My experience with Chen Ziqiang

[taiwandeutscher]

Don't project fanboy laments onto CZQ, he's not making excuses for anything. He's making a living and putting his shit out there like anyone else, and to their credit, the village guys are training up young fighters to compete on the international stage the same as everyone else. None of the current generation of Chen Village guys are asking to have anything handed to them-- people may or may not like their stuff, which is fine, but don't lump them in with the guys who act like TCMA is above and beyond everything else and then make excuses when they get their lip bloodied. If anything, the younger guys should be welcomed into the fold with open arms as guys who are actually out there trying to prove and improve themselves.

....after they have ripped of the whole world for 30 yrs., lol!

[Bhassler]

.

[iwalkthecircle]

After he got done with that guy, he asked if there was anyone else so I raised my hand and got to play a bit.

How was your experience with him? I only could touch him for a moment, so I cannot say much more. My impression was that he felt "normal".

I would characterize it as very "neutral". It doesn't feel like he's doing much, but he doesn't allow a lot of force to build up on him, and his counters are very smooth. He tends to wait and let you do whatever you want, and the only time I've really seen him go on the attack is when someone runs away and is overly hesitant about engaging. What he does carries over nicely to a more sanda-like format, I think, which is good for what the village folks seem to be aiming at, these days. His game is definitely one of timing and technique, though, more so than showing off his 'internal powerz' like a lot of guys on the seminar circuit. It's a matter of taste whether you like what he does or not, but he's definitely got some real gungfu. I also suspect that he limits what he does with the general public as well, but whether that's because he wants to save something for indoor students or simple pragmatism (because people are stupid and will kill themselves fucking with any decent martial artist), I don't know.

I was there too.

Chen ZQ has great skill, the seminar was ran by my neighbor Calvin. We regularly do shuai-chaio for fun.

I actually wrestle Chen ZQ, he have very very good wrestling skill.

iwalkthecircle.

[Bodywork]

[
I was there too.

Chen ZQ has great skill, the seminar was ran by my neighbor Calvin. We regularly do shuai-chaio for fun.

I actually wrestle Chen ZQ, he have very very good wrestling skill.

iwalkthecircle.

Really? Compared to which other.. Great wrestlers...you have tried to throw?
Your assessments and abilities are based on exactly... What?

[amor]

Tired of standards? No, not really.
Know what I'm talking about and able to back it up? Why, yes.
Self important? No way.
There are many just like me and better than me.

But...
What does any of this have to do with me?
If someone said ___________________ was a great Xing Yi, or Bagua teacher, how would you qualify that?

So here we are... Talking about wrestling, with a video that clearly shows some wrestling. Who is qualified to say who a great wrestler is? How?

Your answer?
Talk about me, of course.
So answer the question. What makes some Chinese Taiji person, now....a great wrestler, too?
Says who?
Oh... If this where I insult you back for some reason or other? Uhm...no thanks.

Fair points about making a critical analysis of someones fighting. Not gonna comment on his grappling as thats not my forte but would agree CZQ he does seem stiff and a clear lack of open/closing from videos ive seen of him in the past as in no chest open/closings so without that can't really express power or neutralizing using dantien, just mostly shoving around and feeling for openings to gain leverage.
But thanks for the analysis including the one about the onagi ryu guy in the other thread, I thought he was onto something but then you blew me out the water and set us straight.

EDIT: oops! apologies for getting the quotes mixed up, late night training, mind was probably a little foggy.

[I-mon]

[
I was there too.

Chen ZQ has great skill, the seminar was ran by my neighbor Calvin. We regularly do shuai-chaio for fun.

I actually wrestle Chen ZQ, he have very very good wrestling skill.

iwalkthecircle.

Really? Compared to which other.. Great wrestlers...you have tried to throw?
Your assessments and abilities are based on exactly... What?

John "iwalkthecircle" is a long time shuai jiao practitioner, I forget who he trains with but I'm pretty sure his teachers include John Wang and David Chang or David Lin of the Taiwan combat shuai jiao association. He's also trained baguazhang and xingyiquan under Luo Dexiu for a decade or so.

[willie]

This thread is getting really out of control.
I would find it very difficult to believe that CZQ is not a very good stand up grappler.
He lives in a village where nearly every single person is a longtime martial artist.
He has more training partners then anyone could imagine. The chances of him not being a good stand up grappler is zero.

[Bhassler]

.

[GrahamB]

This thread is utterly bizarre - we have the self appointed authority on Chinese martial arts (who has no Chinese martial arts teacher that he'll actually name) saying the one Chen guy who willingly puts out videos of free play is tight and stiff, when he himself won't even out out a video of anything remotely similar. Let's see a video of you against resistance and see how perfect you look!

