5e Monks Should Have Martial Weapons

This post is about the game Dungeons and Dragons, and is not meant in any way to be making any point about real-life martial arts. This post is related to the 5th Edition (5e) Monk class being under powered, but it is more specifically about my problem with this class's choice of weapons. On the 5th Edition weapon's list we see that the only difference between a short sword and a scimitar is that a short sword is primarily a piercing weapon and the scimitar is primarily a slashing weapon. The 5e Monk class allows the Monks to use Short Swords but not Scimitars. This is shockingly out of place with every Monk cinematic or literary archetype I am aware of, as monks are universally more likely to use slashing swords than piercing swords as is the case in the following Shoulin monk sword demonstration:

And the straight swords used by Wudang monks are long bladed, highly agile swashbuckling weapons more like rapiers than short swords:

Shoulin and Wudang martial arts also have all of the rest of the martial weapons on the Martial Weapons list, including numerous flails:

Asian martial arts monks have battle axes:

And great axes:

Great Swords and Glaives:

And halberds:

And pikes/lances:

And long swords:

And morning stars:

And tridents:

And war picks:

Maces and War Hammers:

And whips:

It is also a shame to forget the longbow archery of Zen monks:

And advanced crossbows in their culture wouldn't have even been considered martial weapons anyways:

I will stop short of an argument for their use of shields (which I could easily make) because I think the over all lack of armor is justifiable for monks. But it's clear to me that 5e needs to allow Monks to use martial weapons.

Gay Was Good Enough

I believe that feminism has been watered down with an abundance of competing interests, and as a result of feminism's loss of potency, we are now going to see women lose reproductive rights. In addition, I believe the Gay movement has been watered down, and as with feminism losing political gains, the Gays are going to loose Gay Marriage in the USA. The supreme court does not have to respect impotent movements.

Feminism has always been first and foremost about establishing the rights of women. This is largely about protecting them from males who have access to them. That is primarily protecting women who can become pregnant against their will. Reproductive rights doesn't much apply to women who don't get pregnant. Feminism is primarily about "people who menstruate."

Feminism somehow began to mean women who never had any intention of having children (most lesbians) and women who never under any circumstances would get pregnant (transgender.) Along with these additions to feminism came a whole new vocabulary, the LGBT(F)QIA, even bordering on polyandry. This vocabulary divorced itself from mainstream use of words, such saying "trans girls are girls," when in reality mainstream society does not see "trans girls as girls." Whenever a movement's ability to project it's message is compromised, the strength of that movement is compromised. 

The low point of the movement was in 2015 and 2016. Two issues were blowing up at around this time:

1. After the scorched earth victory of the US Supreme Court declaring Gay Marriage to be the law of the land, the LBGT(F)QIA movement allowed themselves to get distracted by politics around who-can-use-what-public-restrooms. Feminism was completely blind to the fact that Hetero Males were already very uncomfortable using public restrooms, and instead of focusing on getting more single-toilet bathrooms established, allowed themselves to get dragged into a conversation about what bathrooms trans women (but somehow not trans men) should be allowed to use in public. This was a problem because again it muddled feminism's message, and continued to divorce their vocabulary from mainstream English. 
2. Trans women in sports started to create divisions within feminism. On one hand Feminism was supposed to protect people who menstruate from people who don't, and on the other hand Feminism had expanded its mission to protect everyone who identifies as a woman. To really appreciate WHY people want separate sports divisions for women and men, you must take heterosexual reproduction into consideration. In men's sports we can evaluate the fitness of men for carrying on genes forward into the next generation, as sports not only evaluate natural physical talent, but also both the natural mental ability to focus in short term emergent circumstances and long term work ethic focused on a singular goal. Why then female sports? BECAUSE EVERYONE HAS TWO PARENTS, you get your genes from you mom and your dad. This is why the general public can never be expected to accept trans women in women's sports, is it defeats the purpose for having female sports in the first place.

