Shanghaijay wrote:If you can not do proper push hands than Lan Cai Hua will not work
And that is all I will say on this subject.
Jay
Jay,
Well, I'm not as diplomatic as you, so I would say more
Push hand is a progressive training method that links the skills developed in solo practice to real fighting. In the external martial arts I studied, we use structured sparring. We don't have people go directly from solo practice to anything-can-happen realistic fighting. Because everything happens so fast in real fighting, if you ask a beginner to apply what he learned right away, he's just going to lose his form (especially footwork, shen fa, overall coordination, so he's back to just using his isolated arm movements). So we would go through a process like this: person A can only attack on the left side using technique X at mid-level, person B can only defend with technique Y on the same side same level; then person A can attack on any level; then either left or right, and person B has to defend on the correct side, correct level... then finally person A can use any attack....
Taiji breaks this process into even more steps, especially at the front-end of the process. Take away the threat of hard physically contact at the beginning. I give you a force on this spot of your body slowly while standing still, can you use taiji principle to solve the problem? Then how about faster, bigger force? How about more than one force at a time? How about moving? How about I increase pressure by instead of using flat of the hand, using points of fingers on your sensitive points (like areas just below, behind the ears)?...
When you get to luan cai hua level in push hand, it's not that different from fighting. After that you just need to do fight-specific practice, like how to make the crucial first-contact with the opponent, hardening exercises, psychology (ex. not let anything your opponent do affect your calmness, how to dominate him...), physiological responses (don't blink, don't move directly away from the incoming force...), psychological hurdles ("thou shall not kill"), actual contact training (lots of hitting against moving human flesh, which is a very different feeling than hitting a heavy bag)...
In external martial art training we do a lot of this type of training right away. So lots of external martial art people look at this and think internal martial art people don't even know the basics about real fighting. But that's just because they are not familiar with 1) how internal martial art training is structured, 2) why it's structured that way, and 3) what "high level" implies.
1) we already talked about above.
2) In Chinese martial art we say external martial art training enhances our natural abilities - the principles and tactics of external martial art is based on how we react naturally (deal with a big force with a bigger, faster force); and that internal martial art changes our natural way of dealing with force - 換勁 huan4 jin4(deal with a big force using a smaller force). So internal martial art focuses on deprogramming first, on doing the most unnatural thing when we are physically threatened. That's a huge challenge, especially the mental part. If we cannot use this new way to deal with force even in simple scenarios, we are not ready for real fighting, and therefore those fight-specific training is premature.
Like we said before, using less force is not the only way to win fights. If we cannot change, we may still win fights, but we won't be doing internal martial art. Breaking habits take a long time. It requires a lot of small, incremental steps. If we ask people do apply these principles in the most challenging scenario of realistic sparring first, people are just going to revert to their old habits - the more they train this way, the further away from their real goal.
The reason people would revert to old habit of using more force is that structured sparring is about idealized, controlled scenarios where you can work on executing our skill in the most optimal manner. In a real fight, the psychological dimension alone makes that optimization near impossible. Unless there's a huge difference in skill, we always use more force than necessary in realistic sparring. So sparring too early is very detrimental to internal martial art training.
So internal martial arts have very long, exacting, logical progression in training. That sequence is just very different than those of external martial art. It is a university, I would say graduate level curriculum. It's a high level pursuit. So what's the implication when something is high-level?
3) When something is truly high level, when it takes a high level of selection and training to reach the level of mastery, most people will not be able to be successful at reaching that goal. Most of us can work at McDonald's, how many of us can be neurosurgeons? A lot of people tries and fails at becoming a doctor. At that point the person working at McDonald's can say "see, I'm making more money than you, in fact, you are heavily in debt, you spent all this time and money and didn't get anything..." They can say that about the individuals who failed at becoming a neurosurgeon, but they cannot say that high-level body of knowledge is no good. The relative few who does become neurosurgeon, they understand things, they can do things the person at McDonald's can never do. In the end it's all about the goals of your training - win fights (a win is a win, no matter how ugly), or win fights with least effort, using the most skillful, elegant way possible?
Most people practice Taiji for health today, plus empty-hand fighting in general is totally obsolete, so we don't have that many Taiji people today who are at the neurosurgeon level in those arts- who has gone through all these stages of push hand, to a point they can do luan cai hua, or actual fighting. Today we have a lot of people who can "do something" at some level of push hand, but cannot do anything at the real fighting level. That's just how Taiji training is - in the end either you get everything, or nothing. But that's mostly because of the world we live in, that it places no real pressure or demand on anyone to be good in those arts, not because those arts themselves are no good.
Wuyizidi