Then you've got his acolytes saying CZQ doesn't understand open and close. Come on - this is like saying that Pavarotti doesn't understand singing.

I'm encouraged to see not everybody is drinking the cool aid.

Bhassler - others have noted Shuai Jiao's utility for MMA - see here

http://fightland.vice.com/blog/shuai-ji ... ling-style

However I think the problem is that wrestling is so endemic in the US that in an evolutionary sense it will dominate - like grey squirrels vs red squirrels,

[willie]

This thread is getting really out of control.
I would find it very difficult to believe that CZQ is not a very good stand up grappler.
He lives in a village where nearly every single person is a longtime martial artist.
He has more training partners then anyone could imagine. The chances of him not being a good stand up grappler is zero.

With a little moderation among participants, hopefully it will stay focused on people's experience with Chen Ziqiang. Certain posts adding to the distraction have been moved over to their own thread in BTDT.

It is far from the case that "nearly every single person" in Chenjiagou is a "longtime martial artist." There are a lot of taiji performers there, for sure. Most just train solo forms. Compared to the solo dancers, relatively few engage in serious training of tuishou, let alone actual fighting. And among the name-brand Chen family guys of any generation, Chen Ziqiang stands out for his willingness to engage in stand-up play with a wide variety of people around the world. Neither his father Chen Xiaoxing nor his uncle Chen Xiaowang have ever really been willing to do that. The Chen family in general have been pretty cautious about that kind of thing ever since the Little Bulldozer Mario Napoli won the Wenxian tuishou tournament back in August 2000.

John's (iwc's) observation about CZQ is based on his own shuaijiao training, and obviously shuaijiao gives John a certain level of understanding of stand-up grappling--it's the main point of that game. Plus John got his hands on CZQ. His remark about CZQ's skill level is valid and fairly based on his own understanding. Experienced grapplers can also fairly comment based on the extensive amount of video footage of CZQ. It's generally more productive to focus discussion on the topic of discussion rather than comparing make and size of boxer shorts. Please keep it civil and keep it focused.

Thanks.

I didn't say anything about john or anyone else. after the attacks I read on this thread, some even pointed at me, I'm not sure why you even picked this post
of mine to call un-civil?

[Bodywork]

You are such a self-important fucktard. Don't you ever get tired of yourself?

Tired of standards? No, not really.
Know what I'm talking about and able to back it up? Why, yes.
Self important? No way.
There are many just like me and better than me.

But...
What does any of this have to do with me?
If someone said ___________________ was a great Xing Yi, or Bagua teacher, how would you qualify that?

So here we are... Talking about wrestling, with a video that clearly shows some wrestling. Who is qualified to say who a great wrestler is? How?

Your answer?
Talk about me, of course.
So answer the question. What makes some Chinese Taiji person, now....a great wrestler, too?
Says who?
Oh... Is this where I insult you back for some reason or other? Uhm...no thanks.
____,_________________________

Fair points about making a critical analysis of someones fighting. Not gonna comment on his grappling as thats not my forte but would agree CZQ he does seem stiff and a clear lack of open/closing from videos ive seen of him in the past as in no chest open/closings so without that can't really express power or neutralizing using dantien, just mostly shoving around and feeling for openings to gain leverage.
But thanks for the analysis including the one about the onagi ryu guy in the other thread, I thought he was onto something but then you blew me out the water and set us straight.

Hi Armor
Could you edit your post, please?
The opening quote cites bodywork as having made that comment. Bhassler actually made that type of comment. My answer followed his.
Thanks

The aikijujutsu guy:
Doing his art form is fine. It's an art. As an art form, what is there to say? If he were doing taiji, or Daito ryu or Aikido, you could compare him to his peers doing the same art. Since no one has ever heard of his art form, or seen his peers or his teacher, how can we comment on his execution of his arts techniques?
My remarks were specifically narrowed to the idea expressed that what was shown was "devastating." Apparently meaning that the writer thought the potential of the techniques shown were devastatingly effective.
My comments were more along the lines that you would have to see it OUTSIDE of the uke/nage role to assess it.
I saw it being like Aikido, it just doesn't translate to fighting arts well. Nothing wrong with that. It's an art form.

