Doc Stier wrote:Many years ago, my Chen Style teacher, the late Master Cheng Jincai, taught a week long summertime workshop at a local San Antonio college. We started out with 70+ paid participants on Monday morning and ended with only 14 participants on the following Sunday afternoon. Virtually everyday of that week, fewer students returned from the lunch break and fewer returned the following morning. Their leg strength and overall level of physical fitness was incapable of continuing on.
I spent a weekend with CJC in the late 1990's learning new frame. I hadn't realized he passed. Sorry to hear that.
First, like many other martial arts/styles, Chen style Taijiquan isn't a single thing. Different lineages practice it differently and different teachers within one lineage practice it differently. One of numerous differences is the height of the stances and level of athleticism.
For example, at one seminar held at an Aikido studio with a suspended wooden floor, Ren Guangyi, one of CXW's leading disciples, after repeated foot stomps, lifted the nails holding the floor down: the studio owner would periodically go around the floor and hammer the nails back down. The first seminar our host held with RGY was the Chen sabre form. After the first day of the seminar, the host said he lay in bed that night praying that, as the host, he'd be able to walk the next day: it would look bad (lose face) if the host didn't participate in the seminar he was hosting. (None of the participants were used to that level of athleticism/low stances and found it physically difficult.) By contrast, Feng Zhiqiang eliminated most of the foot stomping believing it bad for one's health and eliminated most of the low stance training, citing "qi leaking out the perineum" from overly low stances.
By contrast, one of the funniest of memories I have was in the mid '90's at a tiger seminar with Pan Qingfu. (I and most of the seminar participants were students of one of Pan's disciples.) Pan would have us hold each stance as he went around the room and corrected each student's posture. One of the top medal-winning students was standing in a very low horse stance when Pan arrived to correct him: the student's horse stance had his behind lower than his knees. Pan looked at the student's posture and then put one hand on the top of the student's head and pushed downwards on the top of his head, crumpling the student to the ground.
Anyway, back on topic, my experience has been that within the wide variation within styles, there is some considerable overlap between individual practitioners of Yang, Chen and Wu styles. There are other practitioners of those styles were there is almost no overlap, with little in common in implementation and training. What many people know of Chen style practice is what they see at demonstrations, where the demonstrator wants to make the practice look as martial and exciting as possible - lots of explosive power strikes, stomps, fast, jumps, kicks, etc. Often, demonstration is done one way and training is done another. Often, people believe the daily practice is the same as the demonstrations: it usually isn't.
I think much of the "Chen hate" is what is captured in the old joke, as follows:
"How many Taiji practitioners does it take to change a lightbulb?"
"10. One to change the lightbulb and 9 to say, 'Oh, we do it differently in our school'."