We’re in a strange situation where the vast majority of people who “do Tai Chi” are performing some kind of elegant, slow-motion movement ritual, but without the required ‘internal’ body movement. There’s not necessarily anything wrong with this, as most of the benefits Tai Chi can give you – like relaxation, better breathing, suppleness, improved general health and flexibility – don’t really require ‘proper Tai Chi movement’. If you’re up and you’re moving then you’re doing your body more good than everybody left on the sofa. This is particularly important for the elderly.
But what do I mean by ‘required internal body movement’? Well, I’m talking about how your body forms the posture of Tai Chi – the movement you use to get into the various postures and flow between them. By default everybody uses a kind of normal human movement – the sort you use when you reach for something in the cupboard, or when you are tidying up a room. You don’t think about it, you just do it. And it’s the same with performing a Tai Chi form. If you’re going to do White Crane Spreads Wings then one hand has to circle up, ending above your head, and the other hand has to circle down, ending near your hip. Like this:
The question is, how did the hands get there?
With ‘normal movement’ we just do it – our brain tells the muscles what to do and they do their thing, in the order and manner they’ve been working in since we were babies.
In Tai Chi we need to repattern the way our body moves to adopt the ‘internal’ model of movement. This involves creating a sense of connection from the toes to the fingers (like you’re wearing a suit), along which you can feel a slight stretch, and then keeping this stretch as you move, while powering and controlling the movement from the dantien and legs, not from the shoulders. In fact, the shoulders shouldn’t be actively doing much at all – they should act as conduits for power, not generators. There are other additives that are used to generate movement, but those are the basics.
It’s a lot easier to practice this sort of movement in a simple controlled way than it is to jump in at the deep end with a Tai Chi form and all the variation it offers. To help you do this, people have created are what have become known as “Silk reeling exercises”.
There are a ton of these on the Internet to watch and follow along with, but like most things of that nature, it’s not the exercise that’s the important thing, it’s how you do the exercise. Luckily, Mike Sigman has recently produced a couple of new videos that not only show the exercise, but also show how you are supposed to do them.
Take a watch, try them out, then see if you can repattern the way you are moving in your Tai Chi form.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to talk about Silk Reeling without getting into some of the style wars within Tai Chi. Silk Reeling is often though of as the preserve of Chen style Tai Chi, and that in other styles of Tai Chi they do something else. You can do you own research on the matter, but the conclusion I’ve come to is that all the various ‘tricks’ that you learn in Tai Chi (like bows, or rotation or sinking and rooting) are all different facets of silk reeling, and you can therefore save yourself a lot of time by just adopting the model wholeheartedly.
Here’s a link to an article on the Yang Family website extolling the virtues of silk reeling and why it’s so useful. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions about why it’s up there.
As it says in the article:
“We need to understand the requirement to ‘link everything together’. Not only does moving energy require going through all the joints, it also needs to be sent through the muscles and sinews above and below the joints. This is the function of spiralling silk reeling.”
So, to return to the aforementioned Crane Spreading its Wings – this is how you get your hands to circle up and circle down. Now you just need to go and practice it.
A discussion of the similarities between BJJ and Tai Chi
So, finally, here’s my much delayed look at the similarities between BJJ and Tai Chi. This is probably an impossible topic to give justice to fully, but I’ve given it a go and hopefully my perspective will be useful to others. I’ve already attempted to define Tai Chi in a previous post, so the next logical question is, ‘what is Brazilian JiuJitsu?’ Well, explaining what the art is, how it evolved and where it came from is not a simple job but luckily a lot of people have made a lot of (very long) documentaries that explain the whole story of the Gracie family, the in-fighting, the out-fighting and everything else in-between, so you’re better off watching those than having me explain it all again here. If you don’t fancy watching them all then the (very) short version is “it’s an off-shoot of Judo that has more emphasis on ground fighting”.
