I've previously posted about the late Master Ark Wong Huey. He was one of the first to teach Chinese Martial Arts to non-Chinese.
Below is a video of a program that was put on by some of his senior students demonstrating various health and self defense aspects of his martial art. Enjoy.
He appeared in the pilot of the original Kung Fu pilot for the series. Below he is the old monk demonstrating the Dragon form.
Saturday, September 21, 2019
Wednesday, September 18, 2019
The 48 Laws of Power, #30: Seem Effortless
Mr. Greene draws from both Eastern and Western history and literature as his source material. Sun Tzu and Machiavelli as cited as much as wonderful stories of famous con men.
Each of the 48 Laws carries many examples, along with counter examples where it is appropriate that they be noted, and even reversals.
It is a very thorough study of the subject and the hardback version is beautifully produced.
One of the things I admire about Greene is that he not only studied strategy, he applied what he learned to his own situation and prospered.
Your actions must seem natural and executed with ease. All the toil and practice that go into them, and also all the clever tricks, must be concealed. When you act, act effortlessly, as if you could do much more. Avoid the temptation of revealing how hard you work – it only raises questions. Teach no one your tricks or they will be used against you.
Of course we are proud of the hard work and practice that we've put into something, but when we put that on display, it makes our accomplishments seem less wonderful, less special. They'll say that anyone could do it if they practiced that much, then they'll criticize your practice.
Don't reveal why you are capable; just do it.
Sunday, September 15, 2019
The Foundational Kata
Below is a demonstration of the Goju Ryu karate version.
Thursday, September 12, 2019
Improving Your Pushing Hands Practice
Today’s Tai Chi tip is all about how to get better at push hands simply by adjusting your posture.
Push hands should really be an exercise in which we get to test our ability to absorb Jin from an opponent and project it into an opponent as required, to uproot them.
It shouldn’t devolve into a pushing and shoving match to see who can ‘win’. Once it turns into that then I don’t think anybody is learning anything anymore. There are far superior methods of grappling and I think you’d be better off spending your time learning those if your goal is simply to win a grappling exchange.
But before we can focus on using Jin we have to get our body in a position where it conforms to the Tai Chi principles of posture, where we’re not fighting it all the time, and it’s working to our advantage instead.
It is said, “Jin does not flow through tense muscles”
So, we need to get our body into a structural position where we can be as relaxed as possible, without collapsing, yet still maintain our connection to the ground. In Chinese terms you would call this a posture where your “qi is strong”, but you are not tensing muscles more than they need to be.
Of course, this optimum qi structure is one of the first things to go out of the window once we start push hands. In push hands we get to test our Tai Chi under a limited amount of pressure. Faults that lie dormant in the form rise to the surface like bubbles.
Here we’re going to go over a few.
1. Head position and leaning
Head position in the form goes hand in hand with the issue of leaning. Some styles of Tai Chi, like Wu style and Yang Cheng-Fu’s Yang style, opt for a slight angling forward of the torso in forward-weighted bow stances. Other styles like Sun style, Chen style and Cheng Man-Ching style all keep an upright posture as often as they can, even in front-weighted stances. (See pictures below)But the thing is, all styles are upright in their back stances (or should be). And even styles that maintain an upright stance, have to lean forward to do throwing techniques that take the person to the ground like Needle at Sea Bottom or Punch to the ground, for example.
I think it’s time to get to the point of all this:
It’s not the lean itself that matters.
It’s maintaining an unbroken spinal alignment that is the key issue!
It’s maintaining an unbroken spinal alignment that is the key issue!
For example, when even a practitioner who is famous for his upright posture does Needle at Sea Bottom, he or she bends forward, she just doesn’t break the alignment of the spine.
The Tai Chi classics talk a lot of carrying the head as if “suspended from above”. If you let your head droop you break the spinal alignment. You are easy to off-balance in push hands because your posture is broken. But if you hinge properly from the hips then you can still keep this spinal alignment even when you bend forward.
