interview with Strider Clark--August 2018

Discussion on the three big Chinese internals, Yiquan, Bajiquan, Piguazhang and other similar styles.

Re: interview with Strider Clark--August 2018

Postby Bao on Fri Sep 21, 2018 12:42 am

Thanks for sharing, I enjoyed the interview.
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Re: interview with Strider Clark--August 2018

Postby Trick on Fri Sep 21, 2018 5:50 am

Wish I could see that vid. Some time ago I saw a vid of him on the Chinese tubes and he definitely seem to have his things well together
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Re: interview with Strider Clark--August 2018

Postby Kelley Graham on Fri Sep 21, 2018 9:49 am

great! really great. "Wrong, do it again. Wrong, do it again. Wrong, do it again." thx.
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Re: interview with Strider Clark--August 2018

Postby nicklinjm on Sat Sep 22, 2018 7:11 am

Nice interview, thanks for sharing. Would have loved to see more usage examples from him, his Tongbei looks good! Hope Tongbei gains a greater following in the US...
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Re: interview with Strider Clark--August 2018

Postby C.J.W. on Sun Sep 23, 2018 8:12 pm

His Tongbei application demo, the one that was shot in a hotel room, is still among one my favorite CMA YouTube clips of all time.

Tongbei is a wonderful art that produces fighters quickly, as the movements can pretty much be applied in combat the same way they are drilled in practice.
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Re: interview with Strider Clark--August 2018

Postby Trick on Mon Sep 24, 2018 12:06 am

Yes that’s the vid(hotel room)I remembered i found it on youku. Even that the guy demonstrated on in that vid is smaller and “standing still” one can see that there are skill demonstrated..One of my Taijiquan teachers I was fortunate to study with also teach Tongbeiquan(wuxing), I found these exercises blend very well together, in my opinion one might grasp the practice of taijiquan quicker if add some Tongbeiquan basics. There is a strong “from ground rising up” feeling to notice very early on in its practice.
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Re: interview with Strider Clark--August 2018

Postby Bao on Mon Sep 24, 2018 12:37 am

[quote="Trick”] in my opinion one might grasp the practice of taijiquan quicker if add some Tongbeiquan basics. There is a strong “from ground rising up” feeling to notice very early on in its practice.[/quote]

Tongbei certainly teach to use strength from the back and from the spine right from the beginning. However, many exercises found in tongbei is also found in many other Chinese arts as Tai Chi, Bagua, Xingyi and Baji. They are not always understood in the same way as in Tongbei though, so some basic Tongbei practice might be helpful as well.
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Re: interview with Strider Clark--August 2018

Postby Trick on Mon Sep 24, 2018 1:18 am

As the story goes about for example the founder of Xingyiquan(Hebei) Li Luoneng who was already trained in Tongbeiquan before coming to Shanxi to learn Dai family boxing...Tongbeiquan may be the root to many of the norther Chinese martial arts maybe more so to the internal ones ..
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Re: interview with Strider Clark--August 2018

Postby GrahamB on Tue Sep 25, 2018 3:13 am

Hmmm... demo against opponent offering zero resistance and holding his arm out in space without moving so he can do 3 strikes in return?

Not saying it's a bad demo, but one of your favourite CMA clips of all time???
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Re: interview with Strider Clark--August 2018

Postby Trick on Tue Sep 25, 2018 6:10 am

All time favorite maybe could be argued. But i guess if he did a demo against an resisting opponent everyone would probably say, that’s no CMA. And things as, that’s boxing, that’s wrestling, that’s tae kwon do, that’s BJJ
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Re: interview with Strider Clark--August 2018

Postby Wuyizidi on Tue Sep 25, 2018 5:34 pm

GrahamB wrote:Hmmm... demo against opponent offering zero resistance and holding his arm out in space without moving so he can do 3 strikes in return?

Not saying it's a bad demo, but one of your favourite CMA clips of all time???


This video was taken around in the mid to late 2000's. It was on one of the group trips to Beijing. The smaller guy being demoed on is Roger. He's from Brazil originally, and had studied BJJ for many years in Los Angeles. After meeting with Zhang Yun laoshi, through his introductions, he decided to go to China to study Wu Style Taiji and Yin Style Bagua full time with Zhao Zeren laoshi. At the time this was taken, he just got there, and I think this was at Strider's hotel. He came to meet them so they can go out to dinner later. So this explains the tiny space and the dark lighting.

