We are up and running!
We are good to go at the new blog site above! Many, many, thanks to wujimon for making that happen. I was having a whole mess of problems with the new blog, but he cleared them all up really quickly. Xiexie ni!
I’ll be sending out emails later to ask everyone to please switch over their links on the blogrolls.
I would also like to ask everyone to direct their browsers and favorites over to the new site. I will stop checking the comments, etc. on this blog very soon.
Unfortunately, the comments from the posts here did not survive the transition to the new blog. The posts made it but not the comments. What I will do is keep the old blog up for reference and reserve the option of taking it down later. I really don’t want people making comments on posts here instead of the new site. So I will take this site down evetually.
Okay. Thanks for your support. You guys have been great.
I hope to see all of you at the new and improved blog!
New blog, new possibilities, new problems
That’s the address of the new blog. There isn’t much to see right now, but I put up a little teaser post to get you guys excited.
I’m working hard on the technical aspects of getting the blog set up. I need it to be up and running by Monday. If it isn’t perfect by then, I’ll just start posting over there and save the old posts from this blog on my hard drive.
This is turning into a major pain in the rear, but I think the effort will be worth it.
So please redirect your browsers to the new site. Thanks!
See you there!
Big changes for the blog
I’m hoping to move the blog to a dedicated server this week. Starting next week, I won’t have much time to do the technical aspects of blog maintainence, so this is the week to move.
I’m also trying to set up a video page over at Youtube to store some of the vid clips that I have. Yikes! Lots to do, so please bear with me! The new sites will be a big improvement.
Some background graphics I’m playing with:
Training with the seasons
It dawned on me today just how much the seasons affect my training. When fall approaches, my body naturally wants to conserve a bit of energy by cutting back on lots of sweat-inducing practice in favor of standing, meditation, qigong, etc. This naturally follows the cycles of nature.
Qigong/TCM theory stipulates that we are part of our environment and that what happens inside the body is mirrored by what happens outside the body. Internal and external events are connected.
After all, animals naturally hibernate or slow down physical activity when winter approaches. They also store food or fat for winter, clear signs that the seasons are changing.
As an IMA practitioner, I’ve always felt the pull to do the same when I feel the first autumn breeze.
I went outside today to practice, but I didn’t feel much like doing anything strenuous. I stopped for a moment, closed my eyes and stood there quietly. The wind blew through the leaves on the trees. The city was mostly quiet even though it wasn’t early morning. My shorts and t-shirt seemed inadequate for the temperature for the first time in a long time. I naturally felt a bit calmer than normal.
All these signs pointed to a change in the weather and a natural shift in training. It’s time to slow down and practice even more internally than usual.
Just curious, does anyone else change their training depending on the season?
Sparring pt.3: the analogies of the pyramid and the tree
People usually compare learning MA to building a house, a useful analogy in most cases.
But when it comes to sparring, I think other analogies might help us see the picture more clearly.
Think of a pyramid, for example. If you want a pyramid to be really high, you need a really wide base. Sometimes I see people who claim to do IMA as fighting arts laying a really, really wide base of skills before they move on to anything else up the continuum I talked about in pt. 2 of my sparring series. They practice standing, forms, etc. for years and often enough, never move up the continuum because they haven’t perfected the lower level skills yet. They spend so much time building the base, that they never get to the rest of the pyramid.
Now think of a tree. It grows roots and then a trunk, then branches and, in some cases fruit. But as it continues to live, the roots also grow, as does the trunk and the other parts. In other words, no part of the tree must be the biggest it will ever get BEFORE all the other parts grow and take the shape. The base of the tree simply expands (the roots too) as the tree matures.
Now think of training IMA like that. Foundational training is done, but it doesn’t have to be perfected to the Nth degree before students can move on to basic practices of material up the curriculum. After all, forms, push hands and sparring all have basic practices. In fact, IT’S ALL BASIC until you get good at it, regardless of the amount of time that you’ve spent training foundational material. What I mean is that there is basic push hands practice just as there is advanced push hands. There is basic sparring just as there is advanced. Thing is, you get better at all this stuff BY DOING IT. And remember, skill at one part of the curriculum does not necesaarily imply skill in the other parts.
I would suggest that students be allowed to move on to new material or new foci in training once they are able to manifest say 80% of the desired attribute or have that level of proficiency in material. Obviously, that judgement is subjective and is the teacher’s call. My point is that if people are training for peng, structure, relaxation, etc. it would be a better idea for the teacher to have the student train to that level and move on to new material while the student seeks to perfect the material beyond the 80% mark on their own. Gains in any attribute trained come quicker at the beginning and then progress slows as training that attribute continues. We would do best to take advatage of that curve and let students seek perfection (if they can attain that) on their own time.
