HL1978

I guess I will respond to my own post, and perhaps some people with more experience can chime in and correct me. This is how I currently understand how this exercise should be preformed, and not the official Aunkai explanation.

Upper body

The arm should extend forwards much along the same way as in the Aunkai agete and pushout exercises. Now while one could pop someone back easily in those exercises by developing a lot of shoulder muscles and lower back strength or by leaning into their opponent and likewise apply that same strength to power the extension, you could hardly call that "internal power."

Now when I say extending the arm like in agete/pushout I am referring to the following. The shoulders should not rise, but instead stay dropped. If the shoulders rise up, they get isolated and start engaging. The elbows should be pulled downwards, but with the feeling as though they are rested on a table and "pushing off of" the table. Now what this will lead to is a very big arc/large range of motion as the arm extends outwards. That is to say the spear will sort of drop downwards as it goes forwards and is raised up much like as if you swung a weight on a string. Simply bending the arm upwards to initiate the motion engages the biceps, while moving in this manner seems to keep the weight of the spear as part of the body rather than something being lifted by the body in isolation. The same above description applies to agete and pushout, with pushout in particular looking more like this sort of extension.That is to say if the arm extends outwards in a straight line from its starting point, it is not correct.

For a dantien driven model, I honestly have no idea how you can utilize the dantien to extend an arm forwards. This does not mean that it can't be done, but merely that my level of understanding does not permit me to definitively say wether it can or can not be done and if so, how one goes about doing it. I do know that the extended arm should be rotated, but I am fairly confidient that it is NOT the arm itself which should be the initatior of the rotation.

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lower body

Now I did this exercise wrong on so many levels, but after attending a seminar with Forrest Chang I think I have a slightly better understanding of what you should be doing.

When one watches this exercise they will see the rear leg rotating as the bodyweight transits from back to front. What I was doing wrong was I was merely rotating that rear leg in coodination with the weight shift while pushing off the rear foot. What I do instead is that I pull myself forwards with the forwards leg and close the forwards side hip. I assume this is powered by the psoas muscles referenced above as I feel the inner thigh and hip area muscles engaging. At the same time, rather than pushing off the rear foot and rotating it, that hip area does the opposite of the forwards side and opens up. The result is that this closing on one side and opening on the other turns my upper body and leg. Thus the rotation propagates from the middle of the body on out, rather than the limbs turning the middle of the body.

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Conclusion:

Now the above description is still a muscle based method of moving the body, just using the muscles in a different manner than how I originally preformed the exercise. It feels stronger, but I can not say for sure if this is how the exercise should be correctly preformed. It just seems slightly more correct with better coodination than my previous approach. As my experience increases I am sure I will see this exercise differently.