Think of the spine as including the neck (which anatomically, it does of course). If the neck goes offline in relation to the spine then the weight of the head has to be compensated by muscles elsewhere in the body. And this extra tensing of muscles results in a less efficient transfer of Jin from (or too) the ground.
Because we are quite used to this happening while standing or sitting, we don’t really feel our head being off centre so much. Switch to working on the ground, in a yoga posture for example, and you can instantly feel the difference your head position makes.
On a technical level, if you are using Jin you should be able to let the solidity of the ground be apparent at the point of contact with the opponent. If you have to use too much muscle then your pure Jin starts to turn into “Muscle Jin”. Muscle jin, isn’t as adaptable to change as pure jin. You can’t easily change direction, for instance. It also just doesn’t feel as it should. It might help you win a push hands competition, but you’ll find it lacking when it comes to martial technique.
And when it comes to the thorny issue of leaning, I’d recommend trying to stay upright in push hands. As I said before, the leans you tend to see in Tai Chi forms are to do with the application of a technique. Sure, you can lean to apply power according to a technique (just make sure you keep your spine aligned) but for the usual back and forth of push hands I’d recommend trying to keep as upright as possible. You’ll find it gives you more freedom of movement in the horizontal axis.
Monday, September 09, 2019
Learning Taijiquan Through the Process of Body Mechanics
When you start learning Tai Chi, you start learning as a person who is used to mostly be aware about your head and hands. For some people, the process of starting to learn Tai Chi can be painful. You will become painfully aware about all of your mistakes and flaws, how bad your balance is, how bad your coordination is and how hard it is to coordinate the body with awareness in the most simple ways. Now you will start to use your nervous system in another way than you are used to in daily life’s movements. Through the time, you will deepen your knowledge about yourself. It will be a long journey with plenty of rewards ahead.
- Balance and the central axis.
- Understanding feet and legs
- Use of the kua
- Understanding the lower Dantian
- Coordinating of kua, dantian and waist
- Opening and closing the lower ribs
- Opening and closing scapula
- Coordinating lower ribs, spine and
- Coordinating lower and upper body and all of it together
- Everything moves together spontaneously without focus on any part starting/initiating movement
Stages 1 & 2 – Balance and centerline
- Balance and the central axis.
- Understanding feet and legs
Now, after learning the basics, you’ll need to learn to become more aware about your feet and legs, not only how to shift weight but to move your body with the feet and legs. You need to try to be as passive as possible with your arms, letting the body push the arms and pull them in.
These first two steps, the very beginning of learning Tai Chi properly, occur mostly while learning a form. The process of learning a long form might take one or two years of study. If you study a long traditional form, you will probably need to learn it first before being able to deepening your body method further.
Friday, September 06, 2019
The Origins of the Kyoto Taikai and it’s Place in Kendo Today
The full post may be read here.
From the very founding of the Butokukai in 1885, there has always been a gathering of budoka in Kyoto once a year for a Butokusai, or a martial arts demonstration. This included not only kendo, but (events changed over time) kyudo, judo, marksmanship, swimming, sumo, naginata, koryu (see below) etc. This has continued over the past nearly 135 years except for exceptional circumstances (Tenran-jiai or war).
Although the main art demonstrated has always been kendo (judo being a close second), nowadays it has become an almost exclusively kendo event (with some ZNKR iaido and jodo).
In the past, the Kyoto Taikai served as THE event that brought disparate and far-flung groups of practitioners together. It was there that shogo (seirensho/renshi, kyoshi, hanshi) were awarded and grades decided (pre-war that would have been up to godan, post war up to judan). Nowadays there are far more people doing kendo, and gradings and shogo are decided across the country, so the Kyoto Taikai’s influence here has been vastly reduced (in the past, shogo and grades were awarded AFTER your tachiai, nowadays it is before).
Today, the Kyoto Taikai serves as a central event for experienced practitioners to meet, do kendo, and socialise. People who are not yet eligible to do a tachiai not only have the opportunity to watch famous kenshi from across the country (world) do their tachiai, but they may even get the chance to keiko with them.