I think this is more realistic and rewarding training. Chasing endless degrees of structure or peng, etc. before people are allowed to do anything else is a terrible idea IMO.
So let’s take taiji, for example. Many schools train short forms, some schools train multiple short forms. Most Chen schools also teach multiple forms, even multiple frames with various forms. That’s a lot of forms! MUST we wait until a student has learned all those forms AND multiple weapon sets BEFORE basic sparring can take place? IN most places, the answer is yes. WHY? It’s ridiculous.
Instead, perhaps basics could be taught along with the short form. When the short form is then learned, less class time should be spent on it. What class time is spent should focus on improving it. But freed up classtime could be spent on basic push hands and application practice of the moves in the short form. Then basic sparring could be introduced so that students could actually APPLY the applications from the short form. (Why do teachers who teach “applications” usually fail to teach how to actually APPLY them?)
At that point, students would then have a basis in fundamentals, form, push hands, and sparring. That basis in the various elements of taiji could then be improved over time.
This follows the tree analogy. Basic training (the root) need not be perfected to the Nth degree before form training (the trunk) takes place. Form need not be perfect before push hands (the limbs) and then sparring (the fruit) take place. We allow our practice (the whole tree) to grow as needed over time.
Sparring, pt.2
Lots of good discussion on my last sparring post. So much so, that I think we need a series of posts to deal with the topic.
One thing that I think needs to be made clear is the place in the continuum of training that hard sparring occupies.
Consider the following continuum:
normal standing–MA stancework–stationary technique training–footwork patterns–moving single technique practice–forms–stationary push hands/chi sao–moving push hands/chi sao–light sparring–hard sparring/fighting
To use an analogy, I would consider the beginning of the continuum as the shallow end of the pool and the opposite end as the deep end. Notice that the continuum starts with something that anyone who wants to train can do — just stand there. The opposite end shows what only a trained combat athlete can do.
One of the problems that I see is that a lot of people that play down at the shallow end of the pool pretend that what they do will work equally well at the deep end. It’s like someone who can stand in the shallow end of a pool and perhaps do the dog paddle a little bit looking at the deep and saying “Yeah, I could go there if I wanted to.” Ha! If you go to the deep end, you better know how to swim!
So think of the number of people that play at the shallow end for the majority of their training time: doing stance work, silk reeling, forms, single technique practice, etc. All of those things are CRUCIAL, it’s true. But they aren’t the same as hard sparring!
Simply put, the whole (hard sparring/fighting) is not just the sum of the parts (stances, exercises, techniques, etc.).
Sure, stances, techniques, etc. are the building blocks needed to shape and mold a fighter. But they aren’t even close to hard sparring/fighting by themselves.
This is called the genetic fallacy BTW: the belief that since B comes from A, then B must be A. That’s false. No one is going to confuse a piles of bricks with a house, I hope.
And yet, we get lots of people that imply that because they can stand in ways that people can’t easily push them over or they can manifest peng continuously throughout their form, that they can fight. It’s simply not the case, folks.
Tests of skill at one end of the spectrum show skill at that particular end and should not be confused with skill at the opposite end.
At this point, I’m very tempted to bring up the video of Chen Xiao-wang’s encounter with a certain Taiwan XYQ-BGZ guy. That’s a pretty clear example of having deep skills at certain things without those skills necessarily translating up the continuum. I won’t provide the video because I don’t want this to turn into a debate about it, per se.
For fighting arts, the whole point of training is to move to the deep end of the continuum.
Spending time on the constituent parts is necessary, but the training MUST move to the opposite end at some point for fighting skills to be gained.
That was why I mapped out my training with my CLF teacher, and that’s why I said that hard sparring must take place in the last post.
Sorry if I beat my point into the ground in this post. 
OT: In Memory of 9/11
May we never forget that day five years ago. It was the defining moment of our generation. Here’s in remembrance of the victims and their families. May God bless them.
New footage of the attacks was released today. Viewer discretion is advised.
Sparring with your teacher
Some threads over at EF are about videos of posters that show them sparring. Often, the posters ask other people to comment on their performance. Whenever I read those questions, I often wonder where the teacher is and why they aren’t answering students’ questions.
Sparring, in general, is a touchy subject and is likely to draw some pretty sharp comments from people. Still, I think it’s absolutely essential that we bring this subject up.
The main thing that I want to say about sparring is that if your teacher isn’t sparring with you fairly regularly when you’re deemed ready for it, then the chances of you ever figuring out how to fight with your style is effectively zero.