And in 2016 a presidential candidate famous for saying he just likes to "grab women by the pussy" was elected. He chose as his vice president the main culprit behind dragging feminism into the above mentioned bathroom trans politics. This president then spent the next 4 years of his life doing everything he possibly could to make sure people who menstruate would be forced to give birth against their will.

And the same mechanism being used to trample female reproductive rights, that supreme court, will trample gay marriage soon enough. But let's look a little closer at how the Gay movement was watered down itself. Looking at the letters, with each additional letter we see a weakening of the movement: G was the original for "Gay": men or women called gay had same-sex attraction, clear definition, solid, still exists today in the phrase "Gay Pride." L was for Lesbian, and here we see the Gay movement being conflated with feminist issues. B was for Bi, highly problematic for three reasons: 1) it falsely suggested that most Gay and Lesbian had absolutely zero opposite sex attraction in addition to their same sex attraction, 2) so-called Bi's had an easy time of passing as heterosexual in mainstream society and in so far as they ever were oppressed it was only for their Gayness, and 3) Bi's quickly became the problem children of the Gay and Lesbian movement as they developed a reputation for swinging and home wrecking, disrupting what domestic stability the Ls & Gs were able to establish. 

T for Trans? Trans isn't even a sexual attraction issue in the first place, it is a totally different issue, and is not relevant to the original issue of Gay: rights for people with same-sex attraction. Q is for questioning and is only there because of the stigma against Bis in the Gay community. I is for intersex which is a legitimate medical condition which could be grouped with Trans identity, but again not a sexual attraction issue. Asexual is by definition 100% irrelevant to same-sex attraction issues.

What has happened here is the Gay and Feminism movements allowed themselves to be diluted, primarily by being allowed to be driven together into a single vulnerable herd to be culled. In no way should the movement meant to protect people who menstruate be lumped into the same category as the movement meant to protect people with same sex attraction. This is a classic problem of what I call "Solidarity = Autonomy," where when groups fail to define themselves, the natural consequence is impotency.

The fearsome hydra that is Feminism + LGBT(F)QIA is now only bark with zero bite. Trump's supreme court is putting a quick end to it. Trump has put the movement to the wall and had his way with them, because they allowed their movement to be diluted and weakened to the point where it could no longer stand up for itself.

Clinch Crisis

From my perspective as a martial arts consumer advocate, one of the biggest problems in martial arts instruction today is what I call the "Clinch Crisis." There are two parts to the Clinch Crisis:

1. For self defense purposes (and injury prevention purposes,) it is best to train to remain standing when you trip or throw someone, because when you are attacked on the street the attacker is likely to have an accomplice near by. 
2. For self defense purposes (and ergonomic purposes,) it is best to train to get up from the ground when you are ground fighting.

These are two sides of the same coin, because if you train to avoid going to the ground then you aren't training to escape from the ground, and vice versa. The one art that attempts to do both is called Combat Glima (Viking Wrestling) and it is missing a lot of self defense aspects you would expect to see in other martial arts:

And that's the best case scenario. "But doesn't Judo cover standing throws rather extensively?" ONLY IN THEIR KATA. Most of the time in sparring, and much more of the time in competition, they are going to the ground when they throw or trip, regardless of what Judo was like 30 years ago. Judo also doesn't cover clinch striking. Kudo, Combat Sambo and to a lesser degree MMA add significant clinch striking to Judo but are still slamming their full body weight down on their opponent in hopes of maximizing the effect of the throw, failing to stay on their feet for techniques designed for self defense.

Likewise Muay Thai doesn't cover sprawling against single and double leg takedowns, even though gets a lot right Judo does not, with lots of standing throws and trips and clinch striking. Beyond a lack of sprawling, Muay Thai's limited clinch time is a significant problem. 

