Mysteries of tai chi
Thought it might be interesting to post these
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FzU8dlY85g http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CHCJjKjwMk (^^^I recommend you turn the sound off: it's a little too 'oh wow, man!' for my tastes) Anyway - Michael has an interesting take on things, some of which I / you / we may not agree with. OTOH, he also has demonstrable skills that are interesting to watch. Stuff like this is good to watch from a 'so, how did he do that? Does it match with what he says, and what others say?' perspective. In the end, just some more training in spotting things. YMMV |
Re: Mysteries of tai chi
Hi Bob-
I agree with your statements about pretty different takes on otherwise fairly familiar things. ("It's not biomechanics" is hard to swallow!) I watched both with sound, and although I see what you mean about that, it turns out I was rewarded. In the 2nd vid, he was trying to demonstrate the difference between "return wave" vs "the bomb." (if I understand his terminology right) This I think is really interesting b/c the distinction indicates that he is doing something different in the 2 cases... but on video, the 2 look similar, so the distinction is a welcome clue. If all goes well I am going to try both out tomorrow. Currently my take is that return wave mostly just happens if you allow it-- it is the ground acting through you. Whereas the bomb is a pulse that rides along those same paths, but is intiated by you, in your dantian. (i.e. you use intent to form the paths, plus dantian stuff to provide energy input in addition to the ground's force) What do you think? |
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Yeah, it's interesting
At one stage, he say 'He compresses...and I just lift him up; I haven't add the chi yet'. From that, I can only guess he means that 'adding the chi' is something different then compressing and returning the force. (I have my own ideas about that, but they're neither here nor there at the moment) Then he says "Now I'm not going to accept the energy from him' (1:11). That *would* suggest he's *not* using the other guy to load him up. Certainly, if you listen to him at 2:15, that idea is reinforced.('That's not the bomb...that supports the bomb') As for 'it's not biomechanics, I'm not using the ground'; I know what he's trying to say (it's not biomechanics as people commonly mean), but I had to roll my eyes. If he really wants to prove that point, let's suspend him from the ceiling and see if he can still 'do the bomb' Anyway, he's interesting to watch - and he says it in English - which is why I posted it. YMMV |
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I should say, btw, that I had no deep, Machiavellian agenda in posting these. They just happened to pop up in my 'Youtube recommends' section.
It thinks I need to see this today - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6bXaXXWtJI Fun, but I'll let others decided if there's anything worth looking at :) |
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I can do this with anyone who wants to play along....
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So - tethered with a bungee or in some kind of zero g environment would be a much more interesting way to prove that particular point. |
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I watched it a couple of times (all three vids and some others) but I'm not going to buy any DVD set or look for hands on time. |
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And particularly how you keep from using the shoulders? |
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If I was in the neighborhood, I'd go out and meet the guy, just to hear/see/feel more of what he's doing, though. Data is data - analysis is something else |
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I'm having trouble seeing much special in what he's doing because of the student factor. More or less what Chris H. said. If you (as a student/uke) really put your arms lightly on someone but disconnect them from your center, no force is going to do anything like what was shown in the video. So there was a cooperative-student aspect to what's on the video. In a lot of "tai chi" schools, students are trained (sometimes unconsciously by peer pressure, just in the same way a lot of Aikido schools produce a lot of dive-bunnies) to hop backward to small impulses.
Incidentally, what he's doing is not "fa jing". Fa jing is a whole-body shaking release of power. Something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_vcWq2GYXs There are a number of fa jing videos on YouTube that support the idea of the shaking power of fajing, so either all those Chinese are wrong and Phillips is the only guy that knows the truth... or he's just misapplying the term. IMO, Phillips can't do that kind of body shaking (looking at his body movements), so what he's doing isn't fajing. It's more like "poop jing"... small pressure pulsing or crowding his jin into the student, adding to pressure that the student is applying onto him. What he calls "closing" isn't quite what I'd call pure closing, but it's in the general direction. However, you can see the same general use of the middle working the back-gate "hole" of Uke in this video of Saotome Sensei using David Goldberg as uke (does it twice in the opening seconds of the video). http://www.facebook.com/video/?id=61...v=133112591037 So anyway, before I'd want to get into any discussion about what Phillips is doing, I'd want to stipulate that it's not "fajing" and his students are too cooperative. FWIW Mike Sigman |
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"So anyway, before I'd want to get into any discussion about what Phillips is doing, I'd want to stipulate that it's not "fajing" and his students are too cooperative."
What about the cameraman? Maybe you did not look at the second video? There are actually three of them. |
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By the way, how do you quote part of what someone says? As you can see from from my previous post, my attempt failed.
