The handworks we have been practicing are meant to stimulate your hands, that makes your techniques clearer , more decisive, stronger, and perhaps cleaner. The weakness I have found in general is that your fingers, hands are not really working, are not really open, so I have given lots of emphasis to stimulate your hands more decisively, consciously, deliberately, . Once you can open your hands, then you have a strong grip. This balance, opposite power, based on same element. The more you can clearly open, the more you can clearly close your hands. That's what it is. So giving strong grip at moment of execution, momentarily, is always related to how you open your fingers clearly to begin with, in the technique. Because there are lots of opening of fingers in clear forms, Little finger is important.
So all those exercises are meant to work with your handblade, together with basic principals of body movement, which are mostly based on hips, from hip motion to footwork, not from footwork to hip. Because your center rotates, it expands to your foot.
You have to understand how important it is to establish this clear center in your body (draws a line from his head to his center) and then let it turn. (draws a circle in his hand) Then everything turns also. Because you don't have it, not yet, you have weaker sense of center physically, when you start to turn your energy scatters, gets split up, because there is no centralization. Do you understand what I said? Well I guess you people are some of the top students in America, I'm still saying you haven't got it. This is an area we have to work, we have to concentrate our work, the details of technique are not so important, once you get this centralization, turning motion/principle, clear hands, its pretty easy to learn technique. But if your study goes too much on detailed information as a technique, just as a form or art, you don't get too far.