Moving With Kua

I came to realise something last week while observing my teacher as he was explaining something to another student. It has to do with the evergreen issue of kua.

Sinking/relaxing/turning the kua is more than just that. We need to understand why we are doing it, which will eventually help us in being able to transfer the force from the legs to the hands. When my teacher sinks or turns his kua, the action is translated to his hands, i.e. when his kua moves, his whole body moves together, the hands move as well. He is able to use the turning motion of his kua to move his body, his shoulder, his elbow and his wrist. And because he is able to uniformly distribute the force throughout, there is no one location which is "heavier" than another, and thus there is no "edge" for me to leverage on against him. He is like a spinning sphere, touch him at any point and you get thrown away.

On the contrary, when I move my kua, I am unable to properly translate the force to my body and hands. The force is unevenly distributed along my arm (usually being heavier either at my wrist or my elbow) and thus, my opponent is able to leverage on that to return my force to me. I am like a spinning cube, there are points at which if you apply the force in the correct direction, you will be able to push me away.

So the lesson here is that we need to move using our kua, which helps us to distribute the force generated from our legs uniformly across our entire body so that we can become a spinning sphere. For example, when pushing, we move our body forward by pushing with our back leg. Towards the end of the push, we need to sink/relax our kua, but at the same time use that movement to continue pushing (by relaxing our shoulders, sinking the elbows and sitting down our wrists).