What is a piquan?

[Locu5]

That is pretty much consistent with the xingyi I learned at SD. They separated each element into a road that isolated the particular motion. Some made more sense than others, and my earth always sucked.

[Nid]

My dog has been known to piquan the floor in unfamiliar interiors.

[DCS]

And Kein Haar wins the thread.

[Pandinha]

And Kein Haar wins the thread.

Kein Haar would be the expert in what is happening in that picture, and movie, as he has probably done it more times than any of us.

[Nid]

Mmmm...not piquan. Well...yes, I guess, in a sense, I've managed to pull off piquan every day without even knowing it (now that Omar has explained it). On the beer bottle (a twisting variety), with my wife (a naked variety which...eh...hard to explain) etc.

On a serious note, I'm gonna keep both the featured LVPD piquans in the back of my mind. Particuarly the piquan I posted. More than anything, people turn away, bend at the waist and tighten up.

[nomamao]

I don't know about the whole pi quan thing here, because from what I saw, it looked like he shoots for the throat in a completely different stance, and then changes legs AFTER the throat is grabbed.

So, that picture of pi quan is really not what we witnessed in the video at all.

The guy charged forward using his right hand, and his right foot was BEHIND him when the contact was made, and THEN he changed his footing. Hand and foot did not act at the same time.

Therefore, from what I've read here, it's not the pi quan move that's in the picture.


Am I seeing something wrong?

[Teh El Macho]

It's osoto otoshi. A "drop" rather that "reap".

Tomas

Agh, you are teh correct. I was just going from the position of the cop's feet from the still pic



I finally watched the full clip, though. It's a drop, preceded with a lunge, practically running over the dude. Nice.

[Bugeisha]

The thing is, it's not really relevant which foot is forward for piquan- it can be either. Piquan isn't ONE technique, it's a way of moving where your energy arcs forward, up and down. The emphasis, in my limited understanding, is on the forward and down at the end of the motion. So the piquan frame can be a strike, or a throw, or whatever fits the situation. The picture of the old man is just showing the base of piquan; the platonic form in beginning xingyi practice, as Omar said. I don't think Omar's point with the cop video was to say that that cop trained xingyi and was performing a textbook piquan, but just to show an example of how the type of motion that piquan describes is applied in the real world, agaisnt resistance.

Tomiki Aikido's shomenate is another example of the piquan type of motion, as far as I understand it.

The five elements in xingyi are not techniques; they're patterns of motion which encompass subgroups of specific techniques. Piquan striked forward and down in an arc. A lot of individual techniques can fit that pattern. And the individual techniques will be drilled as well; the elements are just the base, the substructure.

[nomamao]

Well, by that definition, I don't know if I can say it's even a piquan, because the attacker is only applying a forward press, and doesn't even start the downward press on his own. The victim is the one that applies the downward motion. The cop only stays on him, rather than just standing there.

That's what it looks like to me. I may be wrong, I don't know. But there's no real press downward from the attacker from what I see.

[Bugeisha]

It's hard to tell from the video, for me. The downward and through press in shomenate feels like "seating the wrist" more than actually pushing, to me. It's more like making your hand "heavy" if that makes sense, than getting above the target and pushing it down. I don't know if that holds true for the xingyi piquan, but I suspect it does as a possiblity, if not being the most common application of the movement involved.

I also want to mention that my understanding of this sort of thing has come through playing with people who practice it, rather than through long-term study. I got my education on shomen ate by asking a tomiki aikidoka about it while visiting his dojo in Himeji. My time with piquan comes partly from playing with a baji/xingyi teacher around the corner from my dojang, from learning the baguazhang piquan from He Jinbao a while back, and from similar ideas in my taiji practice.

So I'm not an expert; this is just what I've observed, and what I've felt when I've been hit with these things. The downward motion with the shomenate probably wasn't visible, but I certainly felt it.