How to Harness the Weight of the Wing Chun Pole? — Work Like a Chinese-style Balance Weighing Scale
In the post Adhesively Wrap-hold a Weapon — Hold It Sticky, I wrote: “…… to make the weapon a natural extension of your arm(s) and effectively a part of your body, but not leave it just as an external weight to struggle with.” How can you not struggle with the weight of the pole?
To answer this question, we need an operational definition. I would propose that if you can always move the pole via its centre of gravity (CoG), the effort spent will be the least and will not be consumed in fighting against the weight of the pole; thus at such a state there is no struggle with the weight of the pole.
I hope it is agreeable to you to start with as I don’t want to discuss it here due to limited space. (Do let me know if my proposition is not valid.)
One more presumption: The pole is of the Wing Chun type, which is generally long and heavy, such that it won’t be easy for you to harness it just by arms’ strength. As a reference, the poles in my Sifu’s training venue are in the ranges of around 10 feet long and 4 to 6 pounds heavy.
Imagine you are holding the midpoint of the pole (its CoG) with the right hand. The weights of the left and right halves are then equal (although the actual pole is larger at the head and going smaller up to the tail, let’s make it simple by assuming its weight is evenly distributed). It can be described in another way: Assuming you are right-handed and thus the right side is your focus, the left half of the pole is balancing out its right half.
The entire right arm allows the weight of the pole to naturally descend to the lowest level due to gravity. This is when your right arm is being let loose at its full length like a rope (vertically) hanging the pole at its middle. It is also the moment you use the least effort to keep the pole like that — no excessive effort, no struggle. We can also say: controlling the pole’s CoG is an effective way of controlling the pole.
Suppose now the pole “moves” one foot to the right, keeping horizontal. If you want to keep controlling its CoG, your right arm has to follow suit by sticking it out rightward, making the hand one foot away from the body. Now the arm can no longer be loosely hanging vertically downward; there must be some non-vertical pulling forces in action to support the hand’s distant position that will make your body tense, most obviously at the right shoulder and arm.
Imagine this alternative.
Your right hand doesn’t go one foot rightward but remains at the original hanging position. The pole’s CoG has gone one foot rightward and upset the balance between the left and right portions (no more halves). Effectively the right portion is now two feet longer than the left portion (the right is lengthened by one foot and the left is shortened by one foot too), and thus is two-foot-weight heavier — the left can no longer balance out the right as before.
To restore the balance, you add an extra weight onto the left portion, by increasing downward force with your left arm there, exactly like a Chinese-style balance weighing scale, the hanging support point of which is far off the middle of its rod, made horizontal by the weights put on the measuring pan. (In reality, the measuring pan contains the stuff to be weighed, i.e. to be balanced by the longer portion of the rod and properly the weights added there when necessary. Here I have interchanged the roles of the longer and shorter portions to suit the operation of the pole.)
The pole is now restored to the horizontal position, and what could this imply?
By adding an extra weight onto the left portion, the right hand at the arm’s original vertically hanging position becomes the CoG again! It is not the CoG of the bare pole, but the CoG of an (imaginative) extended pole with two feet longer on each side (of course, the two feet on the left half, and we can call it “half” again, is imaginative and thus virtual), resulting in an overall increase of four-foot-weight. Let’s call it the “resultant CoG” of the “extended pole”. And of course, your right hand is now bearing four-foot-weight more in total to hold the “resultant CoG”.
We can then say that the right arm is still at its loosely hanging position, controlling the “resultant CoG” with no excessive effort and no struggle, but just enough for holding the longer (by four feet) and heavier (by four-foot-weight) pole.
Let’s use this lens to view and describe the first two drills.
In reality you hold onto the left end of the pole (right-handed assumed). Let’s assume your right hand, when your right arm is loosely hanging down, is now three feet from the original CoG (the midpoint) of the pole. Applying the above framework, with an extra weight added by your left hand to restore the pole to horizontal, effectively your right hand is now controlling the “resultant CoG” of an “extended pole” with six feet longer and six-foot-weight heavier than the material pole.
To perform the first drill, the joints in your right arm rotate accordingly (refer to the post The First Two Drills for Pole Training — Only Joint Rotating) to send the pole, the “extended pole”, up and down. Note that your right hand can keep travelling along the vertical (more or less) line immediately next to your body, because the left half (virtual) has balanced out the right half (material), meaning that the “resultant CoG” doesn’t unnecessarily derail, without causing any non-vertical movements and thus not inflicting any non-vertical pulling to your right arm and shoulder.
Similarly, for the second drill, your right hand keeps travelling along the horizontal line from the right shoulder heading sharply to the front. The “resultant CoG” doesn’t unnecessarily derail, without inflicting any non-frontal pulling.
This framework enables a new thinking: To keep the pole at its horizontal, you are not to calculate and juggle how much to pull or push at the left and right hands, attempting to balance out the forces between them in order to reach an equilibrium. A balance in this way is relatively shaky.
What you should aim at is to always keep your right hand “still” (relative to the left hand) at the “resultant CoG” by only “adding” enough weights by your left hand at the left end of the pole, again, functioning like the Chinese-style balance weighing scale. There is no pull or push in the right hand. Nevertheless, the right hand does move, but only when it wants to move the “resultant CoG” (thus bringing along the entire “extended pole”) to a new position, not for finding the “resultant CoG” (striking the balance for the horizontal position), but for attack.
Always keeping the “resultant CoG” at the right hand (right-handed assumed) when moving the pole means no struggle with the weight of the pole.
