While BJJ is known for its ground techniques, each match starts standing up, and there are a few interesting throws and submissions that you can pick up from the art that work well for a Kung Fu practitioner.
As well as this blog, I also run bjjnotebook.com where I live a second life as a BJJ practitioner who has never heard of Tai Chi 🙂
I got featured in a video podcast called Lockdown with Sid recently, so while it’s not exactly “Tai Chi” I thought you might like to see what I get up to when I’m wearing Japanese pyjamas…
Rick Matz of Cook Ding’s Kitchen blog asked me to write a little thing about my story and how my Tai Chi and BJJ fit together, so I did! Unfortunately, it turned out to be quite a big thing. In fact, it’s a bit of an essay.
Have I summed up all the ways that Tai Chi and BJJ fit together? Not at all. There’s still much more to tell, but I hoped I’ve shined a light on to a part of it for you.
Here’s a quote:
“Learning Tai Chi is a constant process of having your mistakes pointed out to you, trying to correct them, then moving on to the next thing. The key to getting good at BJJ is similar – you don’t want to focus on winning, since you end up muscling things instead of being technical and correct. But just like in Tai Chi, it’s learning from your mistakes that matters.”
This is such a well made documentary about BJJ by Tim Ferriss that I just had to share it. It doesn’t hurt that it features Marcelo Garcia – my favourite BJJ practitioner of all time – and it’s clearly cost a lot of money to make, because the production quality is really high.
Here’s the premise: Tim Ferriss – one of those highly productive/annoying bloggers/podcasters/millionaires/motivational/4 hour week talker types – is going to challenge himself to learn BJJ in one week using a concept from his best bud the chess champion Josh Waitzkin to do with starting at the finish. Instead of learning all about BJJ in the way the rest of us do, he’s going to start with a finish move, the guillotine, then work backwards from there, and then try to do it live on a world champion. Yeah, good luck with that!
There is an interesting theory about martial arts that I want to talk about today. Let’s call it the Golden Age theory, as it posits that at one time there was a Golden Age of martial arts, probably in China. Now, ok, you might not buy into that theory, but please bear with me. Drop your natural cynicism for a moment and allow the idea to percolate in your mind a little as we take a trip back to ancient China…
The knowledge the ancients had in this golden age about how the body functioned was complete, detailed and comprehensive, producing something more than normal strength. It was an overarching understanding, so it covered all sorts of skills, not just martial arts, but as time went on, and social, political, economic and geographical environments changed this knowledge slowly degraded and fewer and fewer of these old skills survived intact. Today we are left with remnants of them passed down in different traditions, most notably Tai Chi, XingYi and Bagua, and clues left in the historical record.
That body of knowledge consisted of what is known today as the Internal skills of the martial arts. Most Chinese marital arts still contain some internal skills, what you might call “basic Jin”. We can tell that all martial arts descended from this skill set as you see the remains in today’s marital arts and you can still see clues everywhere, including the names of old martial arts like ‘Six harmony spear’ or ‘Six harmonies, eight methods’. This “six harmony” nomenclature refers to a way of moving the body in a connected fashion from the toes to the finger tips.
This way of moving existed in all martial arts once, and survived amongst a special few even into the modern age. For example, Morihei Ueshiba of Aikido had it, and he died in 1969. Some people have it today, to various degrees. Usually you find these people in the Chinese Internal arts, but there are glimpses of it everywhere, even in the Japanese maritial art of Judo.
If you’ve seen Olympic Judo matches you can see it’s an incredibly athletic sport that requires supreme physical conditioning and strength mixed with a high level of technique. But is today’s Judo really where the art originally started out?
There is an old kata in Judo called Gu No Kata, which consists of a number of movements performed with a partner. It’s pretty safe to say that these days the meaning of the movements has been lost, as it’s performed with raw physical stength, not what the Chinese would call Jin, but dig under the surface and you’ll find that it’s a series of Judo techniques which serve as internal strength testing exercises, linked together.
This article provides a description of Go No Kata.
And here’s what it looks like done in modern times:
It doesn’t look very “internal”, but watch this informative video by Mike Sigman in which he explains and demonstrates how the various postures of Go No Kata are done with Jin – i.e with strength from the ground through a relaxed (‘song’) body.
In Mike’s own words:
“The “tests” in Go-no-kata resolve into Up, Down, Back, Forward, and sideways. You need to develop your qi/frame and you need to work with jin forces until you’re comfortable with them because not only can you resist forces (they’re doing it for development purposes, not as a basic strategy for good Judo), but you can learn to take kuzushi using only the mind-directed forces of jin.
Here’s the video. It’s fairly short. If you haven’t played much with jin forces, it may not be obvious what is going on, so please try to meet up with someone that has some jin skills.”
