martial arts

Judo is returning to its roots and allowing leg grabs again, but only in specific Japanese tournaments

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Getting rid of some of those pesky Olympic rules


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.

This video explains the rules:


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.

What is the role of forms, or kata, in martial arts?

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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.

Give it a listen!

Podcast.

How to get a better tai chi push by pushing a wall

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The power of relaxation

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.

This is the Internet’s no.1 tai chi blog, according to FeedSpot

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The Internet has spoken!

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.

Thanks.

New podcast – Ethan Murchie on Living Neijing

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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.

North American Tang Shou Tao Association
Living Neijing
Liang Dehua

How often do I need to practice tai chi in between classes?

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You might not like the answer

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.

Mr Inbetween – new article and feedback

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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.

Well, I recently got the opportunity to write an opinion piece “I can’t stop rewatching this dark Australian comedy drama series on Disney Plus that hardly anyone knows about” for TechRadar about Mr Inbetween, which I really enjoyed writing. It got a pretty good reaction, especially from the Mr Inbetween community on Reddit.

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:

Happy Year of the Snake

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What to do when your Snake Creeps Down

Hello! Happy Year of the Snake, dear reader. On an occasion such as this is would normally be customary for a tai chi blog like mine to do a little post about the influence of the snake on tai chi, kung fu and Chinese culture in general.

Snake is, after all, one of the five main Shaolin kung fu animals, one of the 12 main xing yi animals and frequently appears as a menu item in Chinese restaurants, er no, sorry, I mean, appeared in Kung Fu Panda!

But, no! I’m not going to do that; partly because it’s such an obvious thing to do that I’ve done it before, and I hate being predictable, or at least repeating being predictable, but also because I’ve just recorded an excellent conversation for my next podcast with Australian national treasure and sometimes-Chinese-martial-arts-practitioner, Simon Thakur of Ancestral movement about finding your inner, ancestral animal, including, of course, the snake, and I just need to find the time to get on with editing it so I can get it out to you lovely people.

I think that what Simon says about our human connection to snake-style movement is probably more valuable than whatever I’ve got to say on the subject of our slithering cousin. So, I’ll leave the snake talk until the podcast comes out!

Simon Thakur, trying to locate his inner snake while doing an impromptu bit of Fox Trot in The Bush.

In the meantime, while you wait for that podcast to properly percolate (all the best things take time) I’ll leave you with a thought. “Tai Chi is more than the techniques, it’s the jins that make it interesting”.

If you listened to my last podcast with the esteemed Alan Wycherley of ‘In Defence of the Traditional Arts’, you might be forgiven for thinking that I’m all about training tai chi techniques. Now, while I’ve no objection to practicing a Repulse Monkey or a Part Wild Horse’s Mane (or two), or even a Snake Creeps Down, I definitely agree with the statement that tai chi is more than the moves. In fact, I think we can probably agree that tai chi applications aren’t that great as martial techniques. There are (shock!) other martial arts that have more effective techniques. Hello, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, I’m looking at you. Hello, Choy Li Fut. Hello, Western Boxing. Hello, Muay Thai, stop hiding at the back! Yes, all these martial arts have techniques that I would probably put ahead of anything found in a tai chi form, regardless of style. They’re practical and effective. And yet, I practice tai chi. So, why is that?

What tai chi has, and emphasises over techniques, are the eight energies – the jins: Peng, lu, ji, an, etc.. What you are doing when you practice a tai chi form is emphasising energy changes using these eight over technique. Flowing from one to the other a bit like a river flowing along smoothly. Sometimes there are fast bits, sometimes there are slow bits, sometime the river turns one way or another, but its energy flow keeps going.

When I practice other martial arts, my emphasis is more on technique. When I practice tai chi I can relax and get more inside the movement and concentrate on the energy flow.

And of course, in tai chi push hands you get to interact your energy flow with the energy flow of another person in a live situation, and that’s extremely valuable for developing martial ability. Techniques are another thing.

Now, if the analogy of a river doesn’t work for you then think of something else… perhaps, a snake? Snakes can flow along smoothly, they can change direction sharply and they can be incredibly powerful or incredibly quick, as well as slow and suffocating. They’re a great example of energy changes.

Homework

In preparation for my next podcast allow me to recommend a documentary by professional paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin called Your Inner Fish. (He’s written a book of the same name, if you prefer to read about him). Snakes come out to play in episode two. Here you go:

Wild Colonial Boy review by Steffan Stringer

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My latest podcast with Alan Wychereley, who was as student of the late UK tai chi legend Dan Docherty inspired my listener/reader Steffan Stringer to track down Dan’s autobiography “Wild Colonial Boy” (I have to admit, I’d heard of this book before, but never read it, and in my mind it was always called “Wild Caledonia Boy”, which, I think, given the Scottish-centric design of the cover would have been a far better title!)

Steffan has written a review of the book on his blog, Blackwater Tai Chi, which is well worth a read.

The book’s blurb reads:

“In 1975, Dan Docherty, a young Scots law graduate and karate black belt, left Glasgow to spend nine years as a Hong Kong police inspector.

As well as serving as a detective and vice squad commander, he also took up Tai Chi and won the 5th Southeast Asian Chinese Full Contact Championships in Malaysia in 1980.

In 1985, he was awarded a postgraduate diploma in Chinese from Ealing College.

He travels extensively teaching Tai Chi and has written four books on the subject.”

When I started Tai Chi in the early 90s everybody had heard of Dan Docherty, and he was something of a big name, not only because of his competition success, but also because of his reputation for unmasking frauds. I remember him gaining a lot of notoriety for pouring a bottle of water over the head of an ethnically Chinese Qigong teacher who was doing seminars on Ling Kong Jin or “Empty force”. Dan’s reasoning was that if he could move people without touching them then he should be able to deflect the bottle without the need for physical contact. It didn’t work. He was also famous for “getting into it” with one of the Yang family representatives in the UK, who ended up leaving the UK after their encounter.

Sadly Dan Docherty died of complications from Parkinson’s disease in 2021. I never met Dan in real life, but his impact on the UK tai chi community continues to be felt long after his death. That’s probably the best legacy a tai chi teacher could hope for.

Also read: Phil Brown remembering Dan Docherty.