so, having had a chance to chew over my having spent some time w/si-hing Mike, a few thoughts…
I think one thing that is interesting about how kahp choih occurs when “borrowed” by styles other than lama, is that you see the difference in terms of what a technique looks like / how it’s used in context of an overall approach versus when transferred in and of itself;
in other words, in Lama, kahp does not exist in a vacuum, and as such the potential for doing it “incorrectly” is simply not an option - that is, it is predicated by what techniques come before it and after it; so you have the paired bin / kahp combo: if you do bin (what I do in the vid before throwing the kahp) first, there is really almost no way that you can end up doing kahp any other way than the way lama does it - the momentum that bin initiates and which kahp takes advantage of, by necessity has to terminate in a “side-bow” stance; if you tried it any other way, it would just feel wrong; OTOH, if the lead-in technique was more linear, then you could conceivably do a kahp w/less rotation - but once you do it “the lama way” (:rolleyes:), you understand why that is preferable to other approaches, IMPE; perhaps what is being suggested here, is that instead of looking at kahp as a single technique, we really need to look at bin / kahp as a single concept, at least initially, because of how they operate together - then, once having understood this, one can isolate the component parts and use them as needed, but never completely alone - if you look at how Mike uses kahp in the vid, you will “see” that even though he doesn’t throw a bin first, his core body mechanics function as if he did - had we not learned / practiced bin / kahp as a pair, we would look very different throwing kahp alone (this follows the general concept of large to small: as a beginner, we do things very big, large circles; as we become proficient and move towards mastery, the circles get smaller, and, dare i say it, more “internal” ::o); so if someone from another system appropriated kahp based on observing how a master practitioner used it, he might have not gotten exactly how important the coupling with bin was…
similarly, what follows kahp in many cases is the combination fan po / paoh (ok Mike, topic for next vid here): not surprisingly, this combo takes whatever momentum is “left over” from kahp and redirects it along the arc of the sphere that conserves it maximally - meaning that it not only tries to optimize the continuity of flow, it also helps prevent injury to the body during practice (in case you didn’t notice, kahp looks an awful lot like a baseball pitch, and carries with it similar risks of rotator cuff trauma over time if done incorrectly - following with fan po / pauh is a “remedy” to the forces acting on the RTC); also, in a way, fan po / paoh sort of acknowledges the inherent dangers of a kahp “gone bad”, for example, one that has been evaded, and assuming that having done so the opponent would try to quickly close the distance: so the fan po / pao helps to change your line to evade, and also to create a counter-attack based on a charging opponent (again, hard to talk about it, easier to see…)
interesting to think about the lama like this after a hiatus of some time…