Try these for size:
The Gracie Brothers and the birth of Vale Tudo in Brazil:
If you want to find out how the art evolved once it entered the United States, and how it compliments other grapplings arts, then check out Chris Haueter’s incredibly entertaining speech at BJJ Globetrotters USA camp:
And finally, don’t miss the excellent Roll documentary on the spread of BJJ in California:
Fighting fire with water
But my concern here is not really the history of the art. I’m more interested in the technical similarities between Tai Chi and BJJ. I’ve heard Brazilian JiuJitsu described as being “like Tai Chi, but on the ground”. I understand where people coming from with that sentiment, but I can’t quite go down that route myself, or rather, I’d settle for saying that it is like Tai Chi, but also explicitly not the same. The one central idea that both BJJ and Tai Chi share is that it’s smarter to not oppose force with force, and instead “yield to overcome” (from a Tai Chi perspective) or “use leverage”, from a JiuJitsu perspective.
As it says in the Tai Chi classic “Treaste on Tai Chi Chuan”:
“There are many boxing arts.
Although they use different forms,
for the most part they don’t go beyond
the strong dominating the weak,
and the slow resigning to the swift.
The strong defeating the weak
and the slow hands ceding to the swift hands
are all the results of natural abilities
and not of well-trained techniques.
From the sentence “A force of four ounces deflects a thousand pounds”
we know that the technique is not accomplished with strength.
The spectacle of an old person defeating a group of young people,
how can it be due to swiftness?”
I’d disagree with the classic on one important point though – most of the traditional martial arts in fact do go beyond the strong dominating the weak, because without that key principle there is not much of an art left in the martial art at all. And I don’t know about the idea of defeating a “group” of young people either (that would be a tall order for any martial art, or martial artists), but to me the classic is suggesting that skill and technique can supersede the natural advantages of youth, such as speed and strength. And when it comes down to it, it’s hard to find an art that can deliver on this promise as well as BJJ can.
BJJ is one of the few martial arts where an older man (or woman) can be expected to regularly beat a younger man (or woman) by having more skill and technique, in a fully resisting scenario, thanks to techniques that manage the distance (a critical self defence skill) and use leverage and technique to overcome brute strength. That’s not to say that no strength is required, but you don’t necessarily need more strength than your opponent to make it work.
Rickson Gracie
To me, the BJJ practitioner that best exemplifies a similarity between Tai Chi and JiuJitsu is the legendary Rickson Gracie. He’s generally agreed to be the best of the Gracies. Compared to the acrobatic extravagances of today’s sport JiuJitsu champions, who favour inverted guards and bermibolos, Rickson’s style of Jiujitsu seems surprisingly simple, yet effective. There are no flashy moves, just basics done at a very high level.
The Rickson documentary “Choke”, which shows his training for a Vale Tudo fight in Japan, is essential viewing if you haven’t seen it before:
In the documentary you can see a young Rickson doing Yoga on the beach. Rumour has it that he also said he studied Tai Chi in a magazine interview, although I’ve not been able to find a transcribed version online to confirm this. Either way, it’s clear that he’s not averse to stepping outside of “pure jiujitsu” to add elements to his exercise, martial and health regimen. The cost of upholding the reputation of JiuJitsu and the Gracie family has been heavy though, and he has several herniated discs in his back, but he’s still on the mats teaching his family art, cornering his son Kron in his MMA fights and giving instruction through his JiuJitsu Global Federation. He also spends a lot of time surfing these days, instead of fighting.
If you read a Rickson seminar review, like this one, you can see that he keeps returning to two common themes – “connection” and “invisible jiujitsu”. The invisible part refers to what you can’t see happening; you can’t see where he is putting his weight and making his connection to his opponent, but you can feel it when he does it. He has detailed ways of making a connection in each position in BJJ.
This sort of teaching from Rickson, to me, is where I find the crossover between Tai Chi and BJJ to be strongest. In Tai Chi Push Hands, for example, we constantly seek to make a connection to the other person, through touch, so its a very familiar concept.
Here’s me doing some push hands:
Forget about the thing I’m trying to teach in the video, just look at the Push Hands routine we’re doing. As you can see, Push Hands very concerned with ‘feeling where the other person is’ and ‘yielding to their force without opposing it’ to neautralise the opponent. From this perspecitve, Push Hands starts to sound a lot like what Rickson is talking about in his seminars, but in a different format.
