Tai Ji for Self Defence 3

30/09/2024

TaiJi and XingYi For Self Defence Part 3

I mentioned in my previous post the value of doing some relatively heavy contact sparring in particular the importance of getting accustomed to being hit. In martial arts in general there is a lot of focus on theoretical ideas and theoretical application as “revealed” in the the Form or Kata. There is no doubt that such areas of study have value and can be interesting, but if you want to utilise such knowledge in a practical way you need a solid real world understanding of how violence works in the in the world outside of the training hall and off the competition mat.

I can give a simple example of reality verses theory. Many years ago (early 1990’s) when I first started teaching classes,  I rented a space in the middle of Manchester. The space was run by a very successful Martial Arts teacher, I won’t go into which style he taught, I don’t want it to become a style issue.  Nevertheless suffice to say he was himself highly successful on the tournament circuit (light / no contact) and was training several other fighters. As well as myself renting space another teacher rented some space and one day one of his younger students arrived a little early for class, without thinking he walked across the training room still wearing his outdoor shoes. The owner of the school saw this and (so I’m told) rather rudely admonished the young guy for wearing his shoes and when the young man, a rather typical young Manchester lad, objected to the tone of the comment the teacher squared up to him and adopted a fighting stance. 

Without further comment the young man stepped straight in and punched the teacher square on the nose, leaving him on his backside and, by the time I saw him with two very black eyes. There are a number of lessons to take from this which I’m sure you can work out for yourself, but for our purposes, tournament fighting of any sort, is not the same as real fighting. When the teacher adopted an overt fighting stance, what was he thinking? Did he think the other guy would back down? Was he waiting for a non existent referee to shout “start”? Who knows. What we can be sure of, the young guy with just a couple of months formal training and probably a short  lifetime of experience on the streets of Manchester, didn’t think twice, he saw the threat and dealt with it. In all likelihood, his technique wouldn’t have won any prizes and it’s highly likely that if the two had met on a competition mat the result would have been entirely different.

This leads me into an issue that needs to be addressed and is something of an elephant in the room, in particular for Tai Chi, as far as self defence and practical martial arts is concerned. You don’t have to search too hard on the internet to find videos of so called Tai Chi masters getting beaten by kick boxers etc. There is a Chinese guy who has made something of a name for himself for calling out Tai Chi “masters”.

To be clear from the start, losing a fight is not the measure of a good or bad martial art or indeed martial artist. You only have to look at some of the best MMA fighters, almost all of them have lost fights, sometimes quite quickly and in brutal style. The problem I have with the Tai Chi “masters” in these videos is that to a man they looked completely clueless. They lacked any form of movement, tactical awareness and as with the example above, when they get hit they look completely perplexed and end up on their backsides. This shocked reaction tells me that these “masters” don’t do any form of sparring, in Chinese martial arts and culture in general there is a concept called “face”. Face is in simple terms, image and status. One of the consequences of this is that, senior practitioners - teachers can’t be seen to have any form of vulnerability and the best way to ensure this is to avoid any scenario where such a vulnerability could be exposed. So senior practitioners don’t spar and in Tai Chi they don’t usually do push hands with unknown people at least in a free style manner. 

Some years ago, I was invited to a Chen Style training event being held by one of the four most senior Chen Style teachers. I was introduced to the teacher by my friend as a “senior” Wu stylist in the UK it was a bit of hyperbole on behalf of my friend, but hell I’ll take it. The teacher smiled politely and the session began. As we went through the various drills the teacher called out various attendees to demonstrate with him certain techniques, inevitably he called out senior Chen stylists first, thus granting them “face”. As the session proceeded we moved onto pushing hands routines, several of which I wasn’t familiar with, in the middle of this he indicated to me to step up. I went up and did a reasonable job of adapting to his varying drills and after a few minutes I realised that I’d been up on the stage quite a long time and the teacher was enjoying himself moving from one drill to the next and I followed along quite comfortably, during our exchanges I learnt a great deal about his method and his structure and no doubt he had done the same. At the end of that session we stopped and he smiled and shook my hand, something he had not done with anybody else. Later in the day we moved onto freestyle pushing hands and yet again he called out his senior Chen stylists, but this time he didn’t cal me out. I don’t know why, was he concerned that as I wasn’t a Chen stylist I wouldn’t be cooperative and risk him losing face or perhaps he didn’t want to throw me about the place and cause me to lose face. There in lies the problem with face, people don’t get tested.

Here lies one of two primary problems with traditional Chinese Martial Arts, senior practitioners don’t get tested in any meaningful way. It is quite natural as a person gets older they will lose their edge, speed diminishes as does strength and importantly the ability to recover from physical punishment is reduced. The idea that an older man can defeat a young  athletic trained man is a myth. Older practitioners shouldn’t worry about training with younger colleagues or students. As an older practitioner you should be honest about the fact that you want to stick to 3 x 2 minute rounds rather than 5 x 3 minutes. Well trained (in all meanings of the phrase) students should be grateful for the opportunity to train with their teacher without seeing the need to take cheap shots. I think it’s this culture of preserving face along with the second problem of civilising martial arts that results in embarrassing performances by so many Tai Chi “masters”. We’ll look at the effect of civilising martial arts in the next post.

#selfdefence #selfdefense #martialarts  #taijiquan #XingYiQuan #taichichuan