Martial Arts approaches to Training

"Be uncontentious and no one can compete with you"  (Dao de Jing)

In recent years a lot of qigong that is popularly taught has been categorized as martial arts qigong.  (I think it is mistake to use this category in the first place, but if we do use it we will have to divide it up further.)  This would be qigong created by and for people who were put in the position of needing to fight.

Traditionally in China the army was filled by both volunteers and draftees.  Resisting the draft often carried the penalty of killing the resister's entire family, so Chinese armies often represented diverse segments of the population.  This fact and the cultural diversity of China naturally led to a wide diversification of approaches to the warriors' life.  People expected to have to go to war, some trained for it from an early age and some did not.  Again, differing views created different  approaches to qi gong, or in this case military training

For convenience, I've broke the topic up into three main traditions.
The first tradition is trance induced fighting and is very old.   The idea here is that winning is more important than living.  Winning is so good and loosing is so bad that it would be worse to come back a looser than to die giving it your all.   The best example of this is trance possession, war dances.  A milder form is the haranguing that happens at sporting events.

The second military tradition would be training to build stamina and resist pain.  If you imagine yourself suddenly drafted into the military at age 14, the sooner you could freely thrust a long heavy spear, the better for your survival.  Training with weights and qi gong practices like Iron-t-shirt and forearm conditioning are all good examples.

The third martial tradition is the so called neijia (inner arts) which includes taijiquan, xing yi and bagua.  This type has the flavor and reluctance characteristic of those who cultivate weakness.  In this tradition the battle field is viewed as an expression of qi.  The battle field substitutes for the body in which the smooth flowing of qi is a priority, not avoiding war, but being uncontentious.  Looking for resolution is different than trying to win, although winning may be necessary for your survival.  This is not a passive tradition, in fact attacking first can easily be the quickest cleanest resolution with the least loss of life on both sides. How this tradition came about is an interesting question I plan to continue exploring. Perhaps people who had been cultivating weakness, were drafted and this was a natural expression of their circumstance.  This third traditions takes the longest to develop usable skills, and seems like a privileged position with in a military world.

Chinese generals sometimes called themselves Daoists.   Perhaps they were trying to show affinity to certain chapters from the Dao De jing like the one at the top of this post.  There is no connection between generals who called themselves Daoists, and religious Daoist.  They had a completely different job description.

In reality, many training methods fall somewhere in between the three traditions I outlined above.  Shaolin quan is somewhere between the second and the third tradition, depending on how it is practiced.  Taiji quan can be practiced with flaring nostrils and ferocious growls.  It follows, of course, that in peoples attempts to preserve methods from generation to generation that these different traditions have often been combined or entangled, creating many hybrids and combinations of methods and views.

Winter Training

Winter is for Storing Qi.  Winter is the time to just maintain your practice.  At this time we try not to lose anything we’ve developed or gained, and of course we try not to get injured.  It is the time to practice lots of stillness.  This kind of practice is called returning to the root, stillness "tonifies" the Kidneys.  In contrast it is also the time to perfect circulation.  Lots of Winter practices have to do with testing or improving circulation, they include, various types of bathing, scrubbing, pounding, slapping, scraping, shaking, etc...
When Winter comes I will share some techniques for improving circulation and developing vigorous weiqi (the qi on the surface of the body.)

Why do we practice differently in different seasons?  Does it have a benefit?  Is there some fruition?

Fall Training

Continuing with yesterdays post:

There is a Chinese saying: Open up to new practices in the Spring, avoid sweating in the Summer, Develop Power in the Fall, and Store Qi in the Winter.

Fall: What is power training? For the most part, power training is the process of improving efficiency. Of the hundreds of different power training techniques one can think of, most, if not all, can be understood as efficiency training. Power training is a process of refining technique. It is the harvest season.
Here is a short list:
Compress (shrink), expand (explode),
Move the whole body as one unit.
Coordinate every part of your body simultaneously.
Focus all 400 muscles on one task.
Use all of your body weight when issuing force.
If you use waves to generate power from one part of your body to another, make sure none of the wave ‘action’ is dispersed before hitting it’s target.
Make all waves smaller and more refined (hidden), so that there is no delay when issuing force.

The process of refining technique can include lots of other aspect of training besides power training. The big question I have for my readers is: How much power does a martial artist need? Isn’t there some point at which more power training is just silly. Isn’t that the point of a lot of Kungfu movies? If my punches can break bones, and knock a man 50 pounds heavier than me to the ground, do I need more?
Isn’t it true that after I have developed a certain amount of power my curve will start to level off, meaning I have to work a lot harder to get a much smaller improvement? I have heard people say that a martial artist's power can keep doubling every few years, isn’t this just a fantasy?