But the similarities don’t end there. When employing standing techniques Rickson also utilises some of the postural work found in Tai Chi and makes makes subtle nods towards the ‘internal’ method of body movement favoured by Tai Chi. He talks about making a connection to the ground through the feet. I’m not suggesting his ‘body mechanics’ ideas fully embrace everything you’d find in Tai Chi, but I can see the foundations of it being built.
For example, in a Rolled Up episode (3/4) from last year Rickson shows Budo Jake how to use some basic body mechanics to create a better root to the floor when meeting an incoming force while standing. He’s talking about transferring the force applied to the arm down to his foot and into the ground, then back up to move the opponent backwards. This is basic Tai Chi 101.
See here, from the beginning:
At.4.26 he starts to talk about ‘invisible jiujitsu’, specifically at 5.55 about ‘putting the weight in the hands’.
I was taught a very similar drill in Tai Chi – a kind of wrestling game, where you had to stand square on to the opponent and try to unbalance them with a push as they did the same to you. The key to doing it is to ‘put your weight into your hands’, so that when you push, it’s coming from the foot, not the shoulder. And when they push you root the push into the ground, instead of letting it push you over.
Here’s a video of me doing it from a few years ago. The camera is on the ground and not straight, so it looks like I’m leaning forward, but I’m not really:
I’m not an expert at it, and use too much arm strength, but hopefully you can see the similarity between this and what Rickson is talking about in the Rolled Up video.
Of course, Tai Chi takes this idea of creating a path from the foot to the hand to further levels of detail – first the idea of ‘pulling silk’ where you create a stretch from the fingertips (and toes) to the dantien and maintain that connection while moving, so it remains unbroken. Incidentally, the silk analogy refers to the way silk weavers pulled raw silk thread from a cocoon – you had to pull with an even pressure or the thread would break.
The next stage after ‘pulling silk’ in Tai Chi is to create windings on the muscle-tendon channels in the body, controlled from the dantien – the famous ‘silk reeling’ of Tai Chi. I think you can view this as the point where BJJ and Tai Chi diverge and head off along different paths – Tai Chi becomes highly specialised in this type of movement, while BJJ becomes more interested in the practicalities of actual fighting, and taking the fight to the ground (or just dealing with the fight on the ground) where it enters a whole new arena.
Realistically, and practically, there is no need for the type of highly specialised and, frankly, difficult, method of moving the body that Tai Chi employs for actual fighting, and also it’s questionable whether you can actually do ‘silk reeling’ type movement when on the ground, since it relies on using the power of the ground to push up from via the legs. Does that mean one art is better than the other? Well, they both are what they are, and they’re good for different things. I’ll probably leave it at that.
Conclusion
Interestingly, when I started BJJ (almost 5 years ago now) I found that my all years of experience in Tai Chi meant nothing at all on the mat when rolling against an experienced practitioner – even if they were a smaller, weaker person. Fighting on the ground is a completely different animal compared to stand-up. I was submitted as regularly as the next white belt, but I did find that my previous experience in Tai Chi meant I could learn quicker than average (I got my blue belt in a year). It let me see the concepts and principles hidden within the techniques of jiujitsu. And it helped me relax under pressure, which is a huge part of getting better at BJJ. Also, doing the Tai Chi form helped me recover quicker from the physical wear and tear which is characteristic of your first 6 months of BJJ, while your soft, squidgy body is still toughening up.
Unlike Tai Chi, which has, in a sense, become set in stone in terms of its evolution, BJJ is a constantly fluid and evolving art. Thanks to the highly competitive environment of the BJJ competition circuit, new techniques are always being created and being discarded. It’s becoming highly specialised towards what works in the most common competitive rule sets. Where I see the connection to Tai Chi is in the older, ‘original’ BJJ that was more self-defence orientated, as exemplified by Rickson Gracie. Where BJJ is headed next is anybody’s guess. Quite possibly it will evolve in several directions all at once, and it will be interesting to see if the legacy started by Rickson Gracie and his ‘invisible JiuJitsu’ lives on, or even gets expanded upon.