And the two second clinch time is also where Sanda fails at this, though they are one of two arts that combine clinch striking with single and double leg take downs while trying to remain on their feet, unlike MMA and other Judo based combat sports. But what grappling options are there if the sport isn't historically rooted in Judo? American folkstyle wrestling has a very high emphasis on training escaping from the ground to their feet, even though they are generally unconcerned with staying standing while throwing or any sort of striking:

Maybe the best clinch option is Sumo, as they try not to go to the ground when they throw, and include head buts, palm strikes and forearm (think elbow) strikes in the clinch, and have unlimited clinch time. Best of luck to you if you want to go train Sumo casually for self defense purposes, because the closest you are going to get is full contact Tai Chi if you can even find that:

But the part of the clinch crisis is the effect this all has on the ground game. Again the only arts that are serious about getting back on their feet from the ground are Combat Glima and American Folkstyle Wrestling. The problem with both of these arts for self defense reasons is they train these escapes while facing absolutely zero threat of submissions, or far more importantly striking attacks. 

Escaping to the feet has become a more popular strategy that is now studied and practiced in MMA gyms. However this is not going to be emphasized to beginners over the striking, take down defense and basic submissions. Furthermore most casual self defense students do not have access to MMA training.

No one is teaching appropriate grappling for self defense to beginners when they walk in the door. Casual self defense students should not be expected to have to participate in a cage fight before learning the self defense appropriate grappling they showed up to learn in the first place. This lack of access to adequate self defense grappling for casual students is what I call the "Clinch Crisis."

Tai Chi Conditioning Paradigm

Tai Chi has a reputation for being good for old people, which means injury prevention in two different ways:

1. Tai Chi is obsessed with balance - as in BOTH you having good balance AND you unbalancing your opponent until they fall over. Of course when you train a physical attribute  you strengthen that attribute, and Tai Chi intentionally develops PHYSICAL balance.
2. Ergonomics - as a Tai Chi guy, I found it curious how much more comfortable Tai Chi was than the other martial arts I had done including Aikido. Likewise when I dabbled in Pa Kua and Hsing-I later, I was surprised by how uncomfortable they were by Tai Chi standards.

I have become obsessed with 2 above, because of twin injuries I have had over the last few years. In 2019 I was drilling take downs on a mat, and when I was being thrown my right arm got isolated and I landed on my right shoulder and head from a double leg take down. This resulted in what felt like a broken collar bone but was actually a shoulder impingement. This took about a year off what I could do with training (and why there are sparring videos of me from that time weapon fighting or dirty boxing left handed.) This shoulder impingement made it so painful to use my right arm that it would cause me to fall to my knees in pain, far more pain than it would take for me to tap from a submission. This forced me to realize that martial arts training could have the exact opposite of the intended effect of improving your ability to protect yourself, to instead impairing your ability to protect yourself, and even worse be a source of danger to your own safety... But this was just the tip of the iceberg...

Earlier in 2021 I was on a trip to Detroit and was rear ended on the freeway. From this accident I got ANOTHER shoulder impingement, this time on my left arm! Last time physical therapy had helped me recover faster, but over all I hadn't taken it very seriously. This time I know better, and I have questioned my physical therapists on this coincidence and what made me so vulnerable to shoulder impingement in the first place:

1. A tight chest.
2. Weak lats.
3. An inflexible chest.
4. A shoulder and neck posture that has become slouched since 2019.

In other words a part of the problem was not enough pull ups and too many push ups, typical of martial arts training... and reportedly weight training as well. But disturbingly, beyond that when doing deep squats I ended up experiencing a significant hip flexor problem which impaired my ability to move around. About a month ago I hit my low point, having to stop going  up a fight of stairs because of simultaneous left shoulder and right hip flexor pain. This made me question my macho routine of dive bombers and deep squats. Notice what these physical therapists have to say about the military press (similar to dive bombers) and deep squats:

Bad, right? But some of the stuff we do in martial arts all the time is actually much, much worse...

Ironically the one thing that was helping me tremendously was my Tai Chi. I noticed that one of the Tai Chi exercises miraculously worked as first aid so I could keep moving even when my hip flexors were acting up... 

