Posture before Power

Let’s go over some thematic basics.  One of the first goals of Mo Duk Pai is to teach students an understanding of body mechanics – how to move their bodies to put maximum power into a strike.  It follows logically then that the first form we teach students (Mo Yee Do) is all about working on body mechanic to achieve maximum power.

Taking a step back from the idea of mechanics for power (or maybe it’s a step sideways or maybe even a step inside) let’s examine the idea of posture.  When attempting to teach a student good body mechanic, there has to be some starting point.  That starting point is: where will they throw the strike from?  To make things easy (this is, after all, a post about teaching beginners) we’ll start them from a place of good martial posture – spine straight, feet underneath them, hands up, elbows down.  One way to teach this good posture is to have students tell them their mother is watching… another more practical way is to have them hold a light weight (10-50 pounds) overhead.  With good posture, this kind of loading will feel fine.  With poor posture, it will hurt the back.  Most students will quickly find good posture.

The next step is to remove the weight and go back to the form and see if you can keep that same feeling you had while holding the weight overhead.

Thanks to Sifu Kyle for the class idea.