Mark Sisson is a fitness author and blogger, and a former distance runner, triathlete and Ironman competitor. His latest book “Primal Endurance” is available now via Amazon. If you’re interested in nutrition, then watch this.
Ido Portal – A Moving Conversation – PART 1/2 | London Real
Master of ‘movement’, Ido Portal talks about his holistic approach to exercise and training UFC champion Connor McGregor:
Discovery Channel Dragon Girls Martial Arts School Documentary 2015
The documentary “Drachenmädchen” (Dragon Girls) tells the story of three Chinese girls, training to become Kung Fu fighters, far away from their families at the Shaolin Tagou Kung Fu School, located right next to the Shaolin Monastery in China, place of origin of Kung Fu. Three girls in a crowd of 27.000 children, under pressure to conform to the norms and structures: They are turned into fighting robots and yet, if you look behind the curtain, you see children with dreams and aspirations:
Did Sage Northcutt Tap Too Quickly??? PLUS the “Gogo Choke” (Gracie Breakdown)
Renner Gracie breaks down Sage Northcutt first loss in the UFC, Rener points out some critical details about the choke that will make you reconsider whether or not he tapped too quickly. Additionally, he discusses Ben Rothwell’s “Gogo Choke” that led to Josh Barnett’s first (legitimate) submission loss in MMA.
How to build a Tai Chi practice that lasts a lifetime
If you know some Tai Chi moves and you want to practice at home you probably have some questions, like where, when and how?
Firstly, the when. The best answer is ‘whenever’! There’s an old saying that the best time to plan a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is right now. Just get on an do your Tai Chi practice whenever you have time. While there are some good reasons to practice first thing in the morning (it’s quiet, your brain hasn’t started to worry about the 20 things you have to do that day yet, etc) there’s no medical reason why practice in the early morning is better than midday, for example.
Secondly where should you practice? The traditional way is outside. I like this idea as we don’t spend enough time outside these days feeling the wind, or the sun, on our faces. Time in the elements and away from unnatural lighting and computer screens is actually very important to our health. Just ask Katy Bowman. If you’re going to practice Tai Chi then why not make use of that time to kill two birds with one stone and get some fresh air as well? If it’s cold outside just put on a coat and some gloves. And practicing Tai Chi in the snow is very cool- just ask that Panda in the picture!
Finally, let’s look at how you should practice, if you want to progress, that is. My teacher always advised doing the Tai Chi form a minimum of 3 times. Once to get it out of your system, then a few times (just once or as many times as you like) to work on something, then finally, once through again just to enjoy it. One of my students described this routine as “Once to notice the mistakes, then the next time to work on them”, which is a good way of looking at it. The ‘working on them’ bit can be frustrating, so the final ‘just enjoy it’ rendition is essential if you want to make this a life-long practice. Remember why you wanted to do Tai Chi in the first place – to enjoy it! Performing slow movements in the peace and quiet (or with relaxing music on) is very calming, so just enjoy yourself in movement. In the last run through you should try to be completely uncritical of your performance. It might be helpful to imagine that you have already attained mastery of the art!
I like this approach because ‘3 times minimum’ is something you can realistically fit into a morning routine and it encourages you to practice daily. Because, guess what? It turns out that you need to practice Tai Chi every day to get anywhere. Yes, sadly, daily practice is essential. Tai Chi is weird like that. I remember when I learned the Beng Chuan punch of XingYiQuan it was very hard, almost impossible, to get it right in terms of delivering structure and power together with perfect timing. But once I got it I realised I would never forget how I did it. To me it was like riding a bike. Sure, you can get rusty if you haven’t practiced for a while, but you don’t every really forget.
Tai Chi is different. At least to me it is, anyway. I feel like every time I do the Tai Chi form I’m learning to ride a bike again from scratch. After 3 run-throughs I’m pretty much back on the bike and riding, but it seems to wear off pretty quick, and by tomorrow you need to learn all over again.
You may have noticed that I’m ramping up the features on the blog – we now have shareable buttons at the end of each story, so you can share it on social media, or email it to a friend.