Money-wise, the taikai is a massive source of income for the ZNKR. Thousands of people compete, each paying around 3,000 yen for the privilege.
When thinking about the culture of kendo, however, talk of money goes out the door: doing a tachiai (whether kendo or whatnot) in the Butokuden is a direct link to the history of kendo, and being part of the taikai itself is seen as an honour.
The point of embu
As stated above, initially this particular embu was one to not only friendship and to show your skills, but also served as an event where you could be promoted within the organisation (Butokukai). This has changed over time as gradings have become more democratic, have been moved to other locations as well as placed before the embu itself in Kyoto,
However, some people reading this might think of an “embu” as something where koryu are demonstrated rather than kendo, and usually – but not always – in a shrine or temple. As this is the norm nowadays I can understand why people believe this, but in fact, the whole concept of “koryu” or “kobudo” really only started in the 1920s and 30s in Japan, a good 30-odd years after the Butokukai began it’s embu event. Koryu embu were for self-promotion, that is, to attract people to study the arts so that they didn’t die out completely. They also served as motivation to study about and polish your own ryu-ha’s skills (seemingly, the state of koryu at that time was dire).
So, kendo-wise the point of holding the embu in Kyoto has, since the grading element has been removed, become more of a traditional event. People from all over meet up, do some kendo, and socialise. Koryu-wise, the initial motivation was to basically ensure the survival of the arts (they were about to be eclipsed by kendo, judo, et al), but expanded to include serious historical and technical study.
Tuesday, September 03, 2019
Mental Traps in Taijiquan Practice
Below is an excerpt from an excellent post at Slanted Flying. The full post may be read here.
...Since we were toddlers, we have trained ourselves to lean into, or brace, against force. When first trying to push something, toddlers push themselves away instead, ending in them seated on their diapers. Leaning into the object allows toddlers to use whatever weight they have against the object that they try to push. Our minds have therefore become accustomed to replying to force by applying more force, and to lean or brace when doing so.
But Taijiquan teaches the opposite; to avoid using force against force! We train to issue force from the ground – from our feet, developed by our legs, directed from our waist, expressed in the arms. In push-hands (推手tui shou), interacting like a “butting cow” (顶牛ding niu) is considered to be an error indicative of poor quality Taijiquan. Butting against a partner or opponent reflects our lifetime habit (since we were toddlers) of leaning and bracing, and resisting force with force.
We instead want to “receive” force into our “root” (into the ground). We want to remain comfortable and aligned, and if we conduct incoming forces downward (e.g., by bending our back leg) rather than bracing backwards (e.g., straightening the rear leg), then the incoming force is more aligned with gravity, which healthy human bodies are comfortable with due to naturally “resisting” gravity every time that we stand.
We have habitual mental images of responding horizontally, pushing forward and pulling backwards, instead of pushing/projecting up from, and pulling/absorbing down into, our feet. The horizontal tendency is what produces the “butting cow” posture during push-hands practice. The “butting cow” loses the resiliency of the rear leg which stiffens instead. One would then lose the quality of “loading the spring” (compressing into one’s root – the ground) that is more appropriate for Taijiquan.
When one’s joints stiffen or lock in response to force (either incoming from an opponent, or outgoing from one’s own issuing of force), the body loses its changeability. We may appear stronger (at least in the one direction that the force/resistance is directed towards), but we also become less adaptable.
Taijiquan seeks to maintain changeability/adaptability even when under pressure; we want to maintain the openness of our joints, like they are well oiled and free to move, rather than locking/tightening them in place.
Many people when they want to bend lower or raise their leg higher for example, try to use force or momentum to do so rather than trying to relax more. This “try harder” or “do more” approach seems to be what humans have learned to do rather than relaxing (doing less). Unless someone is taught stretching or yoga, or something similar, the tendency is to bounce harder and harder in order to force a greater range of motion.
