Push Hands Sensitivity: How Far You Can Go?

Find the smallest details.

I’ve written another post on the abilities that you can develop through push hands drills, but in the concluding article in this series on push hands, I want to explore just exactly how far you can go with push hands sensitivity.

When you first start out doing push hands drills, you have a sense of your opponents’ body, but it is often quite vague. You can’t make out a lot about what is going on inside your opponent.

Start with the big picture

After a bit of practice, you learn how to figure out big problems in your opponent’s structure.

Maybe they are leaning back to far or they are tense all through their shoulders.

When you get to an advanced level, all this has changed.

You can see the big picture, but you can also see a lot of detail as well.

Then learn to perceive the smallest detail

Imagine you are in the middle of a stadium. You can take in the stadium as a whole. However, you can also look at individual elements separately. You can look at the goal post, or at chair. Your you can look at one individual seat. You could even look at the lines painted on the stadium field to the point where you were looking at one particular blade of grass or even at one particular fleck of paint on the blade of grass.

This is the level of detail you can eventually achieve. You no longer sense only big problems. You also sense seemingly tiny flaws in a person’s structure. You learn to catch micro misalignments. You have the ability to spot even the tiniest bits of tension in muscles or internal organs.

There is a lot you can do with this kind of sensitivity both for combat purposes and for healing. Push hands takes time and practice, but it is well worth the effort.

Photo by: André Zehetbauer

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