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I asked Brendan this question via email a while back and was asked to post it on the forum for others to see as well: How can power be transmitted/conducted through a completely relaxed system, and can you elaborate on what is meant by relax completely? As in, when I stand my muscles direct the force of falling into a particular shape. They pull on the ground’s upward force on my frame and lever things into position. It seems a big part of the martial training is to develop a deep sense of which muscles are dealing transmitting this force effectively and into the right shapes for a task and which ones are detracting from it through excess, erroneous tension. Specifically working on developing this sense in squatting type actions has yielded some pretty cool insights in to head movement and dodging, at least in the domain of how to move my head quickly and relate the force directly to the pressure just in front of my heels. I guess it seems that the process has been to let the lower body work more and feel the work more and let the upper body do less work and feel less of the work (work here meaning the feeling of effort/exertion, however minor) but obviously that’s saying something different than “relax completely”.
I guess my question is, should the objective here be to work towards complete relaxation in this manner of decreasing tension in areas where it’s ineffective and directing that effort to where it will be most effectively used by the body shape? Or is there an experience I should be searching for that exists apart from this feeling of effort in all ways?