Saturday, August 31, 2019
The Goals of Martial Arts
Connecting the dots between an individual’s intentions, their actions and subsequent systemic outcomes is more difficult than one might suspect. Just ask any social scientist. Understanding each of these categories is important if we want to come to terms with either the causes, or interpretive meanings, of any event. Yet the structure of the social world dictates that none of us get to work our will just how we would like. My desires may bump up against your goals, and suddenly we both find ourselves acting “strategically.” As the environment becomes complex, everyone is forced to do things that are not reflective of their original intentions. Often this brings about situations that no single actor intended.
This is how you get major interstate wars, at least according to a number of leading scholars in the discipline of International Relations. Given its excessively costly nature, great power war is often modeled as a type of miscalculation. Or as one of my old teachers put it “War is the error term.” We could say something similar about lots of bad outcomes. There is not a single super-villain out there devising a plan to pollute the world’s oceans with plastics. Rather, lots of people make individual choices about personal consumption, or corporate policy, and the end result is something that no one individual truly intended. Such is the tragedy of the commons.
This leads us to one of the most important realizations to emerge from the field of Political Science (and before that Philosophy). Our fellow humans are responsible for many of the bad things that seem to define life, yet none of them (or very few) are actually evil. Even fully rational people seeking their own self interest will inevitably fall into conflict and probably violence. And that is a best-case scenario. To make matters worse, students of psychology have determined most decision making is no-where near “rational.”
Violence is pervasive. It takes many forms. There are short, sharp, instances of acute physical violence. Wars, or physical assaults tend to get the most press. But I don’t think there is any evidence to suggest that in total they are really more destructive than the other forms of structural violence that humans wreak on each other. Famine, disease, colonialism and addiction have all taken their toll. But at least we can still quantify things like infant mortality rates (which typically go up in civil wars) or life expectancy (which tends to drop when economies go into a serious prolonged crisis). Harder to measure, though no less real, are social stressors like inequality, discrimination and humiliation.
The martial arts interest me as a social scientist for many reasons. Yet one of the most powerful is that they are a relatively inexpensive tools which local societies, across the globe, turn to as they seek to address the effects of violence in their own communities. It wasn’t really until the 1960s and 1970s that social scientists in the West began to diversify our understanding of violence as having more than just a physical or political dimension. Yet already in the 1920’s we can read book after book, article after article, in which Chinese martial artists argued that their practices could insulate the nation from each of the ills listed above. They seemed to be far ahead of the curve on this.
This is also part of our challenge when we try to study the Chinese martial arts. As I have argued before, it is impossible to reduce Chinese hand combat down to a single set of motivations. Many people have practiced these systems for many different reasons. An imperial bannerman, a night watchman, an opera performer and a traveling medicine salesman may all have practiced some sort of kung fu in the year 1819. While they all may have done this so as to “make a living,” the sorts of violence that they faced (structural or otherwise) was not exactly the same.
Over the last few years Paul Bowman and I have, at different times, called for greater focus on the problem(s) of violence within Martial Arts Studies. Some of the things that have already been written suggest that students of our field can bring very interesting perspectives to these discussions.
For instance, I highly recommend that everyone take a look at Sixt Wetzler’s chapter in the recently published Martial Arts Studies Reader as a great example of the unique type of work that we might be able to do.
But while violence is the drumbeat that structures so many people’s lives, it is not a concept that can be understood (or even exist) in isolation. As a result, we may not be able to fully grasp the social work that the martial arts are called on to perform if we examine them only in relation to this concept.
Most frequently, violence (or in its interstate form “war”) is placed in opposition to the concept “peace.”
I put peace in quotes for a very good reason. The complexities of defining and conceptualizing violence pale in comparison to the challenges of understanding peace. Violence is, after all, encoded in things that are done or structures that exist. Peace is a subtler matter. Yet it is critical as it structures the motivations of a good many martial artists, in a huge variety of times and places.
