Some great taiji stuff.

[windwalker]

]You should like this then, one of my favourites I had to put it on the tube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI46O2SKxVQ

trained in the tung style for awhile back in the 80s
learned this set along with their other fast set, it seems very broken in movement
from my perspective.

many have spoken of teacher student relationships, this can happen with any teaching
the assumption seems to be that the students are either faking it or want to believe.

[XiaoXiong]

Yeah, I saw that. The speed is ridic. I would love to study this taiji.
Jess

[windwalker]

funny, I think its pretty slow,

you would find that the tung family style is very closed in its approach.

the craziest part was that I literally could not feel him doing anything at all. No sensation of being pushed or pulled or manipulated in any way, just moving in a different direction and losing my balance. Very cool stuff.

Now I train wrestling and BJJ, and continually train my central axis sensitivity and meditation on my own. Working both ends of the spectrum, if you like.

good you experienced something that you could not explain.
but now feel that your present training would tend to prevent it?
seems like the better way would be to train in it, until some type of understanding or ability was reached,
then build the training around this.

[windwalker]

interesting thread.

reading it,

one of the main often mentioned points is that the students either dont know,
dont understand, blindly follow the teacher or
just want to make the teach look good.

did I miss something?

[ors]

Hi all!

Interesting discussion! I would like to add some sidenotes if you are interested. Of course there are blind and "willing" students, but this kind of training is not based on that subject, if it is real. It is mostly about a different kind of using the strenght of the body.
Of course it is NOT fighting. It is "the teacher showing and explaining and the student wanting to understand" training. So the student's willing is involved naturally.

Örs

[XiaoXiong]

Yeah, it seems like there is a camp that wants the student to resist and fight back, but that's contrary to taiji strategy right? Then there's a smaller camp who are saying the weird stuff where you can't really see what's happening is really good. I think both are interesting, but it seems to me like the ones who are really doing the intent driven stuff are the ones people say the students are faking, and the others are using some intent and some strength and movement as well. In my opinion the Tongs stuff looks great for fighting, and I like what I am doing with Yin Cheng Gong Fa for the same reasons. I do want to explore some of this other type of training though.

I was doing a drill with a partner where we stand in normal ph gong bu with three points of contact at the arms, one in the middle on the back of the wrists and the other two at the hands on the elbow. We would practice shifting the force through alternating sides of the mingmen without moving externally. One partner feeds a push and the other takes the energy to the ground first through one side then the other. The goal is to get the feeding partner to fall into the emptiness created by the shift. This was cool, and unique in my taiji training experience. The guy who is mentoring me said that the higher martial arts have this thing about stillness upon contact, in other words he tells me don't move. This was new to me. What do you guys think about stillness and internal training? It makes me think about an interview I read with Wang Xiang Zhai where talked about similar things. I trust him but I also don't really understand stillness deeply. Any help on stillness and theory or practice might be useful for this discussion.
Jess

[windwalker]

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it means you dont change the contact point, it remains the same.
inside changes, this will affect what the other feels and reacts too.

outer arts seek to act on the contact point directly, this is different.

all the teachers in the clips have said the same things, if you can have someone translate them for you, you would find many answers there. The teachers are very kind in helping others to understand and get it.

with someone quite skilled, its really not possible to use force as is commonly thought of. Any one who has met someone skilled in the inner aspects will understand this, its not a matter that they dont want to apply all their force, its more that they cant with out getting injured, in understanding this they dont, using only enough to feel what the teacher is doing.

[LaoDan]

Chen Yanlin (陳炎林) writes some about the lingkong jin (凌空勁) ability in his 1943 book 太極拳刀劍桿散手合編 TAIJI COMPILED: THE BOXING, SABER, SWORD, POLE, AND SPARRING.

He seems to indicate that while this skill is real and appears miraculous, “it is not something you ardently need to strive for, for it is really just a parlor trick,” (according to Brennan’s translation).

此勁異常奧妙。近於神祕。而非目覩者所能信。實乃一種精神上之作用而已。藝高者發此勁時。僅須口中一哈。對方卽雙足離地而後退。蓋因被發者。精神已為發者所吸引。無可抵抗。然被發者必須先明沾黏等勁。故一哈之後。卽由感覺而後退。否則發者仍無效。此勁雖奧妙莫測。但學者可不必深求。僅作遊戲觀可耳。相傳昔時楊健侯少侯父子。能吸引燭火近尺。一手隔之。火光遂熄。卽凌空勁中之一法。惟此功夫今已 失傳云。

[XiaoXiong]

Yeah I've definetly felt that thing like I dont want to apply force cause my wrist will be hurt or something. It's weird how the intent works that way, because I am sensitive to it, and can use it, but not at that level. The other thing is the Fa Jing is so different in taiji than xingyi and bagua that I've seen. The way it comes through the arms as the point of contact and hits the center is something else. There are a couple things that seem to really help me with training better ima and ESP taiji right now.
Getting the intent in the hands and feet. I've done enough training to get this pretty well. Makes the quality of the training higher. Really gets the chi development going.
The orbits of single whip.
The idea of only worrying about what comes to your center, and only worrying about getting theirs.
I am used to doing a lot of tactical stuff to hide my center, attack the joints and affect the center yes, but this kind of focus on the center is more profound. Next I hope to make better use of stillness. I'm going to push at Paul Ramos' place tonight. Stillness is my goal.
Jess

[windwalker]

Chen Yanlin (陳炎林) writes some about the lingkong jin (凌空勁) ability in his 1943 book 太極拳刀劍桿散手合編 TAIJI COMPILED: THE BOXING, SABER, SWORD, POLE, AND SPARRING.