I’ve also added a new page on Finding a Tai Chi class, which links to the excellent Tai Chi Finder website, and answers a question I frequently get asked.
I’ve also created aTai Chi Notebook Facebook Page. If you want to be notified of new posts on this blog then I suggest ‘liking’ the Facebook page is a good idea, as they will then automatically appear in your newsfeed.
One of the consequences of adding a Facebook Page was that some older blog posts get rediscovered. Last week my blog post on The Tai Chi Magician proved very popular once again thanks to a link back from my friend and skilled Tai Chi practitioner Scott at Tabby Cat blog and MERGE Facebook group (closed).
6 harmonies movement, the classics and the boxing art
This article was supposed to be a description of some key similarities between BJJ and Tai Chi. Unfortunately while writing it I realised I first needed to define Tai Chi properly before I could successfully contrast the two. Then I realised that this wasn’t an easy task.
Some people consider the fact that it is taught by a family that has a style of Tai Chi named after them to be enough to legitimately say the art they do is “Tai Chi Chuan”. You might consider that attitude to be similar to the attitude of Leung Bik in this little martial arts film clip about Wing Chun where Ip Man meets Leung Bik. When questioned by a young Ip Man if what he’s doing is really “Wing Chun” he says “Whatever comes out of my fist is Wing Chun!”. In essence he’s saying that he is the style, so there is no restriction on what defines the style.
On the flip side, there’s also the argument that for movement to be truly “Tai Chi Chuan” it must follow a strict number of movement principles, or rules. Some of which you’ll find in the Tai Chi Classics, and some of which you won’t.
The Tai Chi classics actually talk a lot about fighting strategy, particularly the idea of not opposing force with force. But I’d argue that this isn’t really what defines Tai Chi. In fact, most martial arts adopt this strategy, since a martial art where your strategy is just to attack like an unthinking robot until your enemy is dead in HULK SMASH! mode is unlikely to keep its students in the long run! Therefore, it’s no surprise to me that a lot of the writing in the Tai Chi classics seem to apply equally to Brazilian JiuJitsu, Jeet Kune Do, Aikido, Karate and lots of Kung Fu styles just as well as they would to Tai Chi. The writing in the classics doesn’t talk too much in the actual mechanics of movement, and instead talks a lot about fighting strategy.
For example, lines like the following could apply to most martial arts:
“The feet, legs, and waist should act together
as an integrated whole”
“Empty the left wherever a pressure appears,
and similarly the right.”
“It is said if the opponent does not move, then I do not move.
At the opponent’s slightest move, I move first.”
So, if you find that the Tai Chi classics cannot be relied upon to adequately define “Tai Chi Chuan”, what can? The best answer I’ve found is held in the concept of 6 Harmonies movement, or 6H for short. The idea of “Six Harmonies” is actually older than Tai Chi Chuan itself.
The six harmonies are broken down into 3 internal harmonies (the “desire” leads the “mind”, the “mind” leads the “qi”, and the “qi” leads the “strength”) and the 3 external harmonies – the shoulders connect with the hips, the elbows with the knees and the wrists with the ankles (or hands and feet, if you want). You can think of the internal harmonies as being about the desire to do something and turning it into a physical action – the actual Chinese word is “Xin”, which translates as “heart”, but in the sense of the desire arising to do something coming from your heart, not your head. In contrast, the external harmonies describe how the movement actually goes through the body (from the fingertips to the toes) via muscle-tendon channels, a process trained in Tai Chi through “silk reeling” exercises.
The distinctive feature of 6 harmonies movement is a complete connection of mind and body, producing force that appears soft, but penetrates deeply. It’s quantifiably different in feel to force produce by local muscle usage, although to somebody unfamiliar with it, it can look just like normal movement it should feel different. While the initial stages of learning 6 harmony movement may use large circular motions, they can be made imperceptibly small by an expert, which makes it even more difficult to quantify and identify.
Credit must be due to Mr Mike Sigman of the 6H Facebook group here for putting these Chinese concepts into words that English speakers (like myself) can understand without too much problem. He’s produced perhaps the most comprehensive and organised explanation of the process I’ve seen written down in English. If you want to delve deeper into it, I’d suggest joining his Facebook group and looking through some of the older posts.
