How To Train Our Agility

Agility embodies youthfulness, optimism, and cheerfulness. Regardless of age, everyone likes to be more agile. Agility is also associated with the alertness of the mind, the quick response, and the witty humor.

Is agility a born physical asset, or is it a physical quality that can be trained? Like flexibility, Dr. Hu believes that agility can be acquired through proper qigong training - especially through practicing Wild Goose Qigong.

Actually you can find enough practicing materials for training one’s agility in Wild Goose-III (Kunlun Bagua), Wild Goose-V (Soft Palm), Wild Goose-VI (Patting Along the Meridians), Wild Goose-VII (Back Stretching Qigong), Wild Goose-VIII (Five Elements & Bagua), and Wild Goose-X (Wild Goose Palms).

In this short article, we limit our discussion of agility training to what we are going to teach in our coming workshop on March 11, 2006. During this workshop, we are going to learn the first half of WG-III (Kunlun Bagua) and WG-V (Soft Palm).

I. Kunlun Bagua Qigong - Training of body parts coordination

Please observe how this qigong uses the simple turning over of the palms, and the natural left and right turn of the body to train our upper and lower body coordination. So long as you can shift your body weight in an effortless way, you’ll feel that the turning of your body becomes smooth and easy. That is what we usually call: “Your body is getting more agile”.

Now let me explain this point from a little different perspective. Please pay close attention to the coordination of the body movements. Whenever we move one arm, always balance it with the movement of the other arm or with the movement of one leg. Never forget the center-periphery relationship. We need to have two arms moving simultaneously, or one arm and one leg moving together, in order to form a periphery. Otherwise, we won’t feel the centers. And this is our first step in agility training.

II. Soft Palm Qigong -Training of the relaxed and soft palms

Soft palms are required if we want to relax our whole body deeply inside and out. Why? Soft palms help to open up the “Inner Pass” acu-point above the wrist (PC-6), which in turn, can bring our energy into our center (lower dan-tian) through our arm and our Conception Vessel. At the same time, soft palms opens the 12 meridians through letting more qi go through all the tips of our fingers and even to our toes, which are the extremities of all the 12 meridians. And once we have more awareness of the fingers and toes, it will be easier for us to locate the body centers.

In other words, through the simple relaxing and softening training of our palms, we can achieve our goal of letting all parts of our body be more connected, and our body movements be more agile.

To be specific, we train our palms to be relaxed and soft while practicing the following 3 kinds of movements:

1) Walking forward in circular steps, and also in Tai Chi Symbol Bagua Steps, ( as in Movements 10-13; 19-22).

2) Walking backward (as in Movements 8-9; 14-18).

3) Gradually build up the tension in one’s palms and suddenly release it (as in Movements 23-28).

If you like to train your body and mind agility in a delightful and fun-filled way, you would like our Wild Goose way of training through body coordination and through the training of making your palms relaxed and soft.