Practical Tai Chi and Wrestling sparring

^ no argument on that front. Martial arts of all stripes are susceptible to this phenomena. I can appreciate that this makes it difficult to seperate wheat from chaff, which in a way is a bloody shame. Kernels of usefulness often hidden among nuggets of shit - sometimes easier just not to touch.
 
Balto said:
Yes, this is very common in BJJ. I see it all the time.
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I recall an interview with JT Torres when he was a brown belt at Lloyd's talking about how LI still beat the shit out of everyone in sparring and my first thought was 'yes this is a cult' because only in a martial arts cult does an aging guy with no significant competitive achievements beat the tar out of young, athletic, ultra competitive students. I think there was probably some of this at work with Helio Gracie, such as when Saulo claimed he couldn't beat him as a 90 year old (when Saulo had won like 3-4 HW titles in a row).
 
Zankou said:
But aikido and tai chi 'sparring' is infested with compliance mentality that makes this hard to judge. Human beings are mimetic creatures. The way I take throws in judo is not natural, for example; it's something I was carefully taught, and learned through imitation. I do what I feel I am 'supposed' to do. In wrestling competition, nobody feels 'supposed' to flail about like in that vid, and so they just don't do it.
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This is a very interesting point. This is slightly different but related, I have had friendly grappling matches with my friends that don't train and haven't done as well against a white belt with a month or two of training. Simply because they haven't reacted like a BJJ practitioner should, specifically inside my guard.
 
Uchi Mata said:
Real Tai Chi is hard to classify, mostly because it's so domain specific. Though I don't talk about it much and I don't practice anymore, I'm a certified instructor in the short form through the William CC Chen lineage (if you're read any of Josh Waitzkin's stuff, that's who he studied Tai Chi under). I've trained with some really high level internal martial artists, true masters in my opinion. Most of them, if I'd pulled guard and done a push sweep they'd have had no defense, and I could have submitted them with ease.

But if I tried to grapple with them like the wrestler in the video, I would get sat on my ass even though at the time I was training a lot of Tai Chi I was a very competitive Judo black belt (and not a small guy either, I fought at 198 lb in Judo and always had to cut). To a man, these guys also punched with incredible power, though their footwork left a lot to be desired (their defense tended to be a lot of rolling and ducking; I thought of them as a bunch of little Joe Fraziers). Their ability to generate power seemingly out of nowhere via minute control of body mechanics was also amazing.

Was it practical? Not very. I think any decent MMA fighter would kick the shit out of them, no question. They certainly weren't used to defending against things like leg kicks or lower body takedowns. But if you played their game, if you engaged in the kind of pseudo-Greco wrestling the guys in the video were doing, they really could do amazing things in terms of manipulating balance and generating power. The power isn't usually striking type power that knocks you out, it was more pushing power or circling power that would spin you off balance. I really did have people send me stumbling 6-7 feet with what looked like a very small shove. We never talked about qi or meridians or any Daoist internal cosmology, the William Chen school is completely non-mystical and all about body mechanics, but some of the results really are amazing. Now, you have to do it for 20 years and you still won't really know how to fight unless you also put on the gloves and spar (which only about half the people did), but when I see people playing the internal martial arts game and getting spun 1080 or bounced up in the air I don't immediately assume it's fake, because I had that done to me. And I'm about as incredulous as it gets, I took up Tai Chi after I left Korean martial arts because I realized that they were just useless air kicking BS. If you play their game, good internal martial artists can make you look really stupid and do some pretty amazing things. I encourage anyone really interested to go to a seminar or find a local guy who's legit. The latter is pretty hard because there is a lot of BS and fraud in internal kung fu, but a good guide to legitimacy is spending a lot of time on push hands and doing at least a little sparring, even if it's infrequent (since the frauds usually don't spar at all and just do the form). Any William Chen lineage school is also a pretty good bet, though there aren't many around outside the east coast and southern Indiana.
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Exactly. No one ever said these people are gods, but they definitely got some legit skills. Much respect to William C.C. Chen by the way, I've heard he's a great teacher and that he still has some heavy hands, considering his older age. Wasn't his son doing Pro Sanda back in the day?

Peace
 
UnshavenRaven said:
Exactly. No one ever said these people are gods, but they definitely got some legit skills. Much respect to William C.C. Chen by the way, I've heard he's a great teacher and that he still has some heavy hands, considering his older age. Wasn't his son doing Pro Sanda back in the day?

Peace
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Max was doing San Shou for a while, though he really trained it more like kickboxing than Tai Chi. His daughter Tiffany was a pretty promising boxer, she actually trained at Gleason's in addition to training with her dad, I'm not sure if she still fights or not. Master Chen was always all about fighting, he loved it when people who did Tai Chi in his system did other martial arts with more sparring. I think he enjoys teaching Tai Chi to older people and as a healthy exercise, but always kinda misses having people more serious about the fighting aspect. But I don't know him at all, that's just speculation.
 