I’m undecided as to wether there was originally a fully formed 6H theory that goes back hundreds of years, and is the origin, or essence of all Chinese martial arts, or if it’s something that has been refined over the years as a distillation of all the “good bits” of Chinese martial arts. The fact that the ancient meridian system used in acupuncture overlays the muscle tendon channels used in 6H is a good indication that it is an old, old theory, and lots of old Chinese martial arts have the phrase “Liu He” (6 harmonies) in their name (like Xin Yi Liu He Quan), which adds weight to the theory, but we’re drifting into speculation here. In a sense it doesn’t matter if you want to think of 6H as the modern distillation of “internal” movement methods or an ancient system, the important thing is the doing of it, and that requires practice.
Note: I’ve left “qi” in my description above, but that’s because, ultimately, I think its more problematic to replace it with an English word, when there isn’t one that’s really up to the job. Please note – there is much more to the theory and practice of 6 harmonies movement than I’m describing here (for example, dantien rotation, open/close, reverse breathing and the microcosm orbit), so I’d suggest that the reader who is seriously interested in the topic join the Facebook group if you want to get a proper handle on it. It is not a trivial subject!
So, to finally return to the question, what defines Tai Chi Chuan? I’d say it’s a combination of all three of the ideas expressed above – it needs to be from a lineage connected to the original Tai Chi families (the Chen, Yang, Wu, Woo and Sun families), it needs to conform to strict principles of movement, the most cohesive set of which I’ve seen is 6 harmonies movement, and it needs to follow the fighting strategy expressed in the Tai Chi classics.
Now that’s covered, I can get onto my intended subject of the similarities between BJJ and Tai Chi, and a look at the legacy of a certain Mr Rickson Gracie…
My year started with a bang. In fact, a bang to my face. In JiuJitsu class I was sparring with a beginner. As is often the case with white belts in BJJ they do unexpected things to get out of controlling positions. He did an explosive movement, trying to throw his legs over his head. You have to admire the ambition, but unfortunately, all it achieved was that he kneed me in the face, right below my eye. It didn’t hurt that much, and there was no black eye when I went to bed that night, but when I woke up the next morning I had a proper shiner.
The reaction of my wife was “you get no sympathy from me!”, with eyes to heaven.
The reaction of my JiuJitsu coach was “nice black eye!”, with a smile.
The reaction of work colleagues is a shocked “Ooh! what happened?!?!”, with concern.
I usually reply to the last one with “Well, the first rule of fight club is…” which puts them at ease. Then I have to explain that it was just an accident in training and no, I haven’t been in a fight, or mugged. It’s “ok”.
Because, well, it is. If you practice a martial art that has resistant sparring as a training method then getting the occasional black eye is just par for the course. You don’t think much of it yourself, or you are secretly proud, as it can be a badge of honour at your club. It’s other people’s reactions to it that are more interesting.
Anyway, now I’ve introduced some BJJ onto my blog my next post will be about the similarities between Tai Chi and BJJ, which is quite an interesting topic.
Good news! The Tai Chi Notebook has been picked as one of the top 30 martial arts blogs by bookmartialarts.com
It’s worth a look at the full listing because it has links to the other 29 martial arts blogs, which you might want to check out. I certainly discovered some great new ones there, along with some old favourites.
Thank you BookMartialArts, I’m honoured to be included amongst such great talent. I guess I better up my game now!
A discussion of the similarities between ancient Viking and Chinese martial arts, and the fist shape used in weapons arts in general
Image source: The History channel show Vikings
XingYi Quan is considered to be one of the big three ‘internal’ Chinese martial arts, alongside Tai Chi Chuan and Bagua, but isn’t as widely practiced as the other two, possibly because it’s less aesthetically pleasing and less health-orientated. It is more directly martial. It’s known for 5 different punches, which map on to the 5 elements of classical Chinese thought, the most famous of which is Beng Quan, or “crushing fist”, which represents the Earth element. In application, XingYi is quick, sudden and effective, because its origins lie in weapons usage, and it still carries that sense even when used without weapons.