To the main topic:
The same can be said for Jaime's comments on CZQ. Jaime's grappled. He wasn't all that impressed -on that level. Like the aikijujutsu guy, CZQ was doing an art form as well. Now he appears (like some other village guys) to be trying to cross over to more aggressive grappling skills. That's a much more challenging gambit. As the village guys discovered while meeting a grappler on their home turf.
I love and respect the classical arts, even though they usually talk about grapplers like the cross bred, outsider, mutts of the martial arts world. We ain't pretty, but we usually get the job done.
Fair is fair. You just don't get a free pass to say you are a Master at Taiji. It is decades of agonizing work. The classical arts deserve respect for an art form. But, likewise, if they are going to try to walk outside it onto our turf. Then they going to get judged by entirely different standards by men who also put in decades of agonizing work on their game.

[willie]

If you're going to move posts that are off topic and not constructive, at least go to the trouble to move all of them, and not just the ones that you don't like.

Outside of the few people on the board who have crossed hands with CZQ, all of whom have said that what he feels like in free play is not what one would expect based on the appearance of the aforementioned videos, this whole conversation is BTDT from at least two times before in recent memory, and usually it's the same folks (who have never actually pushed with CZQ) saying he has no skills. I definitely get Jaime being disappointed in not getting to do some actual pushing with CZQ, and would agree that if what you want is to learn or have demonstrated great buckets of IP, then a CZQ seminar is probably not for you. Not everyone thinks power is the defining or most useful characteristic of IMA in general or taiji in particular-- I thought he had some really interesting skills, and although it's not what I personally want to pursue in my practice overall, I can still respect and appreciate the obvious work that's gone into his craft and see no need to try and tear other people's work down to justify my own direction.

I'm a little surprised folks who claim to be MMA fighters aren't more interested in what CZQ is doing. If you look at some of the most entertaining fighters in recent memory, like Conor McGregor and Jon Jones, they have a huge advantage in that they have such tremendous balance that allows them to move more freely than their opponents, strike with power at any time, and take advantage of their opportunities. If you watch some of GSP's early fights, he wins a lot of them because he's able to recover himself and take advantage of his opponents being off balance or out of position just a fraction of a second faster than normal. A number of people have said that CZQ uses very little power-- it's all done with balance and timing applied under pressure, and surely that's more useful for actual fighters than esoteric methods of power generation that take more time to develop than the entire career of most competitive fighters.

So we can see successful fighters that make great use of timing and balance-- where are the "loose, internally connected, and effective grapplers" that are being held up as superior? What does an internally connected grappler look like in competition? Or is this whole conversation just bullshit because everyone wants to promote their own brand of IMA?

I believe that he is just mostly defending because of his size and also wearing out their cardio. attempting to even the field some.
If he was a big guy, let's say that he had 4 inches in height and 80 pounds on someone. I think we would be seeing something a bit different.

[Bodywork]

Stalling is an excellent gambit. Helio Gracie made an art of it. It's illegal in most all sport forms of grappling due to expediency's of the audience and judges.
To segue into internals for a moment; if they are working their asses off and you feel like a rubberized statue that's incredibly hard to move around while you can change very fast...all while chillin' and working? That's a good way to play them while positioning.
Size? Yes and no. Is it a factor? Sure. But plenty of small guys have handled bigger guys.
Kano
Mifune
Takeda
Ueshiba
Sugino
Helio
Just to name some popular ones.
At its best, grappling a chess game. You don't force it, like so many newer guys do due to time limits and rules. It's more of a predatory game. Creating and/or waiting, for the moment to move.

[Patrick]

Imagine, what he would do, if he would be a big ex-powerlifter with an IMA background

[jaime_g]

I'll try to explain it better

I have felt Fabricio Werdum. Supreme fighter, almost perfect in the ground, strong as a bull. Probably I'll never feel someone better in the ground. You can only compare him with legends like Marcelo, Mendes, Cobrinha, absolutely top guys.

Well, Werdum feels normal. Yes, one of the best fighters of the planet is normal. He could kill me with one hand while playing videogames, but his perfect bjj is based on external training.

I have felt many awesome normal fighters, from sambo, judo, wrestling, muay thai...All of them could sweep the floor with my bones, but they were normal

I have felt Dan. Dan doesnt feel normal. I'm not saying that Dan could beat Werdum (but I would love to see Dan against any good faixa preta, I'm sure it will be awesome), but they are just different. His body is different.

I wanted to feel Ziqiang. Ziqiang feels normal. Maybe he is an excelent shuai jiao player (I dont know, that's the reason I wanted to push with him), but he is not an internal grappler.

I'm chasing internals, that's what I want. For example, I train with a Dog Brother, tough as nails, much better than me fighting. I cant show him anything regarding to fighting that he hasnt know long before. But he wants to train with me, he trains Dan stuff like crazy (Dan, I sure you'll love him when you meet ), and his body is changing too.

Being a good fighter just dont impress me anymore.