Author: Tai Chi Notebook

Saoirse Ronan’s viral clip and the debate around women’s safety in the UK

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The UK is having a bit of a women’s safety moment right now, and since I’m in the UK and it’s a topic that crosses over into subjects I discuss on my blog, I think I should address it. As well as being about self-defence it’s also about how women and female perspectives are often ignored by a male-focused society. It all relates back to comments made by actress Saoirse Ronan on the Graham Norton Show, a clip of which has gone viral.

You can view the clip here:

She’s sitting on the sofa with fellow actors Denzel Washington, Eddie Redmayne and Paul Mescal. They’re having a lighthearted discussion about training martial arts/self defence for movie roles. While the men laugh and joke about something as ludicrous as thinking about a phone as a weapon of self defence, (can you imagine, lol!?) Ronan points out (she has to try twice to be heard) that this is something women have to think about all the time. The resulting awkward silence speaks louder than anything else.

That this one moment seems to have captured something very familiar to a lot of women – it’s captured men’s ignorance of women’s lived experience in terms of feeling unsafe when moving about in the world and having to think about using things like keys or mobile phones as weapons. Things that men generally don’t have to worry about.

I don’t want to jump on any kind of bandwagon and write an article about how to use a mobile phone as a weapon, because a) you can’t learn self defence from articles! And b) that seems like very opportunistic behaviour.

But what I would say to any women reading this, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ) is a great martial art that will benefit you more in the long run way more than a one-off 2-hour seminar on “self defence for women”. If you really want to feel more confident and less unsafe (of course, there is no guaranteed panacea for this, unfortunately) then I’d recommend starting regular BJJ classes at a BJJ Academy you feel comfortable with, and with an instructor you feel comfortable with (please shop around!), rather than going to a one-off seminar that aims to provide you with a quick fix.

And to the men who might need to become more of women’s lived experience (yes, you at the back!) You might like to read this article from the Guardian, detailing six women’s reactions to the clip, that’s worth a read.

And in the words of the sergeant from Hill Street Blues, “let’s be careful out there”.

New podcast! Ep 35: Baguazhang misconceptions with Edward Hines

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My guest for episode 35 of the Tai Chi Notebook podcast is Edward Hines, a long time Baguazhang student of Lou Dexiu. Ed started training Bagua in Taiwan way back in 1991, and has continued ever since. He now teaches online at I-bagua.com and has books about Baguazhang you can find on Amazon.

To frame our chat we decided to cast around for the most common misconceptions you hear about Baguazhang, and address each of them, one at a time.

Links:

Apple
Spotify

www.i-bagua.com

Forget Mount Wudang, the latest hot Kung Fu mountain is Mount Emei, and this time it’s girl groups leading the way

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It’s all about the needles

Emei Mountain is the latest hot Kung Fu trend coming out of China, and a group of Kung Fu girls is leading the charge, according to a new article in China’s GlobalTimes.

In April 2024 a video appeared showing nine female Kung Fu performers doing Kung Fu moves against the backdrop of Emei Mountain.

Chen Yufei, 23, one of the group members is quoted in the article: “Unlike the dramatized versions of Emei kung fu in TV shows, which ­focus on legends, our practice is rooted in the practical skills and traditions of Emei martial arts.”

The video shows performance with a variety of Kung Fu weapons including double whips, swords and of course, the famous Emei needles *, but the phrase “traditions of Emei martial arts” raises a few red flags for me.

A standout line from the article reads “In 2008, Emei martial arts, with a history spanning over three millennia, were designated a National Intangible Cultural Heritage.”

Ok, hang on, what?

Mount Emei has long been a sacred mountain for Buddhism, sure. But a 3,000 year old tradition of Kung Fu?

If you look up Kung Fu training camps on Mount Emei you’ll find a complete history of the martial arts and styles there: “Emei School has 1,093 bare-hand fighting skills, 518 skills with weapons, 41 pair practice routines and 276 practice methods.”

