HINTS AND TIPS
for all those fancy, crazy, and impractical moves
I designed this page to help people out a bit if they want to learn how to do these things I do. Please bear in mind that no one becomes a Jet Li or a Jackie Chan without endless hours of often repetitious training. In other words, if you have no martial arts experience, you might want to think about going out and getting that first before you tackle stuff like flips, rolls, break falls, or whatever. Kind of like building the house before you put the shingles on the roof. Naturally I'm not responsible if you break your neck instead of your fall either. For a really comprehensive site on tricks, try the links page.
First, some general stuff. I can't say this next bit of advice too many times. Always with any new trick or thing your body wants to accomplish, the biggest hurdle will be psychological. The mind controls the body, not the other way around. If your mind decides that it cannot perform something, your body will prove your mind right. Of course the reverse is true as well: mind decides it can, body verifies. My mind often needs time to process stuff. Once I tried for hours to get to be able to do the kipup, and I couldn't. The next day I did it on the first try. It is my theory that during sleep the mind is able to see where the body is making errors and correct them. In general it is best if at all possible to get thoughts out of the way, as they will simply distract the body. The Japanese samurai used this practice in battle, they called it no-mind. Many other martial arts advocate this idea in one way or another. Techniques should allow the body to flow like water with a minimum of effort.
Now, on to the specifics. I've tried to categorize it a bit, but things do overlap.
Kipup - performed rising quickly to the feet from a lying down position using the abs, shoulder, and neck muscles
- Work your abs, make them strong
- Make sure you have a soft surface to practice on
- Roll backwards onto your neck, then use your neck and shoulder muscles to push off the ground
- The power is generated when the body goes from an upward facing C shape (in the roll back) to a downward facing one (in the push-off)
- No matter what, it takes alot of practice, and the ability to deal with a sore neck the next day
Twist Flip - Like a cartwheel only the feet land facing forward (not backward like in a roundoff)
- Get the cartwheel down first
- Use your hips to rotate your body around to where you want it to go
- It is essential to land forward if you want to link this flip to another one
Front Flip - Flip the body forward toward the front with no twisting (technically a front handspring if you use your hands)
- Rotate around your center of gravity, not your hands, rotating around the hands is not advised (unless you are trying to do a break fall) because it leads to that painful "whump" of you landing on your back
- That means you have to rotate high up in the air! Get higher!
- Commit, don't be a pansy
- Be prepared to land on your butt quite a few times - soft surface to train on is nice
- Be effortless, all the effort is in your mind trying to do it rather than doing it
- Use your hands at first unless you want to kill yourself
Windmill Kick - legs kick in a circle to bring you from lying down to standing
- Its kind of like two lying down crescent kicks
- Kick with your strong side first
- If you watch carefully, the part where you get up is just a backwards shoulder roll, so work on that
- Your legs moving in a circle generates the power to get you to your feet, use it
- It's essential to move without stopping in this technique, otherwise you diminish your power
And soon to come ... back flips, wall flips, and more crazy stuff!
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