Sparring isn’t just something that can be brushed aside for people claiming to study MA as fighting arts. If fighting is the focus of the class, then regular sparring with other students AND with your teacher is an absolute must. If hard, regular sparring isn’t taking place, then the truth needs to be told that fighting really isn’t the emphasis of the school, no matter what rhetoric is being spouted or what the teacher’s background is.
Sometimes people make comments that you can do that outside of class on your own, or that learning to fight with the material is your responsibility. Fair enough. But if that’s the case, then fighting isn’t really the focus OF THE CLASS is it? People can’t have it both ways.
Back when I studied with him, my choy lay fut (CLF) teacher made it clear to me on day one that his art was about fighting. After I agreed that I understood that, ten seconds later we were doing some hard sparring. He said that he wanted to see what I had so he could see where he needed to take me. He knew I had MA experience and he was willing to put what he had on the line to test both himself and me. I had never experienced that before. It both awed and spoiled me. I will never forget him doing that and I will always respect him. Unfortunately, practicing with him spoiled me since no one else has ever been willing to teach the way he did.
He taught me forms, stretching, exercises, drill, etc. But hard sparring took priority over everything else. I would learn a form, then learn how to break down the moves in the form. Then I was expected to drill those moves extensively and finally, I was expected to perform them under pressure through sparring with him. No pads of any kind were allowed. The rule was hard contact to the body, medium to the head. (Now you know why I’m not too bright!)
We sparred almost every class and he basically used fighting to teach me CLF. It was the main way that he communicated to me. I was expected to watch how he performed the moves as he hit me (that happened A LOT) and I was then expected to mimic his movement, rhythm, etc. He would feed me stuff so that I could practice my blocks and occasionally leave me holes that I was expected to attack. If I didn’t attack or didn’t do so with sufficient power, I could expect a pretty nasty punishment.
He was an expert in the five animals of CLF and the drunken form. He shocked me by being able to not only use the moves in the forms, but he could visibly switch from one animal or style to another and fight in a completely different way. I learned to greatly fear his tiger for its power. I had more than a few claw rakes across my chest. I also greatly feared his snake style because I found it way too fast for me to block. I also had lots of deep red bruises from his snake strikes.
He pushed me VERY hard sometimes. We fought for over an hour straight sometimes and I could barely keep my hands up, let alone block anything. When I complained, he said that he was serious about me doing the conditioning exercises on my own time. If I had done more of them, he said, my conditioning would have been better.
On Saturday mornings, he would get all of his students together (we all trained privately and separately with him) and would invite anyone else who wanted to come to a long sparring session. We would get paired off and spar each other until he thought we needed a break. This experience brought me into contact (pun intended!) with many different styles and how they reacted in combat. I got to fight judo guys, taiji guys, lots of different karate styles, praying mantis, long fist, bagua, etc. Busted lips and heavily bruised forearms were the norm after this, but it was totally worth it for the experience.
The result of all this sparring with him was that I gained an excellent impression of EXACTLY how CLF was supposed to move in combat. There were no illusions of what worked or what didn’t since we were expected to make it work on a daily basis. Nor were there any questions of having to put it together ourselves and wondering if we were getting it right or not.
After all, if I was expected to put all this together myself, then what would I have needed a teacher for?
Do teachers really expect their students to reinvent the wheel from scratch when they claim to teach fighting?
I’m not sure myself if fighting will be the focus of any future class that I teach. I’m getting old and the health aspect is becoming more interesting and important to me.
But if people are really interested in learning to fight, then hard sparring with your teacher or with students that he has sparred with extensively is absolutely crucial. You simply will have no idea how it’s done, otherwise.
Unfortunately, teachers who are willing to put in the time and effort to bring students individually to this level are few and far between.
But if you can find a teacher willing to do this, you will never forget it. I know I won’t.
Sale on Zhaobao VCDs
Plum Pubs is having a sale on Zhaobao taiji VCD’s. This series was excellent and I gave it a very positive review here. The san shou disk is exceptional. The demonstrator is pretty hard on his student. He faceplants him several times. I was surprised. He really used force in the applications of his push hands.
Two disks are on sale:
the long form
and the sanshou/push hands disk
Get them while they’re hot.
Another IMA guy’s take on BJJ
The following is a quote from dragonprawn in this post over at EF. He made some great points that I would like to expound on after the quote.
Shane, Meynard and others got on me some years ago when I started a thread on Tim’s Shen Wu site called “Is Ground Training Necessary?” or some such. But after some debate I was a man of my word and went down to my local BJJ school to see for myself. The people there were extremely skilled, super cool and honestly trying to solve “the fundamental problem of the MAs” from my experience. However, there was some tremendous downside.