Of course, in modern times the stories of famous XingYi practitioners like Guo Yun Shen killing a man with a single Crushing Fist (he was a real historical person, and he really did this in a challenge match and was sent to prison for it) have given more weight to the popular narrative amongst martial artists that empty hand usage was always taught first, and weapons were merely an outgrowth of barehand material. That is to say, ‘the sword becomes an extension of the arm’. While that may be true for many martial arts, I find no basis for this view in XingYi’s history. If anything, it’s the other way around.
The characteristic XingYi hand shapes, footwork, striking angles, the back-weighted stance, are all unusual in comparison to other martial arts styles. This is because XingYi is a weapons art first and foremost that has evolved, over time, to the point where it is now done almost exclusively barehand. But you only have to scratch the surface of XingYi a little bit and its weapons-based roots become glaringly obvious.
To me this sets XingYi appart from something like Tae Kwan Do or Western boxing. Those arts were developed with barehand striking (or kicking) in mind. XingYi however, under its older name of XinYi, was originally developed for stabbing people with pointy things, and as the pointy things fell out of favour, or were banned from every day civilian use, the techniques were adapted to barehand strikes.
In the 1600s in China it made little sense to learn barehand martial arts as a distinct entity if you were going to be a soldier, caravan escort or security guard, since people carried weapons for self defence and (despite what the movies say) you can’t effectively fight somebody with a weapon if you don’t have one yourself. And more to the point, why would you want to? Similarly, a soldier fighting in the English Civil War (1642–1651) would find limited application for old English wrestling or boxing on the battlefield. You’d grab a weapon and lean how to use it, fast.
Recently I had the good fortune to watch a video by a YouTuber called Dimicator (Roland Warzecha), who has done a lot of great work recreating European sword and shield martial arts using original source material. (You can support his work by becoming a Patreon). In this particular video he was using a reconstructed Viking shield, and showing the two thrusting actions that he uses with it, a spiralling upper thrust and a spiralling lower thrust. Anybody with a passing knowledge of XingYi will immediately recognise his upward thrust as being virtually identical to XingYi’s Zuan Chuan, or ‘drilling fist’, which is associated with the element of water.
Have a look. He talks about constructing the shield first, then at about 2.47 he goes on to explain how to do a workout with it.
If you took a freeze frame of the end of a XingYi’s Zuan Quan and the end of the lower shield thrust they look very similar:
XingYi Drilling fist (Zuan Quan), shown without weapon.
Viking Shield thrust, shown with a shield.
Viking Shield thrust, shown without a shield.
In the video, Roland makes a point about the necessity for keeping the elbow pointing downwards (like it does in XingYi), since it causes the Latissimus Dorsi muscle to contract, which gives you the support necessary to hold a heavy shield with an outstretched arm.
Medieval weapons were heavy. We know this. It’s only in modern times that weapons became lightweight, as their usage moved from being primarily military to more civilian in nature, in a duelling or sportive capacity – the fencing foil is a perfect example of this. If you are going to strike somebody with a heavy weapon, like a Viking shield, for instance, in a way that would make sense combatively then there are only so many ways the human body can effectively do that, so it would make sense that XingYi would have a lot of similarities with viking shield use. And it does!
I should point out here that while the usage between the two arts is very similar, it is not identical. In the video Dimicator advocates getting power from the hips by turning them as a unit, with the waist, away from the shield arm, so that he is turning ‘side on’. In the XingYi that I was taught (note: there are a lot of conflicting ideas about the ‘correct’ way in XingYi) you isolate the hips movement from the waist movement, and turn them in opposite directions, creating a twist in the torso called the ‘Dragon Body’ (so the waist would turn away from the outstretched arm, but the hips would turn in towards it), meaning you don’t turn so ‘side on’, and can remain facing more forward. This is clearly a difference in application between what is presented in the video and the XingYi method, but not a crucial one.
Hand position
It’s important to talk about the hand position that Roland is showing in the video – he talks about it at 4.30 – he makes the point that you don’t want to “fist grip” the shield and smash it into your opponent, because, as a repeated action, that will shock your wrist joint too much and lead to longterm damage. Instead, he advocates “extending the hand” into the natural position the human hand conforms to whenever you are using a tool. It also gives you more distance on your strike.
