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This is probably my favourite Aunkai exercise so far. It looks a lot like a standard Qigong exercise but is actually quite unique. This is a video of the exercise being performed:

There are a number of things to focus on:

• The hips can be visualised as a basin.
• The spine plugins into the basin.
• The arms are like a funnel (that pours into the basin).
• The legs form a counterpart to the arms (an inverted funnel if you like).

When coming up the visualisation is that the hands pull the body (this is a very Aunkai kind of idea). There is a focus on keeping the spine vertical all the way down. In my practice I accept that it’s not reasonable for me to keep the spine vertical the whole way down but that is the intention - you can see that Ark keeps his spine very straight and vertical the whole way through.

If you’re doing these correctly you shouldn’t be able to do more than 6 or 7 without a break. These are one of those things where the exercise becomes more difficult as you become better at doing it.

Update: there are more details here and here on the Martial Movement wiki - worth checking out if you’ve not seen it.

On Qigong

I said at the start that this is like a kind of qigong exercise. I have a habit that sometimes gets me confused and in trouble of seeing similarities between different kinds of training and different exercises - it can be very useful but also leads to me misunderstanding the intention behind some exercises. That is a kind of disclaimer because I’m going to say that this Aunkai exercise reminds me of the following qigong from Hun Yuan Tai Chi:

(Note: I’m not talking about the circles - the qigong movement starts somewhere around 40s in).

The similarities are obvious, I think, whether they are simply external or there is some similarity in the intentions behind the exercises too I’m not sure (the visualisation I learnt for the Hunyuan exercise is very different but even so…).

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