Bear Swaying is one of the typical movements of Health Qigong · Wu Qin Xi and a key point that is rather difficult to grasp for the exercisers. According to the movement characteristics and technical requirements of Bear Swaying, we divide Bear Swaying movement into three stages: hip-lifting, setting foot on the ground and forward leaning, and backward sitting. It is expected to understand various key points for practicing this movement while exploring the change rules of body gravity center in these stages.  

Hip-lifting Stage

Hip-lifting stage refers to the process of starting Bear Swaying to lifting left hip to the highest point. The technical requirements of hip-lifting stage are: the exerciser’s lifting-side hip should be lifted steadily and slowly and the increase of gravity center of the exerciser’s body should also be even and slow.

We can see from the biomechanical analysis and observation that, the common mistakes of the beginners in doing hip-lifting movement are mainly embodied in the fluctuation of gravity center height during hip-lifting stage. The changes of gravity center height during hip-lifting stage mainly depend on the supporting leg, waist posture and height. The hip-lifting-side waist muscles must be tightened while doing hip-lifting movement, thus to ensure the steady rise of body gravity center by driving leg with hip. The reason for making mistakes of the beginners is often due to the bending in the knee-joint of the supporting leg. The bending of the supporting leg descends the body gravity center that is not conducive to releasing force of hip-lifting-side waist; and the supporting leg changes from bending to unbending needs to resort to the reaction force of the ground, which makes the body gravity center height increase substantially during the unbending process and leads to instability of hip-lifting movement, thus producing correlation effect.  

It is well known that the force is the reason for changing the motion of a body, and Bear Swaying movement also obeys this law. The accurate hip-lifting movement should the result of using the waist muscle to release force and drive the movement of hip joint, and then driving the leg movement by hip joint, and naturally relaxing knee and ankle joints. The strength of the entire hip-lifting movement is a process of passing through hip, knee, ankle joints, and transmitting from the middle of the body towards the extremities successively, so as to achieve the control on the extremities and maintain stable changes of body gravity center.

（By Bian Junyi）