Here are the different pictures he’s referring to:
Finally, watch this comparison video between Kanō Jigorō the founder of Judo and a modern practitioner, and ask yourself, what has been lost?
I’ve been playing about with this guard pass for the last couple of weeks, and it has changed my jiujitsu – it could change yours too.
One of the things I like about Brazilian Jiujitsu is the individuality of it – you’re encouraged to find your own signature moves and perfect them. What works for one person, won’t necessarily work for another. Marcelo Garcia has his X Guard system, the Miyao brothers have the Berimbolo and Bernardo Faria has his over/under guard pass. And I’ve just discovered it…
Read the rest of this post at my new blog… BJJ Notebook
Welcome to a new, occasional, series looking at the basics of BJJ. This is BJJ 101.
Now that I’ve got to brown belt in BJJ I find myself wanting to refocus on the basics and get them really tight. By basics, I mean the fundamental moves that you use most of the time, rather than the spectacular spinning back takes or flying triangles that get all the attention. I mean the boring stuff. The bread and butter of BJJ, if you will.
Read the rest of this post at my new blog… BJJ Notebook
I keep hearing this idea from martial arts instructors of fighting somebody by “not using force”. Sadly that’s impossible, but that doesn’t seem to stop people saying it.
Every martial art seems to come with a bit of nonsense as part of the furniture. One of these that’s attached itself to Tai Chi is that you must learn to fight without using force. However, and to a man (because they are usually men) the people who say this seldom go beyond pushing the opponent away as the final solution to dealing with an attacker.
I think this misconception arrises because, with a little skill, you can get somebody off balance and push them quite a distance away, so long when they are unsteady, using minimal force.
But guess what – if you push somebody away…Â they come back! (Unless you push them off a cliff of course, but then, there’s never a cliff around when you need one, is there?)Â A determined attacker is not going to be impressed by how effortlessly you pushed him away. He’s going to come back and probably be even angrier than before!
I’d suggest the best thing to do with somebody you are trying to incapacitate is drop them at your feet, where you can control and restrain them until help arrives. Maybe the best thing to do is run away. But before you have that as your go-to option, consider the situation where you are with a family member and you are both under attack – what are you going to do, run away and leave them? Or maybe there are multiple attackers, in which case getting tied up with one of them on the ground is not a good idea.
Either way, the idea that you shouldn’t use force crumbles in the face of reality.
So where does this idea come from in Tai Chi? (I should note, I’ve heard the idea expressed in Aikido as well). When you’re doing Tai Chi push hands you also get a lot of comments like “too much force!”, “don’t use strength!”, which is all well and good (what they really mean is ‘don’t use brute strength’), but I think it tends to get translated into “never, ever, use force!”
Do no harm
There’s another variation on the theme which involves the notion that you should be able to subdue somebody without hurting them. Again, I’d say this was impossible. The closest I’ve seen to this idea is the sort of skill you get from BJJ where you can take a person down and mount them (sit on them) so that they can’t get up without having to punch them. You can then wait for help to arrive. Alternatively you can put them to sleep with a choke. But while they may not be getting injured, I don’t think the attacker would call it a pleasant experience!
I’m reminded of this video of BJJ noteable Ryan Hall, where he subdued an aggressive male who was trying to start a fight without throwing a single punch:
He might not have injured the guy, but he ended up putting him to sleep so he was not a threat to anybody.
Feeling beaten up the morning after martial arts practice? Tai Chi is the answer.
The Germans have a special word for that beaten up, tired and sore feeling you get when you wake up the morning after BJJ class – “Muskelkater” – it literally means “muscle hangover”.
That word accurately reflected how I felt this morning after we did 10 x 6 minute rounds of sparring last night in BJJ class. I had no injuries, just an overwhelming sense of body tiredness and stiffness. The feeling is so common that it’s quite often known in BJJ circles as the Jiujitsu Hangover.
I looked at my Yoga mat, but the thought of doing something as strenuous as a downward dog made me wince. Instead, Tai Chi was the answer. Gentle, soft movements that ease the body back into motion. Even after just one run through the form I was feeling 50% better.
Doing the Taiji form slowly and gently can be as relaxing as a hot bath. As a recovery method from a Jiujitsu hangover, or any sort of muscle fatigue, I’m convinced there’s nothing finer. I just wish more people knew about it.
Chris Haueter’s new speech at BJJ Globetrotters addresses the seemingly eternal question people have about Brazilian Jiujitsu.
Chris Hauter is one of the original 12 American black belts in the art of Brazilian Jiujitsu. In this new 1.5 hour (yes, 1.5 hour!) speech he addresses a question which continually dogs BJJ:”Does BJJ work in the street?” He tackles the subjects of sport Jiujitsu compared to self defence Jiujitsu. It’s interesting because he might not say what you expect him to say…
The Tai Chi Notebook 