Mr. Tim Cartmell is a martial arts practitioner and instructor at the ACE Jiu-Jitsu in Orange County, California:
whistlekick MA Radio on December 17, 2018 wrote:Jeremy Lesniak:
(At 21:06) . . . So when you talk about, you know, that old-school level of training that you experienced from these great masters on Mainland China, what would that look like to the rest of us? What would we see?
Tim Cartmell:
Well first of all, we have a lot of time, you know? When I was in Asia, I worked enough to make ends meet but I train a lot, hours and hours a day because that’s what I was there for. So one of the things is the sheer volume of time that they put in. So nowadays, I mean, you’d have to be a career martial artist or a professional combat sport athlete, I think, to have that much time. So it’s not really fair actually to compare, you know, like if you do martial arts as a hobby and even if you train, you know, four or five days a week for an hour or two, you can’t compare it. Because these guys just… and I did as well at the time, you know, we trained hours a day. We trained, you know, up to six hours sometimes a day. So that’s one thing. Now obviously if you have a method and your stuff is legit, if you train that much, you’re gonna get good at it, you know. And if you have a lot of talent, you’re gonna get really good at it. So one thing is people have to understand is, they have a lot of time; they were training a lot. So the traditional training that I did with them, from the internal perspective, there’s a lot of emphasis to put on specific ways to kind of cultivate and generate power. So there’s a lot of emphasis put on your alignment, kind of your structure of alignment, your posture, you know, how you old your body and certain movement patterns. So there’s a lot of standing in the beginning, you know, holding different zhan zhuang positions in Chinese, like holding different positions; a lot of it. We do quite a bit of that, and it’s torture, actually. In all honesty, too, I’m not really sure if standing as long as we did is even necessary. Maybe it’s partly just mental, I feel. Because you know, it’s a grueling thing to stand in these positions for so long. So that was part of it – a big part. And then, you know, endless repetitions of basic movements was another big thing, so not very exciting at first. But it ingrains these movement patterns so they become fundamentally first nature. And then, you know, you go on from there and then forms – practicing traditional forms – then you take the technique out of the form. And the one thing they have that I feel would be a benefit to a lot of combat sport athletes is you can kind of breakdown martial training. You have solo training, obviously, so you gotta condition; do your forms, do whatever your strength training, all that kind of stuff, and then there’s training with a partner. So training with a partner can range from doing cooperative technique training all the way to full-contact sparring. And I find now, what I see in a lot of schools, a lot of academies, traditional as well, there’s not enough time spent in what I call like the mid-range of training so what you’ll get is… for example, a lot of say a Jiu Jitsu class, which have limited time, you’ll teach a student a technique and they’ll practice it on each other with absolutely no resistance. So you know, say you learned how to do some kind of joint lock and you’ll practice it, I’ll practice it. We’ll go back and forth till we get the idea, you know, maybe learn a couple of techniques, and then bam, you’re sparring. And then it’s 100% resistance right off the bat. So I feel if there’s time constraints, that’s really the only logical way to go. But if you have a little more time or you can schedule a time better, one of the training methods that we did – traditional training methods – they have between the not the completely compliant training and the 100% non-compliant, full sparring training. In between that, there’s various training methods and levels of force that we did a lot. And I feel like this is a missing link in a lot of people’s training. For example, you know, everyone knows in Tai Chi have things like pushing hands, right? So pushing hands is an example that everyone would know. It’s not completely cooperative but there’s parameters. You’re basically testing each other’s sensitivity and balance and you know, your frame and power. But since it’s not full-contact, no one’s getting hit or throwing down hard. You’re a little calmer and you have more time to, you know, focus on certain variables, such sensitivity. So that would be an example. Of course you have to go beyond that. If you’re in a martial art and you want to fight and you never practiced really fighting, you’re not gonna be very good it. It’s like any other endeavor. You gotta approximate your event as closely as possible. But there’s different ways to train to get there, right? So that would be one example. Or there’s different levels of sparring. So sometimes, when I practice Xing Yi Quan in the school, we would have drills like, you know, I’m only allowed to punch, you’re only allowed to throw. So you’ve got to be able to defend yourself and take me down without hitting me, and I have to practice hitting you and and not let you take me down, or maybe I can only kick and you can only punch. So these things are kind of intermediate — not completely cooperative, not completely full sparring — but more rules but they force you to work on variables you might not work on. For example, if I really like to punch, you know, and every time we spar full-contact, I’ll just try to punch you, right? So my grappling is lacking. So I’m forced to work on my grappling. When you say, okay all you can do is grapple, he’s gonna punch you, that kind of thing. When I practiced in internally there was a long or quite a big range of these practices, and I feel like they really maximized the training time. So that was a big part of the training, like different levels of these drills. Or you know, it Jiu Jitsu, it has its counterpart. You might just drill a position or you might drill where, you know, no matter when you were sparring but all I’m allowed to do is arm-bar. So these kinds of drills, I feel should be practiced. This should be most of the partner training. And then, you know, full-contact, 100% sparring needs to be done but maybe not as much as some schools do it. You know, maybe some of these intermediate drills would be with help then improved a little bit quicker. So that was traditional training. And not that modern training doesn’t have that kind of thing but you know, that’s where I was first introduced to it. So a lot of alignment work, a lot of basics, a lot of holding positions, a lot of repetitive single movements, a lot of form repetition, and then drilling techniques, drilling techniques, and then these other practices. So that’s basically how it went. And then, you know, like I said, my school expected you to fight, you know, go and fight like go and compete, that’s it.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Right on. I do want to speak a little bit to what you brought up with the transition, the often rapid transition from very light, we’ll say slow or no resistance in partner techniques, and then taking the largely into free sparring and often heavier sparring, you know, heavier contact. And it’s true. I see a lot of schools that don’t have that transitional work, and I was lucky enough that I grew up with some of that and anyone that has had me come to their class from teaching anything combat, really, that’s actually where we spend most of our time. And I just want to point out and I’m fairly certain you’ll agree but because it’s an important concept; it is the lack of this training in that middle space that holds people back. Because what do we tend to do if we’re put in… The more intense the situation, the more likely we are to fall back on the things we’re most comfortable with. And that doesn’t give people the opportunity to improve the things that they’re just kind of figuring out. If you’re throwing a kick at their head at anything approaching at high velocity or power they’re not gonna be experimenting with the technique that they just learned 20 minutes ago.
Posted: Tue Jun 18, 2019 2:12 pm