As some of you will be aware I’ve been working on a book about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu for the last year, and well, that book – Brazilian Jiu-jitsu: The Ultimate Illustrated Guidebook – is finally finished, and will be available for pre-order very soon.
It’s a collaborative project with renowned illustrator and author Seymour Yang who goes by the brand name Meerkatsu, and is famous for his BJJ-themed illustrations, which are used in all sorts of BJJ clothing products like rash guards and gis.
The book is a hefty hardback one-stop resource for everything a beginner, and even a more experienced person, needs to know about Brazilian jiu-jitsu. It contains over 260 pages containing over 970 hand-drawn illustrations that show each technique in detail. It covers all our favorite standup techniques, positions, different guards, guard passing, sweeps, submissions and escapes.
Get your free chapter!
Head over to meerkatsu.com, enter your email address into the popup box to sign up for the Meerkatsu newsletter and you’ll receive details on how to get your FREE chapter very soon.
This video has been doing the rounds online, showing some tai chi (taijiquan) fighting applications.
I don’t think there’s much to say about it, but it does perhaps prove useful for answering that question you get a lot: “can tai chi be used for fighting?”.
Let’s just try to say a few things about it though:
Firstly, he’s clearly just taking a tai chi posture (‘Play Guitar’) that looks very like that an ‘on guard’ position and using it in the same way a boxer does to parry and block punches. The hand he has by his chin he’s using in just the same way a boxer does their back hand to parry a jab. Is there anything wrong with that? Maybe not. You could use the posture like that, but is that its purpose?
Is that what that posture is designed to be used for? At this point, who knows. Usually you see ‘play guitar’ used as an arm locking posture, or combined with a foot sweep into a shuai jiao-style throw.
On the positive side, he’s actually getting the guy to throw the attacks properly, which is nice to see. Maybe they could be a smidgen closer together, so the punch would actually land, but compared to most applications you see from non-committal attacks, it’s not bad.
No, it’s not sparring, but not everything has to be. I don’t think it would look quite as much like ‘tai chi’ if it was sparring.
Finally, is there much ‘tai chi’ going on here? I’d be looking for smoothly flowing into sticking, yielding, and neutralising. He follows up a couple of times, but I don’t see much in the way of controlling the opponent here. The opponent is more often than not just blocked, and not controlled.
The bar for tai chi applications is pretty low. There are too many videos of people bouncing away at the slightest touch to muddy the water, so I think we have to say that this is at least a step in the right direction.
Judo and (Brazilian) Jiu-Jitsu might have exactly the same origins, but they’ve gone down really different paths in their evolution. While Judo has focused more on the sporting elements and becoming an Olympic grappling sport, BJJ has always wanted to keep things closer to its Value Tudo origins, which evolved into modern MMA.
Even today, many BJJ classes have a strong self-defence element, however BJJ is a broad church and some associations and classes are much more orientated towards sport grappling, particularly the no-gi variation.
One of the frequent criticisms of modern Olympic-style judo was that it had sacrificed too much realism in pursuit of beautiful big throws in competition. One way it did this was to make any grab of the pants or legs illegal. This seemingly simple rule change had dramatic effects on the sport. Since the legs were no longer a target the stance of judo players became more upright in their stance, leading to more possibilities for big dramatic throws.
Remember, under Judo rules a match can be won with an Ippon, a throw that lands the opponent on his or her back. In BJJ no such rule applies – a spectacular throw simply earns you two points and the match continues.
All Japan tournament rules
I hadn’t noticed before, but there has been a recent rule change in judo, in a particular Japanese tournament called the All Japan Championship, that means you are allowed to grab the legs again, opening up a whole range of possibilities for long-forgotten judo techniques to make a reemergence.
There are some restrictions though. To grab the pants you have to have a grip on the upper body with one hand, and you cannot grab the legs with two hands. This rules out popular BJJ and wrestling techniques like the single leg or double leg.
Will the new rules get adopted by wider judo federations and ultimately the Olympics? It’s unclear at this stage, and too early to say, but it will mean that going forward, judo could end up looking very different to the way it does now.
Traditional martial arts, which are perhaps better described as “martial arts that are not sports”, tend to have a lot of forms, or kata. I’m thinking of karate, tai chi, wing chun, choy li fut, etc.
But what exactly is the role of kata, or forms? And has it changed over time?
In this new episode of the Heretics podcast I discuss the role of kata with Damon Smith who has extensive experience in various martial arts over decades.
It certainly became very trendy once MMA became a big deal to describe forms as useless, however, I think they do have uses, even today. As usual Damon has some pretty interesting insights into how forms have changed over time, and he can look back to the way they used to be trained in the 1980s compared to today.
Mike Sigman’s post on qi has made me want to think more about jin and qi again. I realise I haven’t been posting about it very much recently – partly because I’ve been distracted by writing a book about BJJ – but now the book is finished it’s time I came back to the subject. I read another post Mike made recently on his 6H group about pushing against a wall, which I think is a brilliant idea, because it’s so simple.
In a way this post is just me writing it out in my own words as an exercise, so I can understand it, and contextualise it a little more in terms of my tai chi practice.
Pushing is a big deal in tai chi because it features so prominent in the form – one of the four ‘energies’ of tai chi is called push in English, which (as I discussed with Ethan Murchie in my last podcast) is confusing since the translation of “an” into English is more accurately to “press down”, which isn’t what the push posture in tai chi looks like, or how you’d push a wall.
An AI-generated tai chi ‘push’against a wall
Pushing is also part of tai chi’s two person exercise, tui shou – “push hands”. So most tai chi people are pretty familiar with the concept of pushing.