Roland showing how to “extend the hand” with a natural tool-using grip. It’s the kind of grip you naturally take on everything from a screwdriver to a sword handle. In sword circles, this is known as the ‘handshake grip’, and is often contrasted to the ‘hammer grip’.
Interestingly, this ‘handshake grip’ was the exact hand position that I was shown to use in XingYi to punch barehand. We were taught to punch using this fist formation, and despite what you might think, it actually works really well. There is no risk of damage to the fingers, and the strike is powerful. In fact, it limits the risk of damage as the fingers act as shock absorbers. There’s a video by Paul Andrews of XingYi Academy (you can become a Patreon of XingYi Academy to support its work) that explains the XingYi hand position in detail here:
I’m aware that punching like this is something of a heresy in modern martial arts.
Due to the popularity of boxing and MMA, the basic assumption today is that we should all be punching with a boxer’s fist, or we’re doing it wrong – “let the punch bag tell you what fist shape is correct”, goes the accepted wisdom. I remember when my XingYi teacher first taught me to use the alternative XingYi tool-using/conch shell/handshake fist he simply punched me with it in the stomach – my legs gave way and he floored me, so I didn’t need to question whether lining the bones up in this unconventional way was effective. Like a sudden Satori, there was no need to debate or question – it so obviously worked that I just knew.
This traditional XingYi fist feels different to being punched with a flat-knuckle fist – it seems to penetrate deeper, and hurt in a different way. It’s like being stabbed rather than punched. You might be wondering if it only works on softer surfaces. Indeed, my teacher’s favourite target was the soft spot on your stomach, just below the solar plexus, but he had no qualms about using it against harder targets like your skull with free abandon when demonstrating technique. You just tended to prefer him to strike to your body though, because getting it in the face was even worse and left more obvious bruises!
I’m wary of confirmation bias that is inherent to all human beings – we see what we want to see – but to me it’s clear that XingYi’s fist shape is a hang over from its primary function of tool/weapons usage. It’s the way you hold a sword, a spear, or a bread knife when cutting, or a viking shield, as can be seen in the Dimicator video.
While I was taught it this way, it should be noted that a lot of XingYi lineages simply don’t use this fist anymore for Zuan Chuan. They prefer the flat-knuckled boxer’s fist. However, it should be noted that the big proponents of this sort of fist find their lineages trace back to famous masters like Sun Lu Tang who were involved in the 1920’s Koushou movement whose aim was to simplify martial arts and make them more appealing to the public to promote a strong sense of national pride.
At this point in history it’s impossible to know which was the original fist used in XingYi, but I think on balance, I would go with the theory that tool using fist was the original. This ‘XingYi fist’ is odd and counter-intuitive at first and I can see it being dropped in favour of an easier fist shape to make the martial art more appealing. But I think, personally, that it’s the original fist.
N.B. It should be added that even within lineages that use this fist in their Zuan Chuan, in their XingYi animals there are still a huge variety of different fist shapes used, some of which are flat-knuckled, others are palm strikes, etc. For example, Horse Xing, in particular, uses a flat knuckle fist.
Conclusions and disclaimer
Am I suggesting that the Vikings practiced XingYi, or that Chinese soldiers had Viking shields? No, of course I’m not. Instead, I’m suggesting that perhaps the action of Zuan Quan is so suited to weapons use that it has arisen independently in two distinct time periods and cultures. So many little details are the same – the elbow drop, the spiralling extension and the hand position because it is the optimum way of performing this action.
I’d also like to add something of a disclaimer in that there is often hot debate amongst XingYi practitioners on the correct way to practice the art, so the views presented here are only the way I was taught – other people do XingYi differently, and I don’t speak for them.
Also I’m in no way an expert in Medieval European weapons arts, and apologise for any mistakes I’ve made in their presentation here. That is purely down to my own ignorance. I’m not going to correct the article along the lines of comments like “my master in China says…”, but if I’ve got anything wrong then please let me know.
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