What I am trying to depict in this post may be considered to be too imaginative, prone to be criticised as unrealistic and in fact unnecessary. However, it appears to me as something can’t be omitted should the exposition of the point-linked mechanism be completed, as it manifests the gist and essence of the mechanism. So here it is and I’ll keep the explanation as simple as possible.
There are multi-directional forces at the contact. But harmonising the many directions into one unified, instant effect is nearly impossible in the reality of combat where speed highly matters. On this, I have proposed that you should avoid engaging with the opponent’s line of force at the contact, so as to give yourself a guiding intent for operating the multi-directions.
However, when the idea of “avoid” comes to the fore, it will easily result in holding back your power already exerting on the opponent – an unwise move exposing more openings vulnerable to immediate attack.
A more workable intent is to “wrap around the contact”. Before proceeding, let’s imagine a scene of “going around a corner”.
When you go around a corner, you don’t try to alter the position of the corner. You can go around it effectively by shortening the distance in-between as much as you wish. If the distance is shortened to “zero”, you are in touch with the corner throughout the going-around movement but you are still not altering its position, i.e. you will never cut the corner. Going as such, it can be described as: you are wrapping around the corner.
Thus by “wrapping”, in-between space is being minimised, ideally to be none, during which the two parts in contact are being “tightly” kept together.
In the context of forearm contact, the hard contact of the opponent presses your soft contact which has been equipped with multi-directional forces. The hard contact is relatively rigid. The extent of change in its area and shape is small. On the other hand, your soft contact behaves as a spongy and elastic surface. The extent of change in its area and shape is larger, meaning that there are more points available for contact within the area, albeit small.
The hard contact of the opponent is analogous to the corner. Your soft contact (a spongy and elastic surface) wraps around it (tightly kept together) without displacing its current position (not cutting the corner). Note the word “around”. Although the area in contact is small, you don’t treat the corner as angled and sharp. It is always “rounded” in your mind. And this is made possible by the presence of the spongy, elastic and flexible area that provides more points for contact when wrapping, reflecting the effect of multi-directional forces at play.
While the wrapping movement doesn’t displace the hard contact, the position of the latter will still alter as a result of microscopic deflection brought about by multi-directional forces (see the post What’s Happening at Forearm Contacts? – Microscopic Deflection). The overall effect on the hard contact: adhesive and sticky.
The ability of applying the wrapping intent is highly dependent on the performance of the wrist-palm structure (the intent of curving and the umbrella analogy, see the post Palm Dynamics – the Umbrella Analogy), because it directly affects the dynamics in the forearm interaction – it defines how spongy and elastic, and how active the contact area can be. (Details are not elaborated here so as to maintain simplicity of this post.)
With the wrapping intent on, your movements can be described in the following way: The body momentum in its entirety as obtained from the point-linked structure “rolls” onto the two contact areas (simultaneously) to make my soft contacts wrap around the hard contacts of the opponent. The overall effect is that my soft contacts always adhere to the opponent’s hard contacts – very sticky – while the opponent is almost not able to put up force on me due to constant microscopic deflection at the contacts.
2019.04.06
IdeasWingChun 