Spring and Summer Training

There is a Chinese saying:  Open up to new practices in the Spring, avoid sweating in the Summer,  Develop Power in the Fall, and Store Qi in the Winter.
Why not practice everything all year round?  If gongfu/neijia(inner arts) is not a processional religious tradition why would we practice this way?  Is there any good reason?
Let’s talk about what the saying means first.

Spring:  Opening up to new practices, of course means learning new routines and new techniques, but it also means stretching more, increasing your range of motion, and breaking up any stagnation leftover from Winter.  Usually Spring is associated with the Liver organ, which "stagnates" from too much fried or greasy food.  The liver is "tonified" by vigorous movement.  Spring is a good time to sweat a little.

Summer:  Not sweating is a form of endurance training.  This season is associated with the heart, which is the Emporor of the Organs.  The country is well run when the Emporor has nothing to do.  Of course we know the heart is a pump that needs to keep pumping, but does it need to pump fast?  To understand how not sweating can be endurance training consider running 100 yards as fast as you can and timing it.  Immediately take your  pulse.  Now try to run the same distance in the same amount of time, and try to do it with a slower heart rate.
The Chinese idea works just the opposite, try to move as much as you can with out increasing your heart rate enough to break a sweat.  Over time you will be able to move faster and more vigorously without increasing your heart rate.
Running through a few Shaolin forms at performance speeds still gets me breathing hard.  It feels good, but I don’t do it everyday, and I actually think it would be counter productive if I did. When I go backpacking with a heavy pack, everyone else seems to get tired first, so it must be working.
I would argue that we really don’t need what many people call "cardio-conditioning." What do my 100 a day readers think?

Matched Fighting vs. Real Fighting

The issue of whether or not a particular martial art is effective or not comes up all the time. What is realistic?

1.  Actual hand to hand combat in war.

2.  Surprise attacks,
-muggings
-kidnappings.

3.  Fights for honor
-the school yard
-the bar
-arguments (petty and otherwise)

4.  Crazy people, drunk or on drugs.

5.  Intervening on behalf of someone being bullied or mugged

6.  Intimidation (including turf defense and "hating out")
-by an individual
-by a group.

7.  Professional encounters
bouncers
body guards
police.

A matched fight has several things these above fights don’t. The first is parameters. The fight happens right here, when they ring the bell. And there are rules, no weapons, certain blows likely to maim or kill are usually forbidden. The fight will be stopped if one person concedes defeat. In addition the only surprises are likely to be techniques or strategies. The opponents are roughly the same size and wear the same types of gear. There is likely some advantage gained by conditioning or numbing one’s body to take a hit (of little use in a knife fight for instance.)
If you are training for a matched fight you train specifically for the constraints of that fight, even down to studying the previous fights of your competitor.
Matched fighting and real fighting are completely different animals.

Tuishou vs. Roushou (push-hands vs. soft-hands)

Tuishou and roushou are what we might call martial arts parlor games. They are gentrified, limited two person fighting games.
For me, and many martial artists, tuishou and roushou are the arts of not becoming defensive.

How does this work?
On the emotional level one must train how to lose well before developing skill. The pride of winning is totally addictive. Because the parameters of both arts are strict limitations on actual fighting, someone who wants to win will keep trying to change the rules, or the parameters of the game. They will up the ante by, for instance, resetting their foot in a game of fixed foot tuishou. I often have a student handicap them selves so that they can practice losing to someone who is less skillful than they are. I tell beginners, the goal is to make your partner happy. To do this you have to really try to get to know your partner. If you practice correctly, an experience of intimacy replaces the desire to win.

How is this done?
There are many steps so I'm just going to cover a few of the ones that deal with undoing defensive responses.

First you must make and feel a ring shape with your arms (later it becomes a ball). Practicing very slowly at first, have your partner use their arms to make contact with your arms on the outside of your ring. Keeping contact your partner then slowly moves their hands toward your neck. A small increase in the size of your ring will arrest their progress (once they are stopped they should not keep trying but instead break contact and start again). This un-trains the defensive response often called against the wall, meaning using your back muscles to pull your arms apart (a reflex we use to protect our head and neck when falling backwards).