Uchi Mata said:
Max was doing San Shou for a while, though he really trained it more like kickboxing than Tai Chi. His daughter Tiffany was a pretty promising boxer, she actually trained at Gleason's in addition to training with her dad, I'm not sure if she still fights or not. Master Chen was always all about fighting, he loved it when people who did Tai Chi in his system did other martial arts with more sparring. I think he enjoys teaching Tai Chi to older people and as a healthy exercise, but always kinda misses having people more serious about the fighting aspect. But I don't know him at all, that's just speculation.
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That's cool man. Ever get a chance to spar with Max or train with him?
 
UnshavenRaven said:
That's cool man. Ever get a chance to spar with Max or train with him?
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Nope. I've actually never met William either, I mostly trained Tai Chi when I college and I had no money for seminars. My main teachers were Charles Pearce, who is a master under William, and Randy Pardue who was an accomplished student of Charles and a guy from a different lineage named Lao Ma. I also trained a fair amount of Ba Gua with a really badass (though tame looking and somewhat eccentric) guy named Zach Crisp.
 
Darkslide632 said:
No. No it doesn't.
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It does. Do randori with any competitive black belt. You'll just be awkward and suck at everything. Anything you do they are already 2-3 steps ahead. You won't even be able to get a proper grip.
 
Zankou said:
I think that's the point .. I don't doubt there are some guys who are amazing at aikido, or tai chi, and this transfers somewhat to a more open-rules grappling contest. In other words, I can accept the idea that you might get some cross-over grappling benefit from them.

But aikido and tai chi 'sparring' is infested with compliance mentality that makes this hard to judge. Human beings are mimetic creatures. The way I take throws in judo is not natural, for example; it's something I was carefully taught, and learned through imitation. I do what I feel I am 'supposed' to do. In wrestling competition, nobody feels 'supposed' to flail about like in that vid, and so they just don't do it.

Unfortunately, martial arts with a focus on 'aged guru with internal might' theory are horribly afflicted with compliance behavior, even from people who honestly THINK and would SWEAR they are resisting as best they can. This is just human nature, to do as expected, particularly in a group setting with a revered leader. Smart people and experienced martial artists fall into this mindset just as easily as other humans do. And that is why we get this ... it is a mistake to think this same dynamic is not heavily present in almost all TMA sparring with a 'master', albeit not usually to the same crazy extreme. Feel the master's POWER:

Btw, you see this same mentality emerge in BJJ as well. It's just human nature.
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Completely. It's why I even though I don't really compete at this point in my life (small children, weekends are packed, I can only train late night on weekdays), I enjoy training at a place where there are a ton of competitors because they just make better training partners even when you're never personally free on weekends to do a tournament.

Training with competitors has really let me know where I stand, that I can hold my own with many people but there are also tons more who can completely smash me at will without even putting in more than 30% of their effort.

And yet even with my mediocre grappling and meh striking offense and terrible striking defense, when I was playing around with internal martial arts in my 20s while in med school I'd get compliments all the time.

"good rooting"
"wow it's like you absorbed my energy and turned it against me"
"your form is strong, but too much power"

And the worst of all was a guy in his 30s who watched me practicing the 108 yang style taiji long form in the park one day and comes up after I finished. We were being drilled on the long form for an elective class at school and I just focused on learning the movements even though I knew full well that I could osoto gari the 50 year old tai-chi-is-not-about-fighting instructor at will into the duck pond at the park so hard that Einarr would slow clap from across the Atlantic. Compare that to the last time I rolled with Gokor, the highlight of which was me escaping mount one and only one time before he said "oh, you flexible eh?" and then proceeded to tap me every 35 seconds while carrying on a casual conversation with a third party a few yards off to the side of us.

"So how long have you been training taijiquan?"

"uh, seriously? about 4 months"

The dude was pissed off. I had always tried to do the form with a more martial bent than my own instructor at the time and I'd keep the application of each move in mind while doing it and keep things mostly Yin but try to use explosive force at the right moments of the form. Based on this the guy in the park thought I was an instructor and he told me that what I was doing was the sort of tai chi he wanted to be doing but never got to do after 6 years of regular training. When I told him I'd only been doing taijquan for a few months it shattered his worldview and confidence in his teacher.

I put it into context that I was training and competing in judo from 9 to 17 and working on a master's degree in chinese medicine so I was no stranger to yin and yang or use of qi or balance, or the body mechanics of repelling, whipping, circling, and exploding. That made him feel a little better but he still had a look on his face like I had just crushed his dream. Hopefully he found a better place to train after that.
 
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I think the video is not real as well.
Great to watch though!
 
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