And working on getting my Tai Chi forms back to what they should be improved my over all mobility. Inspired by this I replaced my deep squats with sprinters lunges (which focuses more on hip flexors,) and now a few weeks later I no longer have a hip flexor pain mobility issue. But we martial artists are experts on fighting technique, not conditioning technique. It turns out that if I had been doing push ups 100% correctly (instead of 80% correctly,) it would have probably helped to prevent shoulder impingement instead of being a contributing factor to it...

All martial arts are continuously evolving for the better or for the worse, from generation to generation. It seems to me that making sure our conditioning techniques are promoting good health over the course of decades, and not only enhanced performance over the course of months, is a huge opportunity for improvement with this generation of martial artists. This effort in the past in the development of Tai Chi is what has made this ancient art continue to be relevant today.

Point Fighting is LARPing

I recently got some grief from an admin of a facebook group purportedly about Chinese sword fighting, who took issue with the real-weight Nihonzashi weapons I do continuous sparring with being padded. The irony here is not one other video I have ever seen in that group had continuous weapon fighting, weapon free sparring, or any real weight weapons being used to spar with in that group. The best case scenario was:

Just because something is marginally better than Olympic Fencing doesn't mean it is good. It appears the fighters are mostly nonreactive to the other fighter's weapons, they can't feel when they are getting hit, and it shows with their flashy fighting style that gives very little thought to defense. The weapons are very light weight and flimsy. Worse yet it's still stop-and-go fencing/point fighting.

Point fighting is LARPing because it is pretend: 

1. It's not a real dual-until-first-blood, because no one is drawing blood. 
2. It's not a real fight because you aren't allowed to hit hard enough to impact what the other fighter is doing.
3. It's not real free sparring because they are not sparring continuously.

You could make an argument that point fighting like you see in Olympic Fencing or Olympic Karate is a helpful drill like Tai Chi stationary push hands. But it's really not appropriate to compete in drills, we don't have pad hitting drills competed in Boxing for example. The reason why point fighters do not care about real weight weapon sparring is because they aren't training to fight so much as they are LARPing.

Tai Chi: Before and After

This kid is a Tres Espadas member who has already fought in a Tipon, but who is relatively new to unarmed sparring. This is where he was shortly before the pandemic in the grey T-Shirt, and you can see his sparring partner has no problem taking him down four times in 2.5 minutes:

For about a year this kid trained in Tai Chi with me about once per week as we were locked up together during the COVID 19 pandemic. In bad weather we would work inside on stationary push hands and on individual techniques from Yang style Tai Chi. In good weather we would work outside on different types of moving step push hands, sometimes bordering on Lei Tai sport fighting, (as all Tai Chi styles are supposed to traditionally,) as well as Yang style forms. We always covered a little Zhan Zhuang/standing mediation out of tradition and for the sake mental focus and good posture. As the pandemic was subsiding before the delta variant outbreak, this kid got a chance to spar the same person as above under the same rules with the same gear, and the results were impressive (as he was taken down zero times in 5 minutes):

Our Dog Brother's issue Super Stiff action flex padded sticks were falling apart after a decade of hard free sparring. Fortunately the famous Blood and Iron HEMA club from (Vancouver BC) Canada was at the last gathering (NW Warrior Tipon Tipon) we participated in, and they had introduced us to a new brand of sparring weapon, Nihonzashi. Nihonzashi's padded swords are designed to be:

1. As heavy as a real metal sword.

2. As stiff as a real metal sword.

3. As long as a metal sword.

4. As safe to spar with as any other sparring sword.

When we got our first pair of padded swords from Nihonzashi over the pandemic, we knew we were going to have knowledge gaps on how to fight with real weight metal weapons, because most of the weapon sparring done over the last few centuries was with wood or bamboo sticks. In the following video we start off talkative and safe, and as we get used to the weapons we start trying to use our previous techniques full force and speed with these real weight weapons. Though there's free sparring by the end of the round, we still aren't sure how to adjust to the real weight of the weapons:

I went back to my Tai Chi for solutions. I re-examined the Yang style saber form. I cross referenced it to the Wu style and Chen style saber form for context, and compared it to a few other kung fu saber forms. I was pleasantly surprised by how straight forward the Yang style Saber techniques are (and without the mystery surrounding the Tai Chi straight sword/gim.) After a month or so of more practice with my Yang style saber technique, I gave it another go with my same sparring partner as in the above video. You can see how much more comfortable I am with the real weight weapon than my sparring partner who is still basically trying to use stick technique:

On one hand Tai Chi comes with a LOT of baggage if you are a lineaged instructor (which I am not.) On the other hand there is a wealth of knowledge in Tai Chi returning from the past through free sparring that is very helpful indeed.

Free Sparring

I have added a new page to the side bar of this blog called Free Sparring, because free sparring is such an important concept to this blog. Almost anything I have to say about martial arts goes back to best practices for free sparring!

Gear for Weapon Sparring

 I am sometimes asked what gear should a group use for weapon sparring. For helmets you basically have two options, karate helmets with plastic face shields or fencing helmets. Maybe there's a better brand (like perhaps for Kudo,) but the one I have used is Tiger Claw:

But fencing masks are the standard if you want to train to participate in gatherings, fencing masks do not have breathing holes that sparring knives might slip through, and fencing masks have built in neck protection. Blue Gauntlet seems to have the best value and appropriate protection for martial arts weapon sparring:

For knives the best value for safety and some level of realism has been the Cold Steel Hard Rubber Tanto for over a decade now:

There are many new stick brands and some of them may be better than Action Flex, but historically Action Flex has been the highest quality sparring sticks... look for the ones specifically branded as "Escrima," which I believe were endorsed by Dog Brothers in the past:

For sparring swords and machetes, there is only one brand I know of that makes sparring weapons about the real weight of a sword that are safe to spar with. The best sparring machete I know of is the Nihonzashi brand Padded Wakizashi, and they have three other swords as well (Katana, Odachi and Longsword): 

Now as for other weapons such as staffs, pole arms, axes, hammers, tomahawks, etc. unfortunately I have no recommendations, weapon sparring gear manufacturing isn't really there yet. For example the two sparring spears I have used the most are the Action Flex staff which is too floppy and light to be considered anywhere near like fighting with a real spear, and the Naginata from Calimacil, that has a latex skin that is incompatible with fencing masks, and is shockingly expensive. Right now it seems like our best hope is that Nihonzashi will start making a sparring Naginata, but that hasn't happened yet. 

A final note is that we need hand protection while weapon sparring. The issue is blood borne pathogens; at Tres Espadas every sparring weapon we have used could cause an abrasion of some kind on the hand, especially around the fingernails. Tough guys who want to feel hand pain when sparring should at least use work gloves. We have been using cheap street hockey gloves lately:

Self Defense Evolution

I and some like minded individuals have started a new Martial Arts facebook group called "Self Defense Evolution." As a martial arts consumer advocate I am very concerned about big picture trends in the martial arts community, and take very seriously issues a lot of martial arts instructors want to ignore:

1. Are beginners getting enough free sparring time to develop physical self defense skills?
2. Are the free sparing practices both safe and realistic enough?
3. Are the full ranges of techniques being advocated for actually being taught? (For example if your grappling instructor says to "just run" against a knife, is he teaching you dive rolling over fences so you don't get stabbed the first time you run into an obstacle?)
4. Are the range of techniques being taught appropriate for the two key self defense scenarios people are worried about? (These would be being attacked my multiple opponents or by a knife.)

All Martial Arts are in a constant state of evolution even if they don't admit it. I hope you will join us in Self Defense Evolution if your are interested in this change and what we need martial arts to be going forward.