First, I was about 40-years-old rolling with mostly 20 and 30 somethings. It seemed every one of my randori partners had horrendous injuries from the BJJ and no practice that they used to fix themselves up again like a good IMA guy would.For example, one dude (could not have been 25) when working with me on cervical submissions asked me to take it easy as he had three ruptured vertebrae in his neck. I asked how that happened and he said BJJ. Had another dude left my TCC school to switch to BJJ - broken clavicle right away. And I found one asshole who didn’t respect the tap the day we were doing knee submissions! I almost lost my composure with him.
…
Anyway I did realize that in their favor grappling stamina was quite a bit different than boxing stamina (sometimes I’d let them arm bar me just so I could get a drink of Gatorade). But at the same time I began to think that after the basics you are only learning grappling to grapple other grapplers (if that makes sense). Bottom line I found most of it very sportive in naturecompared to my combat tai chi steel/cotton dragonprawn boxing which is far more street practical. The BJJ guys were very addicted to it though so there was no converting them.
Then to top it off I watched a Pride fight of my BJJ teacher. As he closed in to take the opponent down and grapple him like the python he is the guy gives him a good ol’ uppercut to the jaw on his way in and he looked like those Looney Toon cartoons were they say “Which way did he go, which way did he go?” before hitting the canvas lights out. More or less supporting my original hypothesis I might add. (earlier, dragonprawn had said that IMA students should spend more time learning to get up quickly rather than spend time learning to groundfight.)
The part about horrendous injuries is something that I’ve noticed as well. Most people who pursue BJJ seriously get injured fairly regularly it seems. It is a fighting based art, afterall, and injuries are just part of the territory. I saw a few people get injured and I heard about others in the school that got hurt pretty bad. I know of other people who just quit the practice because other students were too aggressive and wouldn’t tap out even if they were in an impossible position. Others would crank up the tension too quickly so that the joints were damaged before students could even tap. That kind of stuff is not cool and if you train BJJ, you have to be on constant watch for it. Still, every MA has it’s risks!
But the bigger point that dragonprawn brings up is that BJJ has no healing side to it at all. It’s fighting and that’s it, but then many MA’s don’t have healing practices. Still, attitudes about MA and healing have something to do with the mindset of the practitioners. IMO, most of the people attracted to BJJ are going to be young men in their teens, twenties, and thirties. Maybe a few women or men in their 40’s or above will be interested, but they would be the exception IMO. So the mindset of the “invincibility of youth” would be quite strong in most BJJ schools I would imagine. This does show up in the attitude a bit from my experience.
The fact that MA can have a healing component doesn’t enter into the BJJ mindset at all, and that’s too bad. IMA does a fairly good job with healing the body IF people are taught how to use it that way, a caveat that rules most people out I’m afraid.
But this problem with the BJJ mindset isn’t all their fault, the fault also lies with people who run around talking about IMA for health but they or their teachers weigh 300 lbs, etc. When IMA students talk about health and healing but they aren’t healthy themselves, then they just end up looking like fools. Who could blame people for being skeptical? If you talk about healing and health, then is it too much for your body to show SOME evidence of it?
Second, his point about grappling other grapplers and the sportive nature of most schools is a good one. Like all MA’s, BJJ specializes and BJJ students spend most of their time grappling with other people who are interested in BJJ. That just makes sense. But it does show a bit of a limitation. How other BJJ students react to the techniques gets ingrained as you hone your reactions against them. If you’re not looking to pursue BJJ itself, then getting the basics down may be enough for you.
I also agree that some schools eventually become sportive in nature. BJJ sport competitions are a natural part of the game for some students who get into BJJ. Why wouldn’t it be? Competing can bring out the best in you. Students who are willing to get out there and put their heart and soul into the training deserve extra training from the teacher. We all want serious students, don’t we? And from a teacher’s POV, there’s no better advertising than students that win competitions. It’s proof positive that you not only have the goods yourself, but that you can teach them to other people. So the attraction of competition shouldn’t be ignored or easily brushed off.
And yet, competition can become the sole focus of some schools. The self-defense side of BJJ can get ignored in the rush to victory. Schools that used to attract many different students from all walks of life can become fight/competition clubs that only attract those willing to compete. That’s too bad. BJJ has a lot to offer everyone.
Finally, his comment about learning to get up instead of fighting on the ground is one that should be taken seriously. Part of the problem with the sport BJJ mindset is laying on the ground in the guard position waiting for your opponent to attack. Unfortunately, you can see this in too many of the fights the Gracies are involved in. They dominate on the ground so they lazily lay there until the opponent figures out a way in. Sure, it may win competitions but it’s not a smart thing to get used to considering what might happen in a self-defense situation.
All-in-all, I found dragonprawn’s comments to be quite interesting.