Now imagine you are pushing against a wall and somebody asked you to push harder. Most people would simply push harder with their arms and lean harder into the wall. What you’ll feel when you do this (try it) is that it pushes your upper body backwards and away from the wall quite a bit because it’s impossible to push hard with your arms without introducing excess tension into the system.
This is the “you’re using your shoulder too much!” criticism that a lot of tai chi teachers sling at their students, without really explaining how not to push using the shoulder.
So, let’s look at exactly how you could push harder without using the shoulder.
The only another way to increase the power of your push is to increase the downwards power through your legs. Now, it’s pretty hard to push downwards with your legs, since we have nothing above us to push off from if we want to push downwards. Instead, all we have in a downwards direction is gravity, so how do we use that gravity power? The answer is to relax and sink down into your legs harder.
Put your hands on a wall and try it.
As you sink and relax more through the legs you should feel the power in your arms increasing.
What you’ll notice is that you have to internally align your body correctly for this power to reach your hands. The good news is that you don’t need to think very hard to do this, you can just feel how you need to arrange yourself and your subconscious will do the rest. But you need to properly relax. If you tense up parts of your body – your shoulder being the main culprit – the power won’t slow smoothly and uninterruptedly through the body to reach its destination.
At this point you should start to realize why the word relax (or “sung” in Chinese) is said so often in tai chi practice.
That path from floor to hands is what you’d call a ground path, or a jin path. And the force you are channeling into your hands is known as jin in Chinese. The usual English translation of jin that you see used is “refined strength”.
Again, don’t get hung up with where the path goes through the body, just where you want the force to go.
You should also notice that as the jin force in your arms increases, you don’t get knocked or pushed backwards as easily as you did when you were using brute strength, because there is less tension in your upper body.
Obviously you are not going to push a wall over! But you can now feel the forces in your body that we should be dealing with when doing the tai chi form, and hopefully when you do “push” in the form, your push will now be a little bit different, more refined, a little less clumsy and a lot more tai chi-like.
Tai Chi Notebook blog has been selected as not only one of the Top 45 Tai Chi Blogs on the web, in fact, it has been put at no.1 position.
I’ll now wait for the money to start pouring in so I can retire early and live in a remote island with no wi-fi.
FeedSpot say that “This is the most comprehensive list of Top 45 Tai Chi Blogs on the internet.”, so check it out, because you’ll discover something new, I’m sure.
In this podcast I talk to internal martial artist Ethan Murchie about this teacher Vince Black from whom he learned xing yi mixed with elements of Sufism and Shamanism, as well as the North American Tang Shou Tao Association which Vince set up and which is still running today.
We also discuss how traditional arts can survive alongside MMA, the Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal medicine (the Huangdi Neijing) which Ethan teaches through his Living Neijing website, the meaning of Chinese terms like qi, peng, lu, ji and an, as well as his tai chi teacher Liang Dehua and the Yang Shouhou lineage of Yang family tai chi.
Yang Cheng-Fu demonstrating a tai chi form, emphasizing the importance of daily practice for mastery.
One question that nobody I teach tai chi to ever asks me, but I think they should, is “how much do I need to practice between classes?” Perhaps they don’t want to hear the answer!
The quick answer is: every day. If you’re serious about getting better at something you need to do it every day. I don’t mean just tai chi, it’s the same with anything you want to do in life. Want to learn to play the piano? Practice every day. Want to learn to speak Spanish? Practice every day.
Here’s what I observe about myself when I practice the tai chi form everyday: you go much deeper into your practice, because you’re not taking one step forward one step backwards anymore. You’re only going forward. Your tai chi form gets much, much sharper if you do it every day and you are able to get deeper into your practice. If you take a day off, it takes you a day to get back to where you were last time. There are things you notice about the movement, or about the way you do a movement that you only get the mental space to notice in your practice if it happens every day.
I’m not saying that if you miss one day everything will fall apart, but just try it –, make a conscious choice to practice the form every day for a week and see how it opens up your practice.
How long to practice
The next question is how much should you practice in a session?
The answer to this I like the best is, ‘do the form a minimum of 3 times’. Once because the first run through is always terrible. Second to work on something specific, and third to finish off just enjoying it and not working too hard.
If you have more time available you can do the form more times in the middle part of your practice to work on specific aspects. Or you could break out individual moves and work on them over and over. Some people really like this – I’m not such a fan because I don’t think any move in tai chi is especially better than any other, but that’s just me. Xing yi has a different approach because it emphasises the five ‘fists’, but that’s a different martial art.
Wu Jianquan practicing tai chi, demonstrating a deep stance and focused movement.
Why the same form?
You might wonder if there is value in repeating the same form each day – I mean, why not do a different one each day, or freeform something? I think the answer is that you get something unique out of doing the same form each day that makes it worth it.
The idea of repeating a familiar sequence may not initially appear to be in keeping with ideas of spontaneity, but I think when you go deeper into a form, it can still feel spontaneous. Not to mention that once you go deeper into it and start living it from the inside you realise that a form is just a series of expressions (energy changes) and you can do those in multiple ways, so it is never the same form.
As Heraclitus famously said, or was reported to have said, “You cannot step into the same river twice”. However, I think you need to be very familiar with the river in question (the form) to appreciate that.
I’ve written on here before about Mr Inbetween, the Aussie TV show centered around the character of Ray Shoesmith, a hitman for hire, that forever has a soft spot in my heart for the way it covers societies approach to violence.
Anyway, I though I’d share the article here because I enjoyed writing it. And here’s a little clip on how Ray dealt with a kid who had been bullying his daughter:
The Tai Chi Notebook 