Call me a cynic, but I don’t believe any of this. It appears to me that the Kung Fu traditions of Emei Mountain really belong to the work of modern wuxi fiction of author Jin Yong who wrote a lot about a fictional Emei Sect. In his book, The Heaven Sword and Dragon Saber, the Emei School is founded during the early Yuan dynasty by Guo Xiang around the same time as when the Wudang School is established.

Of course, this being a complete fiction hasn’t stopped the Kung Fu tourist industry from setting up shop on Mount Emei. As this 2012 article describes, there was not much Kung Fu on the mountain back then, but it was starting to be set up, complete with a history. But if you look up Mount Emei today you’ll find Kung Fu competitions are held there, and very much like the operation at Mount Wudang, you can go there to study Kung Fu, for the right price.

The all-female Kung Fu troop heralding from Mount Emei seem to be as much a creation of the Kung Fu tourist industry as anything else, at least to me.

So where does their martial arts come from? Looking through various pages on the Internet I found a Reddit post that sounds true to me: ” “Emei” is just a generic term for martial arts from Sichuan, extremely few styles have any actual direct relation to anyone who loved or practiced on Emei shan.  Also almost everything called “Emei” today are modern offshoots of northern Chinese martial arts brought to Sichuan with nationalist troops as they were forced westward by the Japanese in WWII.”

None of which, of course, is to take away from the performance of the Emei all-female Kung Fu group, who are pretty damn good at WuShu.

  • Note 1: Mount Emei even has its own weapon, the Emei Ci which are sharp steel rods known as needles or piercers, that can be worn on a ring on your finger and spun around.

A visit to Mount Emei by Will of Monkey Steals Peach:

Looking for quality BJJ clothing? Try XMartial

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I’m pleased to announce I’m partnering with XMartial for BJJ and general gym-wear clothing. I’ve gone with XMartial because they have a genuinely fun range of designs, and also their website is full of people I actually recognise from the world of BJJ, like John Danaher, Jordan Preisinger from Jordan Teaches Jiujitsu, and B-Mac. Plus, its Reddit customer reviews for quality and shipping to the UK are good and the customer service is highly rated.

Here’s an example of one of their rashguards that I thought was pretty cool:

Shipping in the US is free, but there is a small $9.50 for shipping to the UK. There are lots of different designs, and XMartial sell gis and hoodies too. So, if you’re looking for new, high quality, BJJ wear and you want to support The Tai Chi Notebook then head over there and have a look at what they’ve got. Thanks!

Tai Chi and the art of occupying the other’s space

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You can think of the Tai Chi form as an exercise in claiming your space. We rarely think of the space we occupy or move around in as part of ourselves, but it is. We often let others take our space, or give it away needlessly. We move out of the way when people walk towards us in the street. Rarely do we stand our ground and own the part of the earth that is directly underneath us.

In tai chi push hands we learn to claim our space, to gently redirect people that want to come into it and also to take away other people’s space if we need to, and not let them get it back. In the tai chi form we learn to round out our movements, so that (as the classics say) there are “no hollows or projections” in tai chi. Your goal is to create a kind of sphere with your body, as if you were inside a giant beach ball. Your hands extend to the limits of the ball, and no further.

Finding your centre

In tai chi there is ‘finding your centre’ within yourself, but there is also ‘finding your centre’ when in contact with another person. When two people are in contact, especially if engaged in some form of conflict, they are rarely both in balance, usually the advantage lies with one person or the other. The one in control is usually the person who has made both people part of their ‘centre’. Viewed from above, they become the centre of the circle, around which the other person is orbiting.

In class today I was working on the ward-off posture. I think by far the best way to think about ward off, as a martial posture, is to think about having just slipped a straight punch over your right shoulder by moving your head and turning your body to your left, you then step diagonally into the space occupied by the other person, right under their armpit using the familiar ‘ward off’ posture to keep them off balance. You need to keep that full, rounded, ‘peng’ aspect to your arms here, and once you have them off balance, you never retreat or give up the ground you’ve taken. If you do then you’re simply giving them their balance back. You need to keep them off balance continually, so that they can’t recover and they end up open to strikes or to being knocked over.