Do Not Stretch Like Me

A few people have asked me about my stretching routine since I posted about stretching. So I will cover that in this post, but first...

Stretch as I say, not as I stretch

First, I don't have formal education in athletics or coaching sports or as a personal fitness trainer or anything like that. You would be wise to listen to anyone who is a more qualified expert than me. As with any exercise program you should check with your doctor before you start doing it.

Second, and I can't emphasize this enough, the stretching I do is:

1. NOT the stretching I did to become as flexible as I am.
2. NOT safe or smart for anyone do to do... I have pulled hip flexor muscles doing this numerous times.

Third, my general recommendation for building flexibility - and what I should be doing and mostly am not doing - is using dynamic high kick stretches like Ax Kick stretch or Cheer Leader Front Kick stretches for warm ups, and using front splits and straddle/side splits as cool down stretches:

1. Dynamic kicking stretches engage your cardio and thus fit in well as part of a warm up routine. Splits don't get you high kicks so much as the dynamic kicking stretches do. I recently had to start doing dynamic kicking stretches again because my left leg couldn't kick above groin level even though I was bringing my head to my left knee in the front splits on a regular basis! Not only are these dynamic kick stretches easier to do than the splits, for martial artists they are much more important.
2. Static stretching like the splits over time help you maintain mobility and build over all flexibility, BUT they can REDUCE your muscular output for hours after doing them! So they are VERY good for you to do, but NOT immediately before you work out! Static stretches like Yoga at the end of a work out can do a lot to reduce muscle soreness, and that is where the splits belong in your workout, at the end!

My Hypocrisy

Now the gory details of my actual stretching routine (see also 2nd video in my last blog post.) I usually do this cold (you should always warm up first) after standing mediation or sitting in a chair for hours working on a computer:

1. I start in the side/straddle splits, feet flat on the floor with my hands on the foor, with my my arms straight and my hips at my shoulder level or higher, like the beginning of a diver bomber.
2. At this point the biggest challenge is to try to keep my lower back straight with by rear sticking out a little, this sets up the angle in my hips to do the splits right.
3. Breathing is obviously important.
4. What I have to do here is focus on relaxing the muscles being stretched. If I had to describe this, it's like using breath to hollow out the inner thigh and groin muscles, and as they feel empty they relax and stretch further.
5. From here my rear is going down and backwards.
6.  In this phase I may do some tricks to get unstuck if my muscles start to freeze up, which I will get into later below*... about 90% of the time I don't need to.
7. The next step is that I can feel my calf muscles touching the floor even though I am not in a full side split yet.
8. At this point my posture changes significantly. First my toes now point more up towards the sky (than in front of me when I first started the split.) Second I try to get my shoulders and head up above my hips as much as I can, getting more body weight on the muscles I am stretching.
9. At this point I might do unstuck tricks*.
10. Once I can feel my groin is flat on the ground, I know my side/straddle split isn't quite done, because I am still in too much of a v-shape, so now I work on getting my hips forward, until I am in a full side split.
11. Now I rotate my upper body and hips to go into a front split on which ever side of my body feels stiffest that day while doing the side/straddle splits. Usually this involves my hips coming more off the ground, so that when I get to my front split there's some more stretching that happens as I get my groin back in touch with the floor. At this point my upper body is held up by my arms.
12. Once I am in the full front split, I use my arms to make my back 90 degrees to the floor as much as possible, and then take my arms off the floor and try to lean backwards a little.
13. Then I lean forward and grab my forward foot with both hands and slowly pull my head to my knee or shin.
14. Then I lean back into the front split.
15. Now I use my arms to pick my group up off of the ground a few inches, and then repeat steps 12-14 again on that same side.
16. On the third repetition I have one hand grab the other wrist behind my back, and pull by wrists towards the ceiling and I lower my head towards my knee or shin.
17. I then use my arms to elevate my groin off the ground and rotate back into the middle/straddle splits, and repeat steps 7-10 above so that I am in a full straddle/middle split again.
18. Now I repeat steps 11-17 for the other side that I haven't stretched yet. 
19. So far you will see I have done the side/straddle splits three times, and the front splits 6 times (3 times on each side.)
20. From the third side split I lean back into a sitting position and end with a butterfly/tailor seat stretch, which I do 2 or three repetitions of (this is because I was losing mobility to cut my toe nails even though I was doing my spits regularly, and this cured that problem.)