Perhaps the easiest place to start would be with a distinction drawn within the Peace Studies literature, often attributed to Johan Galtung. Still, it should be noted that these terms have been in circulation since the start of the twentieth century and reflect a common pattern of conceptual classification seen throughout the field of Political Science. Galtung notes that “negative peace” is often taken to mean the absence of violent acts. Importantly, it does not actually suggest a lack of conflict. For example, Russia and the United States enjoyed a negative peace during the Cold War.
Though their conflicts continued to have a shaping effect on global politics, and terrified generations of people with the prospects of nuclear annihilation, no actual shooting between the two super powers ever took place. Clearly this is a type of peace, but it is one that leaves something to be desired. Even in the absence of a formal declaration of WWIII many people’s lives were destroyed.
The stark nature of this paradox led to renewed focus (first in Europe, and to a lesser extent in the United State) on the idea of “positive peace” in the 1960s and 1970s. It sought to move beyond the obvious violence to address sources of underlying conflict (where possible). This often means creating new types of relationships between actors, or internally seeking to address the systemic social and economic failures (poverty, famine, alienation, inequality) that either led to conflict in the past or might simply rob people of their basic humanity going forward. Advocates of change through the creation of positive peace are typically just as interested in what is happening in the World Bank as the UN Security Council.
Peace Studies departments are much less common in the United States than the sorts of International Relations (IR) programs where I received my training. Still, a number of their concepts have found their way into the general Political Science literature. One of these insights, which might be particularly helpful for students of Martial Arts Studies, bears on the question of scalability. Much of the traditional IR discussion of violence has focused on events at the national level. After all, nations which go to war and IR theorists very much want to understand why.
But a moment’s thought suggest that it is not just nations that “go to war.” It is also social groups, cities and individuals who are mobilized in these campaigns. And it is at this much more local level that the violence of a conflict, whether acute or structural, is actually absorbed. We should not be surprised to discover that local leaders and community actors are often very aware of the logic of negative and positive peace.
Still, local community leaders have neither the resources nor the ability to make the sorts of sweeping systemic changes that classical Peace Theory often advocates. Instead they may find themselves relying on voluntary groups as they attempt to steer their communities through events not of their own making. This is one area, from Japan to Indonesia to South America, where we have regularly seen martial arts communities brought into the political realm.
For instance, one of the most common side effects of sudden economic or political disruption is a spike in violent crime. At various times in Chinese history martial arts groups have been explicitly called upon by local officials to deal with these trends. They have been used to clear the roads of bandits, protect crops ripening in the field from neighboring villages and even to form militias. Or to put it slightly differently, the martial arts societies were called upon to provide some much-needed “negative peace.” In the short run one must protect the village’s crops and keep bandits at bay before anything other sort of policy action is possible. Likewise, when we train individuals to physically protect themselves from the worst effects of a violent assault in a modern American environment, we are focusing on a model of negative peace. We are attempting to bring peace by ending an anticipated attack.
Yet that was never the only goal of the Confucian officials who would, from time to time, recruit martial arts groups to help and restore order in the countryside. They were well aware that violent bandit groups tended to recruit from the same pool of “bare sticks” (young unmarried men with few economic prospects) that martial arts schools drew on. In times of famine or economic disruption these individuals, who were typically day laborers or only marginally employed, were hit first and hardest by any disruption. That hunger and desperation was precisely why they were likely to join a bandit organization. Worse yet, they lacked a secure place within the traditional village structure which defined one’s status through the inheritance of land, marriage or educational attainment. The long-term social prospects for excess sons was quite bleak. Or in current social scientific parlance, we might say that these young men were systemically disadvantaged.
The formal raising of militias, or the informal tolerance of martial arts groups, addressed these issues on two levels. Militia membership came with a paycheck that might forestall economic emergency.
Membership in a martial arts society provided an important source of identity. There individuals would develop narratives about the importance of protecting the same communities (and according to Avron Bortez, even the same norms) which might otherwise have been seen as alienating and threatening. In either case, by taking young men off the street the bandits brotherhoods and rebel armies had fewer potential recruits and they tended to grow more slowly. This, in turn, limited their ability to disrupt the peace.
