Peace

Principle: Listen: Peng and Body Leads the Hand

Peng, Chen's armor, is not unusual in the martial arts world. It's a feature of any high-level practitioner teaching internal or external styles and a must for those styles that allow the exchange of blows or throws. What's unique about Taiji and Chen's armor is that intermediate practitioners who lack the skill to apply it in self-defense can acquire it purely for health.

Peng is commonly characterized as inflated energy that absorbs and redirects an attacker's power. Its expansion quality prevents an opponent's force from penetrating your outer defense, reaching your core, and injuring you. In Chinese culture, Peng is the body's protective "Chi."

The concept is correct, but as Eastern and Western medicine overlap, the Western perspective is something to add. As an important centering and alignment technique in Chen's Taiji, Body Leads the Hand, allows the body to position itself before the hand reaches its position in a movement. Yet, in Chen's it has the deeper function of uniquely sensitizing the skin to create Peng, body armor without sparing, being hit or thrown to the ground.

Having achieved a visible degree of emptiness and relaxation, listening using the body leads the hand for health, finalizes work on the integumentary system, the skin, by firming and strengthening the structure of the body's loose connective tissue:

"Loose connective tissue includes reticular and dense connective tissue, also known as fibrous tissue, subdivided into dense regular and irregular connective tissue.

Dense regular connective tissue, found in structures such as tendons and ligaments, is characterized by collagen fibers arranged in an orderly parallel fashion, giving it tensile strength in one direction. Dense irregular connective tissue provides strength in multiple directions through dense bundles of fibers arranged in all directions."

In addition, the slow stretching and twisting in all directions required with body leads the hand technique work on these deeper, loose skin layers to produce the Elastin protein. Elastin is highly elastic and present in the body's connective tissue. It allows the skin to return to its original position and shape after stretching, contracting, or being poked, pinched, or punched.

High concentrations of Elastin strengthen the body so that an individual can take a fall or blow without injury. Its important load-bearing function is heightened when relaxation occurs since body support is transferred to the facia when nervous tension is relieved from the muscles.

Elastin is the substance Chen's armor is made of and a storage house for mechanical energy necessary in martial arts, but more on this in the Push Hands section.