At this point Roger is new to the group, had no idea what Shi Style Tongbei is, and asked for a very casual, quick intro. It was a spur of the moment thing. Hence the low production value.

The design of Tongbei skills is like most advanced CMA's skills, it starts with a set up, in this case the "Luring Hand", if you block, that springs up the trap - setting up a series of clever follow-up skills. Since Roger is the one asking the question (normally a student can't ask a teacher to show him anything, but since he is a younger brother he can), by Shuo Shou etiquette he was supposed to do what comes naturally but doesn't change, and let the instructor show what comes next.

When Strider first went to China in the 90's he didn't know about this etiquette, and when a gongfu uncle was trying to teach him Ba Wang Xie Jia (an over the shoulder throw where the attacker arm is full extended with palm facing sky), he tried to relax and drop elbow to follow the uncle's motion, the uncle became alarmed right away, made sure he really locked up Strider (almost dislocating his shoulder and elbow) and threw him down very hard. He was really upset and other teachers had to explain to him Strider (18, 19 at the time) didn't know the unwritten rules. Even today that uncle still half-jokingly remind our teacher "you got to watch for that Strider, he tries to beat his uncle."

This is a common thing in traditional circles - there are lots of rules regulating when you can fight with people outside the group. So one the classic ways to make a name for yourself then is to defeat an uncle. Since no one can formally or casually challenge an uncle, they often do it sneaky - like pretending to asking their uncle a question "can you just tell me if I'm doing this right" - you just do the movement yourself. Sometimes you deliberately do it wrong. Then pride get to the best of them, and they show on you what the skill should be like, and you "accidentally" (it is second nature now, I didn't mean it) beat them.

So yeah, it may look strange, but that's how it goes in traditional teaching. Within our group we're actually very careful about this. As Strider's uncle Zhao Zeren like to say "today teachers need to do a lot more da shou (uncooperative fighting), not just shuo shou (demo like this one here). In Shuo Shou the student is supposed to cooperate, so over time in all situations, they cooperate with teacher out of habit. In Taiji this is bad, as this is how many 'masters' demonstrate empty force throws to their student in the beginning, and over time, because it seems to work all the time, they really think they can do it. It starts with teacher deceiving the student, and ends with student deceiving the teacher."
Last edited by Wuyizidi on Tue Sep 25, 2018 5:44 pm, edited 8 times in total.
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Re: interview with Strider Clark--August 2018

Postby edededed on Tue Sep 25, 2018 5:51 pm

Hi Wuyiziyi,

How do you write "wei zhao" in Chinese? And could you give details about what the rules are? (I am too old to go to China and get thrown down hard now, I want to avoid it! ;D )
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Re: interview with Strider Clark--August 2018

Postby nicklinjm on Tue Sep 25, 2018 6:07 pm

Wei zhao = 喂招. The unwritten rules (and sneaky challenges) Wuyizidi is talking about are very common, had a similar experience with my sifu. Like Strider, I didn't know the rules either in the first year I was studying with him, and he still likes to tell the story of how I actually tried to counter and hit back when he was demonstrating on me. Of course he knew how to deal with it (painfully I might add), but it did surprise him!
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Re: interview with Strider Clark--August 2018

Postby Wuyizidi on Tue Sep 25, 2018 6:36 pm

edededed wrote:Hi Wuyiziyi,

How do you write "wei zhao" in Chinese? And could you give details about what the rules are? (I am too old to go to China and get thrown down hard now, I want to avoid it! ;D )


No prob :)

Like nicklinjm said, wei zhao 喂招: spoon feeding the skill

In the old days martial art training is a very formal process with long evaluation periods. So the apprenticeship usually start with long period (often a year) of training in something really basic that you can't use for fighting right away, like stretching and zhan zhuang.

The next step in this "useless" training is forms training. Form is a nice way of cataloging all the skills of the style. The major reason there are lots of forms, which people today can't naturally appreciate, is that you have to keep kids interested during this long period of training.

At this point, satisfied with the child's aptitude and character with hard, boring, but absolute essential training, the teacher start the Chai Shou 拆手 process. Breaking down each posture of the form into individual movements, and fully explaining all the attack/defense implications. This is where the idea of wei zhao 喂招 comes in. The teacher only go as fast as the student can absorb the lesson.

