Fang Song 放松

Leaving out, not letting go

Fang Song (放松) literally means “letting loose”. In Yiquan it means a particular kind of relaxation, and Yao Zongxun puts it at the start of everything: “If there's no Fang Song, there's no Yiquan.” It decides, he says, whether a practitioner's skill is real or fake.

It does not mean letting everything drop. Andrzej Kalisz describes relaxation as removing the unnecessary tension: the muscles go on working, only less than usual. Standing in Zhan Zhuang takes some force, or you would fall over. Everything beyond that gets in the way.

Wang Xiangzhai describes the state with two images: soft outside “like flour mixed with water, like the body of a newly born baby”, alive and full inside. What is soft, then, is the surface, not the structure.

Between limp and rigid

Fang Song lies between two faults. Letting go too much makes you limp (松软): the body sags and the joints carry the load unprotected. Holding on too much makes you rigid (僵死): the muscles block one another. The formula for it runs “relaxed but not slack; firm but not stiff” (松而不懈，紧而不僵).

Tradition also puts it as an image of the body: the bones support, the flesh hangs like flowing water. And in practice Fang Song is the relaxed tiger lying in the sun, loose outside, ready inside at any moment.

Why Fang Song comes first

Yao Zongxun names three factors that cannot be separated in standing: Fang Song, directed intent (Yi Nian) and correct posture. Fang Song is the condition for the other two. His reason is simple: “If you are tense, your mind will never go through your body. Not even in a lifetime.” The image can only steer what lets itself be steered.

Without relaxation, standing turns into its opposite: “If you keep the Zhan Zhuang position with no Fang Song and Yi Nian, even five minutes can be very tiring, and instead of finding freedom you will build a physical and mental cage.”

Without Fang Song there is no whole-body force (Hun Yuan Li) either. Where one muscle works against another, shaped force falls back into raw muscular strength (→ Jin, Li and Qi).

How to get there

The Chen Akademie and Yu Yong Nian describe the same six ways independently:

• Mental relaxation before standing: gathering yourself deliberately.
• A relaxed face: almost smiling, but not quite.
• Through the out-breath: every few minutes two or three deeper breaths; the shoulders let go with the exhalation.
• Gentle micro-movement: tiny movements of two to five millimetres show where excess tension still sits, and release it.
• Active adjustment of posture: changing the posture slightly yourself when tingling or pressure appears.
• Passive adjustment of posture: the teacher supports, touches or gently rocks you.

Then there are images: a garden, warm wind on the skin, floating in water, a warm shower. Kalisz calls them tools you will later no longer need: “The deeper you go, the less you need.” Your own images are expressly allowed. Against the flood of thoughts Wang recommends letting each thought fall like a snowflake into a pot of hot water: the stronger the thought, the faster it melts.

Yu Yong Nian stresses that this is not passive switching off. Relaxation in standing comes from attentive observation of your own body, one place after another.

What happens in the body

There is no separate “relaxation nerve” for skeletal muscle. Muscle tone is partly co-regulated by the autonomic nervous system, through the sympathetic branch, which raises tone under load. A muscle loosens when that state of alert subsides, not because something is switched on (→ autonomic nervous system).

This fits Yiquan's instruction exactly: not doing more, but disturbing less. The lever of the out-breath has its counterpart here too: the pulse falls on the out-breath and rises again on the in-breath.

How to tell it is right

• The body feels heavy and full, as if filled with lead, and yet not tired.
• You feel as if you were sitting in the stance, carried by the image as by a chair.
• Movement feels like swimming in air.
• Pain is not a sign of progress but a pointer to tension, blockage or a faulty posture. The posture is then corrected, not endured.

Fang Song, Song and Song/Jin

The glossary has three terms side by side that are easily confused:

• Relaxation (Song, 松) is the general principle training starts with, together with the six ways towards it.
• Fang Song is the quality that is meant to arise from it: loose without going limp, the precondition for Yi Nian and whole-body force.
• Song/Jin (松紧) is the deliberate alternation between releasing and tensing. It presupposes Fang Song: whoever cannot release cannot alternate either.

Yao Chengguang puts it in one sentence for partner contact: “If you are slack it does not work; if you are too tense you cannot change.”

In contact

In Tuishou it shows what Fang Song is for. Only a relaxed body perceives the partner's fine changes of force at all (Ting Jin); someone who is tense mostly feels their own effort. And only someone who is not holding on can yield to an attack and redirect it in the same moment (Shun Li Ni Xing). Because the force does not first have to be freed from a cramp, the body answers sooner.