That ability is one reason why, while strikes exist in Tai Chi, they’re not really emphasised in the form. Instead, in the form you’re continually learning how to take ground from the opponent and occupying it while remaining in balance. As a means of self defence, it is highly effective, but not easy to understand without feeling it, which is another reason why so many people are confused about how Tai Chi works as a martial art.

You can train Tai Chi with me in Bath/Bristol, and get better at standing on one leg, twice a week.

Listen to a podcast about this blog post.

Thank you for supporting The Tai Chi Notebook. If you are reading this on a website that isn’t thetaichinotebook.com, then it’s highly likely it’s been stolen. Please let me know so I can issue their webhost a DMCA takedown notice for copyright breach. Thanks. And if you have the great idea of starting a tai chi website by stealing other people’s work to fill it with content for clicks then take a good hard look at yourself, and do better.

Episode 34: The five points of control in Tai Chi

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The latest episode of my Tai Chi Notebook podcast is slightly different to a regular episode. There isn’t a guest, but that doesn’t mean I’m entirely alone…

This episode is brought to you using the power of artificial intelligence. I fed a recent blog post about the Five Points of Control into Google’s NotebookLM, an AI that produces a podcast based on your article, just to see what would happen and the result was so good that I decided to put it out as a real episode!

See what you think:

How to do takedowns and throws, in Tai Chi, Xing Yi, Baguazhang or any martial art

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I came across an interesting video by Ed Hines of i-Bagua.com recently that discussed some general principles of throws and takedowns. There is some good information here, especially about dead angles, and base. Have a watch:

Of course, in my ear I can hear my BJJ friend saying it’s all nonsense, “why not just do wrestling?”, or “he’s doing zero hand fighting!”. My friend tends to think that everything you can know, or ever want to know, about throwing and standup grappling is already inside wrestling.

He probably has a point, and a lot of the clever ‘internal’ things that Tai Chi teachers demonstrate are really just found in wrestling basics, or are obvious if you do wrestling. But here’s the thing – not everybody wants to do wrestling or even can do wrestling! It’s time-intensive hard, physical work, from which you will probably get injured, and, frankly, it’s for young people, not anybody over the age of 30. Not to mention that you’ll also need to invest in a good quality BJJ mat for grappling training.

If you’re going to approach takedowns without having the time or energy required to learn wrestling, then you’re going to need a softer approach. Oh, hello internal arts.

How to defend everything

I wonder if you’ve ever seen the video “how to defend everything” by Chris Paines on YouTube? (It won’t embed, so I’ve had to link it). It’s about BJJ, not internal arts, and focused ground work, not standing, but those principles he’s expounding, I feel, are universal to all grappling, and they’ve really changed my approach to takedowns. It’s also very simple. Simple is good – simple is practical.

At 50 minutes it’s quite a long video, and some of the important points don’t happen until near the end, so I’ll give you a quick summary: In a nutshell, there are 5 parts of the human body that you need to access in at least one place to achieve a throw or takedown.

Part 1. Back of the head,  
Parts 2-3. Armpits and
Parts 4-5. Back of the knees.

(back of knee area extends down to ankle, armpit area extends down to hip).

When I do takedowns I just keep looking to insert a part of my body (arm/hand/foot/head/whatever) into one of those places. I just keep spamming it as an attack. If you keep doing that then eventually you manage to ‘own’ one of those places and a takedown will sort of present itself, especially if you get more than one.

You can analyse any throw on YouTube and you’ll find that the person who did the throw got some part of their body into at least one of those places to make it happen. Now, that might mean that the model being used is too general (i.e. it covers a lot of the body!), however, I think it’s still a useful model if you want to work on defence (which people rarely do!)

If you’re doing some grappling and you get taken down, then replay what happened in your mind – you will have let your opponent into one of the 5 spaces for too long. Long enough for them to get a takedown on you. The answer to preventing the takedown then becomes about reclaiming control over those 5 points of your body, rather than trying to do some sort of pre-scripted counter to the throw.