So until you go through this wei zhao 喂招, you can't really use it. Today people complain everyone who just does form can't fight, well that is by design :) To link a long sequence of movements together from individual skills, we are often forced to abbreviate the end of one movement and beginning of another using circular movement, so they can flow smoothly together. This had the side benefit of hiding the real movement (and therefore application) from any onlooker. This is also the reason why while doing the same form, some masters would insist the students to make the movement more "square", to show they understand the full movements/application intent.

This is where things get tricky:

1) teachers are conservative to start with. Also, unlike the Mr. Miyagi media stereotype, martial art masters as a group before 1949 are mostly illiterate, they are more like professional athletes - people with great skill, but big tempers. My own teacher told us one story from early days of training with Master Wang Peisheng: there was this one Bagua skill that was very difficult to understand, Master Wang showed it on one of them once, he and others around didn't understand. Fine, he's starting to get impatient, he does it again. Again none of the students understood. Finally he got really upset - he's a martial art prodigy, everything came to him easily, he genuinely doesn't understand why it's so difficult for others to understand. So he's like "okay, maybe you didn't feel it because my force is too small, i'm going to do it for real this time, so you can feel what the actual force feels like on the body." Bam, this time, because the movements are even quicker, no one saw anything. Master Wang now stands over the student "do you understand now?!" The student, who hit the back of his head against the ground really hard, his mind is completely blank, being 1) afraid of teacher's anger, 2) doesn't want another concussion, is like "oh yes, I think I got it now. I'll go home and practice it a couple of thousand times. Thank you, thank you..."

From this example we can understand how some great masters like Yang Banhou couldn't keep students around :)

In that particular instance, they went home, practiced a thousand reps within one training session, and finally got it. Before they went back later in the week, they coordinately beforehand who will just watch Master Wang's feet, who will watch his body movements, who will watch his hands, and who will follow his eye movements...

wei zhao 喂招 is also why trust was paramount to the traditional master-disciple relationship, because the teacher will open himself up to let the student try the skill on him. Because internal by definition is not something can be seen, only felt. And only by feeling it in his body can he tell if the student's neijing is right.

2) So here's why the not changing during the practice is important: if one party change his ongoing movement upon seeing the other person's reaction, then the other person will have to change as well, that often means you are no longer practicing that pre-designed defense skill. The only way for the defender to get enough reps in to practice a particular skill is if the attacker doesn't change. Unstructured, free for all fighting is end stage of fight training, to get there we have to go through the structured training stage first.

This is why Yang Chengfu, after his father passed away, sensing the urgency to improve as fast as possible, hired someone to be his training dummy. That person is super strong, but doesn't know anything about martial art, and Yang didn't teach him. He was hired just to feed Yang forces as Yang asked him to, so Yang could practice his response. The process was a huge success for him.

In every large school there are students who can't put their ego aside during practice, they have to win every encounter. Even after being told by everyone they still change the force when practicing with you. The only thing you can do is to avoid that person. Hence Chen Manching's famous saying "invest in loss". Until someone puts the ego aside, no learning can take place.



Today you rarely see those fake demos in external martial art, especially striking art, because they don't have those skills, and they don't need to do these kinds of Wei Zhao. For example: to practice any type of joint locking techniques, the attacker has to go with the force of defender right? Otherwise he could easily be hurt. I know - I have 2 wrist surgeries (torn TFCC) from practicing Shorinji Kempo. This is why Aikido is the one non-Chinese art with most fake demos right? If your skill don't include wrist lock throws, the attacker never need to cooperate, thereby short-circuiting the teacher-student mutual deception cycle. Same with internal martial art.

So today the fake demo is actually a perverse indicator of group's past glorious history and authenticity - somewhere in the past, perhaps very recently, there were high level masters who can do something like that, some skill that is so incredible it looks fake/unreal, so the students tried to emulate that. If that didn't exist, because it looks so unreal, it would be beyond a normal person's imagination to even come up with a fake skill like that in the first place. They would just do an exaggeration - being knocked back 10 steps instead of 5, but not pop into the air, then fake hop a couple of times, or thrown without being touched...
Last edited by Wuyizidi on Tue Sep 25, 2018 7:02 pm, edited 9 times in total.
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Re: interview with Strider Clark--August 2018

Postby C.J.W. on Tue Sep 25, 2018 6:37 pm

GrahamB wrote:Hmmm... demo against opponent offering zero resistance and holding his arm out in space without moving so he can do 3 strikes in return?

Not saying it's a bad demo, but one of your favourite CMA clips of all time???


Fav Tongbei clips of all time. Good Tongbei apps are rarely captured on film.
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