He seems to indicate that while this skill is real and appears miraculous, “it is not something you ardently need to strive for, for it is really just a parlor trick,” (according to Brennan’s translation).

此勁異常奧妙。近於神祕。而非目覩者所能信。實乃一種精神上之作用而已。藝高者發此勁時。僅須口中一哈。對方卽雙足離地而後退。蓋因被發者。精神已為發者所吸引。無可抵抗。然被發者必須先明沾黏等勁。故一哈之後。卽由感覺而後退。否則發者仍無效。此勁雖奧妙莫測。但學者可不必深求。僅作遊戲觀可耳。相傳昔時楊健侯少侯父子。能吸引燭火近尺。一手隔之。火光遂熄。卽凌空勁中之一法。惟此功夫今已 失傳云。

ZMQ, also said much the same thing from one of the books I've read.

my point would be that much of their skill stems from the basic principles and ideas from which "LKJ" arrives from.
its not something "one strives for" but arrives to, naturally with a deepening understanding of the real skill being developed.

I have always said that touched or not the principle is the same. Why any teacher would then say "it is really just a parlor trick" would seem to indicate they never met with any high level exponent of it, and more to the point that they dont seem to really understand the basis of their own art.

Yang replied that there were only three kinds of people he could not defeat: men of brass, men of iron and men of wood.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yang_Lu-ch'an

iron, wood and brass have no mind

[I-mon]

the craziest part was that I literally could not feel him doing anything at all. No sensation of being pushed or pulled or manipulated in any way, just moving in a different direction and losing my balance. Very cool stuff.

Now I train wrestling and BJJ, and continually train my central axis sensitivity and meditation on my own. Working both ends of the spectrum, if you like.

good you experienced something that you could not explain.
but now feel that your present training would tend to prevent it?
seems like the better way would be to train in it, until some type of understanding or ability was reached,
then build the training around this.

Nah I don't think so. That teacher (Cai Songfang) taught and practiced something really simple: Wuji gong, standing meditation. He's the guy Jan Diepersloot wrote a lot about in Warriors of Stillness pt 1.

So I still practice wujigong, and in fact incorporate it into everything I do. And it helps a LOT in wrestling and BJJ, and I've got the rest of my life to get better. In the meantime, grappling is really, really fun, and it makes my xingyi/bagua/taiji/capoeira/muaythai/boxing background about a million times more effective.

I've been working a fair bit on "structure testing" or "rooting" or "posting" stuff over the years, and a lot more recently. Being able to absorb force on any part of the body in any direction, while maintaining the "heaven-earth" axis through the centerline with relaxed breathing. The other side of this is that of the "pusher" or person applying force, where I've been working on something like what someone described above: being able to apply force on another person's center, in different directions, without changing the point of contact or visibly externally moving one's own body, while maintaining the same heaven-earth axis and breathing. So for example I might put my left hand on my partner's right elbow, and my right hand on his left shoulder, and I'll practice finding his center and applying a force to the left, to the front, uprooting from underneath, etc, without moving my own body (externally).

Again, it's classic Taiji stuff, but massively applicable in grappling/sparring, and it's hardcore as fuck muscular training - for all the internal muscles.

[Andy_S]

And now for something completely different...

This is Chen Ziqiang demonstrating what I suspect many here would consider "low level" Taijiquan: Competitive style PH.

What I like about Ziqiang's approach is that this is not a "demonstration" with a student nor a set of "applications" this is him actually asking the student to do their damndest to throw him in a sparring format. The students, who are all bigger than him and all outweigh him, get nowhere. (I have yet to see anyone throw him, though it certainly has happened.) While this kind of training is not the totality of combat, its application to self-defense or combat is obvious - especially when you look at his finishing positions. The same cannot be said for many of the skillsets posted previously - and indeed, we have seen/discussed on a previous thread how some of the more "out there" skills that have dramatic effects on conditioned students, simply do not "work" on non-cooperative persons.

I am sure that if you ask ZIqiang, he would not say that he has reached the highest level of Taiji. Fortunately, he is only in his (I think) late 30s, so he has another 30 years + to work on this "higher level" skills.

I suspect that even the greatest grandmasters, the ones who obtained "high-level" skills, went through this stage: As I-mon alludes to, some kind of grappling-based sparring teaches you a huge amount about sensitivity, about change, about flow, about leverage, about balance, about yielding, about leading into emptiness, etc, etc. I don't think you can bypass this level.

And I'll lay my cards on the table. Personally, I think this is excellent applied Taiji.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KjiqF3 ... ubkHt3l5ng

[Patrick]

I do not understand this "tai chi grappling", it looks more strength based than judo, wrestling, bjj, sambo etc.

[Andy_S]

Patrick:

Well, Ziqiang is a lot smaller (therefore, probably less strong) than everyone he throws hither and yon, so the logical inference must be that....looks are deceiving, no?

For me: I see relaxation; yielding; leading; following; and technique by the bucket-load. His favorite move, "flash the back" is based on redirection and a turn/spin around the vertical axis.

[Patrick]

Maybe you are right, but I see mostly someone exploding with his weight into his opponent, and that he seems to do good. It is not really what I like about grappling.