N.B. You can look at standing on the foot as a possible exception to these rules, however… that doesn’t tend to work in a pure grappling environment, unless you also get one of the other 5 as well. Standing on a foot and striking somebody however is a different beast – it’s much more effective. It’s the same with standing wrist locks… they can work, but 9 times out of 10 they won’t – i.e. they are very low percentage, and almost certainly don’t work against experienced people. Your time is better spent trying to get one of the 5 control points. (Apologies to Aikido 🙂 )

N.B. 2 – But what about the gi or wrestling jacket? Well, think of it this way, a collar grip is simply a very effective lever to the under armpit area, so when you grip the collar, you are effectively cheating because it’s giving you easy access to their armpit area. It’s why, when we go for chokes we grip deep on the collar, under the ear, but when we go for throws we tend to grip much lower down, so that the lever to the armpit is stronger.

Anyway, some food for thought.

Episode 33: Daoyin and Qigong with Tina Faulkner Elders

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My guest for the latest episode of The Tai Chi Notebook Podcast is Tina Faulkner Elders, chief instructor of the RuYi School of Taijiquan and Qigong in Aberdeenshire. We talk about Tina’s training in qigong, first with her father, then in Beijing, China, and then on Wudang mountain itself, the legendary home of Taoism.

Links:

Podcast link

RuYi School of Taijiquan and Qigong

Facebook page

YouTube Channel

Tai Chi basics: Rounding the kwa to make your tai chi form better

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Paying attention to your inner thighs can bring better structure and a feeling of power to your tai chi form

If you’ve read my last post about keeping the knees bent during tai chi practice, and most importantly can do your whole tai chi form without violating this principle, then the kwa (inner thigh) is a good thing to focus on next.

Quite often in Zhan Zhuang chi kung standing practice we use the imagery of balloons supporting various parts of the body. You can imagine balloons supporting your arms, under your armpits and that you’re sitting on an imaginary beach ball. Balloons are soft but strong when pressured, so they’re a good image to help with the idea of staying relaxed and that feeling of springy peng (‘bounce’) energy that needs to be in the body during tai chi.

We don’t tend to use the supportive balloons imagery when explaining tai chi because it’s a moving practice, so the imaginary balloons would inevitably float off at some point! But you can still use the imagery in a couple of places – imaging balloons under the armpits and one held between your thighs that is gently pressing the knees outwards is a good place to start.

The kwa needs to be kept open at all times in tai chi practice.

One of the things beginners often fail at in Tai Chi is sufficiently rounding the kwa. By kwa I mean the area of the inner thigh and groin. I’ve been told that this area is more correctly called the dang in Chinese, but kwa/dang/whatever, I mean the arch formed by the inside of the thighs and containing the pelvic floor. As I’ve discussed before, beginners tend to want to straighten their legs, rising everything up in their stance, which has the effect of collapsing this kwa area, so that it effectively closes as the thighs move together.

In tai chi we always want to maintain the feeling that we’re holding a small balloon between the thighs so that this area is always rounded. Of course, there is opening and closing going on in tai chi all the time. As you progress through a move, one side of the kwa is opening and the other is closing, but regardless of any opening and closing movement that is going on, you need to keep a general feeling of openness in the whole area throughout the form. Even in postures where the feet are together. If you stand with your legs together, then that is considered a closed kwa, but in tai chi that area always has the feeling of being open – even when the legs are together.

You might find that last statement confusing, but it’s helpful to remember that in tai chi we are not performing an exact science, but we are dealing with feelings. The feeling of being open is what I’m talking about.

The last thing to mention is the why. Why do you need to do this? That’s where you need a teacher to give a demonstration of the application of tai chi against a simple push. With the kwa rounded you create a good base from which you can receive and launch attacks. When pushed, you can use that base the rounded kwa gives you to receive and then bounce away an attacker. If your kwa collapses when your upper body is pressured then you can’t do this without using a lot of effort and strength in the upper body. In tai chi this is wrong. Using your legs is always a better way.

Thank you for supporting The Tai Chi Notebook. If you are reading this on a website that isn’t thetaichinotebook.com, then it’s highly likely it’s been stolen. Please let me know so I can issue their webhost a DMCA takedown notice for copyright breach. Thanks. And if you have the great idea of starting a tai chi website by stealing other people’s work to fill it with content for clicks then take a good hard look at yourself, and do better.