All of this reveals an important pattern. Martial artists, while lacking standing within the Confucian order, were often a critical asset necessary for the stabilization, and projection of power into, local society. In times of crisis it really was necessary to “man the barricades” and fight bandits. Hence the actual efficacy of these practices were important when thinking about the strategies for imposing a “negative peace.” Yet these measures worked best when they succeeded in convincing young men that they had a place in the system, forestalling the rapid expansion of the types of social disorder that arose quite frequently in Chinese history. And it is not at all clear that the “most realistic” types of martial arts training would serve these other ends the best. Basic fitness and self-defense skills are always great. More importantly, they transform violence from an existential threat to an engaging puzzle that one can organize their training and identity around. And if the creation of a positive peace is your central goal then public performance (lion dance), community building (lineage mythology) and ritual begin to make a lot more sense.
When viewed from the perspective of negative peace these things may appear to be secondary considerations at best. Others might see them as distractions, or evidence of the “decayed” state of a martial system. And yet these “secondary” practices and structures must also be replicated through the generations, often at great expense. So why maintain the effort? Why do so many systems continue to argue that the martial arts are first and foremost a means by which young people learn about their place in society? If we consider these same systems from the perspective of positive peace theory suddenly these sorts of practices make much more sense. Rather than being somehow secondary they are important tools by which local society seeks to address the sorts of ills that lead to festering conflict and eventually violence.
Wednesday, August 28, 2019
Do What You Can
Below is an excerpt from The Business/Judo of Life, which is authored by Dr. AnnMaria De Mars, who among her other accomplishments, happens to be Ronda Roussey's mother. The full post may be read here.
World judo champions are a small club and I don’t fit in. Let's look at what some other world champions did post-competition
- Mike Swain - owns a company that sells mats
- Jimmy Pedro, Jr. - sells mats and runs a judo club
- Kayla Harrison - competes in mixed martial arts
- Yamashita - something judo with the IJF
Okay, I’ll be honest. I’m so not in with the cool crowd that I have no idea who won medals or what most of them are doing. Travis Stevens got a silver in the Olympics (I think) and now does judo and jiu jitsu clinics. Some guy in Canada got a silver medal a while back, I only remember he was nice because - Canadian - and I think he does something with their national sports program.
Then there is me. After the world championships I went off to get a Ph.D. , specializing in Applied Statistics and Psychometrics. I’ve founded four companies and spent most of my days writing software, meeting with investors and potential customers, writing budgets or writing up results of quasi-experimental designs for grant reports or academic journals.
It’s not that I don’t like judo or think it’s a good thing for people to do but I’m pretty busy. You don’t see Bill Gates out on the mat, now do you? (No, I’m not Bill Gates but I’d kind of like to be, except I’d like to not be a guy and keep my kids.)
This IS my day job. Check out Making Camp Premium for your iPad/ iPhone or Google Play or on the web. You’ll learn about the Ojibwe people, brush up on your math skills and other useful knowledge like synonyms and idioms. Get it for yourself, your kids or donate to a school to help other people’s kids.
DO WHAT YOU CAN
Some of this came about because I did NOT have the advantages that “kids these days” swear they need of just doing judo full time. Since I was working full-time during my competitive years, there were a lot of times I couldn’t be at the best judo club, or sometimes any judo club. I learned to do what I could.- Can’t get to practice? Get up and run sprints in the morning before work.
- Can’t get to practice? Lift weights at the gym near my house.
- No one near my size/ age to train with? Ask the guys at the Naval Training Center to run matwork drills on them over and over.
- No one really interested in training seriously at the club? Ask each person if they’d mind taking 25 falls for in a line so I can get in 200 throws.
- Injured my knee and can’t do standing technique? Do dumb bell curls and exercise to build up my hands and arms for gripping and chokes. Do sit-ups. Do matwork drills.
I don’t remember anyone ever specifically teaching me this. I think I just figured it out through necessity of wanting to win and being in a lot of situations that were suboptimal for making that happen.
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