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To quote someone, just hit the quote button and remove the parts you don't want between the quote and slash/quote markers. If you need to quote more, just be sure that there are quote and slash-quote markers around the original text that you want to quote. Best. Mike Sigman |
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About the Tai Chi; I think Micheal Phillips is being reasonable, a lot more reasonable than so many fakes out there. His stuff isn't so far fetched; he's merely following a belief that Chinese people have had for thousands of years. He's just demonstrating how the power of chi and the energy of the attacker can be used to rebound the attacker. Not some crazy mega no-touch "chi punch". Someone on Youtube commented that they had practiced JuJitsu for (Insert # here) amount of years, and the hardest he's ever been punched was by Micheal Phillips. Sure he could have set it all up, I'm just saying that there are crazier things in this world than that. - Johann |
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Regards, Mike Sigman |
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When I see someone doing that hop I know pretty surely that they have somehow probably been exposed to some southern-Chinese Taiji and that everyone in the class does that hokey hop.... it's almost a hallmark of S.C. Taiji. Someone with competition judo, wrestling, MMA, etc., is going to just laugh and throw them in a more serious confrontation. Incidentally, Aikido and similar Japanese martial-arts also have a hallmark move when there are no jin/kokyu skills being taught in a class: they shift the hips to an incoming force instead of using the mind (what Ueshiba called "the Divine Intent") to adjust the kokyu/jin path. FWIW Mike Sigman |
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On the other hand, a lot of what you see is just crazy. Like most aikido demos you see where people fall for no real reason and the sensei gives that smug smile as if he actually caused them to fall. I did have a student grab me once with a reverse single-side grip. We were only supposed to be doing hand-escapes--getting out of his grip. But when I tried to escape, he just had a really strong grip. So I just "surged" through the movement and he came off his feet and did the feet-over-head flip in the air to land on his back. The way I know this was real was that it was a concrete floor and we had no mats at the time. I've had other bizarre little things like that happen over the past decades, but, sadly, I've never learned to do it by will. On the other hand, some teachers train their students to be sure that it always looks like they're that effective. So, yes, some of it is involuntary and uncontrollable, but probably the vast majority of it is fake. As for the guy in El Paso, if I ever get out there, I'll let him do it to me and form my opinion from that. I hate fake falls and screwy jumping responses and I've assiduously trained everyone I've ever worked with NOT to take baloney falls if a technique is no good. But every now and then something happens so easily and produces such a startling result that I know there's more to this stuff than you might really understand just by seeing it happen. Best wishes. David |
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http://www.yangfamilytaichi.com/phpB....php?f=2&t=206 Unfortunately, one of the video links referenced in this thread from 2003 is no longer available, but the discussion is still interesting. One post in particular from this thread is worth considering: I think there are a couple of different scenarios regarding the hop. One, as Jerry suggests, is a voluntary hop that one does when one knows that an opponent or push hands partner has you at a disadvantage, and you're about to be launched. It's a way of maintaining your frame, and quickly re-establishing your equilibrium. The other scenario is an involuntary hop. This can happen once one has been "led into emptiness" by your partner, and there is a sensation of disorientation where you're not quite sure of your vertical orientation, and it literally feels as though one has fallen or stepped into a hole (which is another way of translating "luo kong"). In this case, even though both feet are on the ground, your legs involuntarily stretch out as you try to "find" the ground, as it were. If the opponent adds just a little lift to your frame at this moment, you'll propel yourself back in a hop, or series of hops. Just as it can be a bad habit to hold your ground no matter what, I imagine the defensive hop can develop into an unconscious habit with negative consequences. The hop reminds me a little of what I learned in jujitsu years ago, called "sutemi." Beginners learn mat rolls, falls and solo flips, working up to airborn versions of the same. Later, you learn that the solo airborne flips you've been doing are basically your half of what happens when being thrown by a partner. In practice, partners often "help" each other by doing sutemi while being thrown. As a beginner, I don't think I was even aware of this phenomenon until the sensei once called me to the mat during a school demonstration to perform a throw on me I hadn't yet learned. I went up and grabbed his gi as normal, and he looked at me and said quietly, "Don't sutemi." My mind kind of went blank, and the next thing I knew, I had hit the mat faster and harder than I ever had before. With this little demo, he made it clear to me that he didn't need my help for his technique to work. Take care, Louis With respect to "hopping," I tend to think it follows more particular styles of taiji than whether the taiji is "southern" or "northern" Chinese. Hopping happens in Beijing as well as Hong Kong or Shanghai: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQu_smT9bU8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJaaVm7rKqE In general, I've seen much more "hopping" in connection with Yang and Wu (Jianquan) lines of taijiquan than with Chen. |
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There is an awful lot of difference between what is going on here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQu_smT9bU8 and in the original video. Maybe it's not obvious to everyone, though, if they're not familiar with how to generate forces and who is reacting to a definite force (and subsequent balance issues) versus someone who has been trained to hop at anything. Mike Sigman |
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It seems to me that you guys are over-analyzing the situation; The guy hopped bakwards.:eek: Lifting your feet up as you fall backwards can happen to anyone and it is a pretty normal reaction. I have had people push me before and thats how I hop back, and I have no Southern Taiji trainning. You can always look at a video and say; "my, that hop looks fake," but how would you hop back if you were pushed? To take the matter further, how do you even know how a person would hop back if hit with "chi energy"?
Its strange; do we really have to have Michael suspend himself from a rope (a noose? :dead:) and push back another guy on a rope to demonstrate that he's telling the truth? Isn't that just a little picky? The point made that some people are trainned to jump back at anything is a good one but some of those guys looked to be pushing very hard. (They could have been faking that too:eek: .) |
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FWIW Mike Sigman |
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But damn, now I'm the one over analyzing! :disgust: |
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Mike Sigman |
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