Second, you make the same ring but have your partner use their arms to make contact with the inside of your ring. Again they should proceed to attack your neck. Arrest the attack by making the ring smaller. This time you may have to also turn at the hip socket so that they don't touch your body, but shrinking the ring will stop their progress toward your neck. This un-trains the defensive response often called pincering, in which one uses chest and pectoral muscles to force the forearms together making a narrowing corridor shape with the arms.
Do not respond to these attacks by moving your arms up or down, just change the size of the ring. Then try the same thing with one arm inside the ring and one arm outside the ring. Repeat the exercise daily until it is second nature.

Once you have basic tuishou skills and you know how to keep your frame, you can try roushou. The big difference between the two is that roushou allows slapping with a soft hand. The basic rule is that I can only slap with as much force as I can get sliding off of my partner's defense. The harder or more actively my partner defends, the harder and more often they get hit. And of course, the same goes for me. So first you learn to defend lightly, than not to defend at all. Very cool.

Since both practices train sensitivity, it's fair to say that the muscularly stronger opponent has the disadvantage. Still it would be a mistake to say that we cultivate weakness because it gives us an advantage. The real reason for cultivating weakness is that it reveals our true nature. It's not that our true nature ever actually goes away, it's just that strength and the fears or fantasies that produce strength tend to obscure, or one might even say numb, our true nature.

Just a note: Searching google video for 'push-hands' gets lots of interesting results, but searching for 'roushou' gets nothing I would actually call roushou.  Time to make a video.

Walking #1 (Older people)

What is it like watching most older people move? Is it a source of pity or sympathy, or perhaps a foreboding omen of what we can some day expect ourselves? If we were to study older peoples' movements with respectful inquisitiveness what might we learn?

Young people walk by falling slightly forward to create momentum and continuously catching themselves with their front foot as they stride forward. This type of movement requires:

1. The ability to suddenly contract muscles should we mis-step or slip.

2. Well integrated reflexes, righting reactions, and equilibrium responses so we can stop abruptly.

3. Buoyancy in the joints(space/fluidity) and a fairly wide range of motion to account for sudden variation.

As people age it becomes more difficult to maintain the muscle tissue sufficient to catch oneself, right oneself and return to balance. As people age they often develop a reduced range of motion do to repeated injuries, including what we tend to call normal wear and tear. Even small injuries often leave scar tissue which reduces pliancy and range of motion. This along with a general loss of fluids in the joints leaves less space in the joints for movement. This not only makes large steps difficult or painful, but the righting reactions needed to re-balance are often out of ones range of motion or would themselves cause re-injury in the joints.

Big steps, or any type of reckless movement, brings the risk of falling and breaking already deficient bones. Thus how do older people walk? Hesitant little steps. They test the ground with each step and find their balance with each weight shift, doing their best to maintain their balance all the time.

Eventually, everyone's muscles and reactions degenerate and we are all, in a sense, forced to except the sensitivity that comes with weakness (in Daoism this process is called return).

When older people walk they draw on all the resources they have, (they'll take your arm if you offer it.)

Those in the past, who cultivated the Way,
Were subtle,mysterious, abstruse, penetrating,
Unfathomable, and so too deep to describe.
Because of this,
I can only tell you how they seemed.
They were cautious, as if crossing a river in winter.
Always watchful of danger on all four sides.
They were ceremonious and polite, like being a guest.
Yielding, like ice beginning to melt.
Plain and unconditioned, like an uncarved block of wood.
As open, as a valley.
Murky, like turbid water.
Who among you can be so murky and yet know
Quiet and Clarity within?
Which of you can enter stillness only to return to movement?
Those who keep this Dao,
Avoid fullness.
Because they are not full,
they can renew themselves and not be worn out.
Daode jing Chapter 15 (Liu ming)

This quality of movement, testing the ground before a weight shift, avoiding muscle contractions, essentially seeking depth and ease, are all things we do when we practice qi gong, taiji, or bagua. Aging may actually make them easier to do!

Martial Arts Training Manuals

Someone else who believes that gongfu is entirely about fighting are Brian Kennedy and Elizabeth Guo, authors of Chinese Martial Arts Training Manuals, A Historical Survey. I read the whole book, it's got lots of great pictures and historical information. It's easy to summarize their view: Martial Arts is a job. Whatever, it's still a great idea for a book. They summarize about 30 different historic training manuals. One of my favorite facts from the book is that it was illegal to publish martial arts books for most of the Ching Dynasty (1650 to 1900~).

Putting the Quan back in Taiji Quan

This exciting website argues that quan exclusively means "fighting skill." While I strongly disagree with that assessment, she makes lots of other great arguments about the problems with the way taijiquan is taught.

http://martialtaichi.co.uk/articles/how_taiji_lost_its_quan.php

How to use Taijiquan in a Fight

Here is my latest video offering, enjoy.