissues need to be stretched and that stretching needs to be maintained throughout the practice. Musculature should be engage but contracted to a minimum (the relax bit) to allow for the potential contractive force to be used when/where needed.
Problem #2 - Standing Still
Standing practice requires constant internal adjustments, your are not supposed to stand perfectly still. Stability of the frame is achieved by constant change, unceasing micro adjustments to the flow of gravity.
Check out the tuned mass damper in the photo above. This weight hangs suspended inside a giant skyscraper, always counter balancing external forces action on the building. Our frame is much like this, albeit organic and located in our belly. Stasis for those of us above ground is never ceasing motion.
Problem #3 - No Intent
Connecting the body internally is a big step forward in standing practice, however, it does not stop there. The body’s structure must also be given a purpose, a motivation if you will to arrange itself to some objective. Intent is used to accomplish this. A practitioner may imagine pushing and pulling on a tree in the distance in order to induce a physiological change in her structure. Proper use of the intent organizes the countless bio-electrical signals from the brain to dynamically organize the structure to the purpose of the intent. In other words we must feelize, not just visualize, some purpose for our structure and manifest a change in feeling state as a result.
Problem #4 - Just Standing
To really get something from your standing practice recognize that it a the keystone of a complete method. There are many practices, exercises, tests and skills that need to be practiced so their results can be put back into standing practice itself.
This idea that you can just stand for countless hours until a fairy comes and sprinkles magic dust on your head granting you internal strength is just wrong. There is a method. In the method standing is the Alpha and Omega, meaning everything that is learned from standing is applied in other practices and what is learned from the other practices is applied to standing.
Standing practitioners should expect a return on their investment of time and effort. Fixing these common problems will make a huge difference in how the practice feels and what results are gained from the hours invested in it.