*There are three tricks I use to get unstuck. If I have been stretching every single day like I should, then I rarely have to use these, but sometimes my slug-like commitment to fitness means the only conditioning I did that day was standing mediation, shame on me. Here's the tricks to get unstuck:

• Transition to front splits early on whatever side of my body is giving me the most resistance in the side/straddle spilt. This is ONLY step 11 and 17 above (NOT 12-16,) and it does not replace any of the front splits further in the routine.
• Quit and start over. It's too painful, I am too lazy, so I just give up, relax for 60 seconds and try again. I am always surprised by what a Ninja I am on the second try.
• This is the dark magick secret you are looking for with the splits: While in the split, you flex all of your muscles being stretched as hard as you possibly can without changing what position your body is in. As you are finishing your flex, breath out relaxing your muscles you were just flexing. By flexing, we get an opportunity to INTENTIONALLY RELAX afterwords. The flex should happen for at least several seconds. This can be repeated a few times. This method has a high risk of injury, so it is only for people who have been stretching daily for a while to make bigger flexibility gains, and has to be done VERY cautiously... even then it is risky.

That's my routine, and I have warned and forewarn you not to do it (any ax kick stretching I do is when I am practicing martial arts.) I have been crystal clear on what you should do instead of this routine. If you don't listen to my warning, I suggest you have them play this song for you to think of me on your way to the hospital as you pray that you might be able to do martial arts again one day:

Stretching

 I have been doing full splits almost every time I work out since 1990. Here's a picture of me warming up for the 2018 Pacific North West Warrior Tipon Tipon gathering:

If you want to be able to do this when you are almost 50 like me, pay attention: 

1. Clean living ages well - smoking, drinking, drugs etc. do nothing for you that you can't get from fruit, while wasting your money. 
2. Stretch every day for 10 minutes. 
3. There are two very specific stretches that I have found the most useful, which are Axe Kick Stretches (a dynamic stretch) and the splits (a static stretch.) Of the two, the Axe Kick Stretch is easier and more important, and it is a decent warm-up exercise:

But the more coveted stretch is the splits, which is probably a better cool down exercise for you than a warm up exercise. I have just about much experience doing the splits as anyone else alive on Earth, but I recently found a YouTube video that even helped ME do splits with less pain and effort:

How to Fix BJJ

A combat sport is a competitive game that teaches skills that could come in handy if you have to fight to defend yourself, like boxing for example. As a combat sport IBJJF grappling is fine, but BJJ promises to be a more comprehensive self defense system: 

Here is a clear path on how BJJ can fulfill that promise of being more than just a combat sport:

1. White belts should complete the basic self defense instruction you offer ( Pink Belt, Gracie Combatives, etc.) so that all higher belts understand your basic self defense strategies. When white belts are rolling (free sparring,) to prevent injury and provide the most important skills for beginners, the white belts and anyone they are rolling with should going for positions only (not working on submissions outside of completing the self defense instruction.) 
2. Blue belts should focus on learning submissions and take downs. Anyone not rolling with a white belt should start standing up with the goal of submissions on the ground.
3. Purple belts should develop a working knowledge of striking, through safe free sparring. This does not have to cover everything seen in MMA, but it should include strikes seen as key to making BJJ work in MMA, including curriculum on how to fight while standing up.
4. Brown belts should practice knife grappling. A knife grappling round should start standing up, with one sparring partner being an attacker with a safety knife and the other sparring partner being a defender trying to take that knife away from the attacker, while the attacker is trying to land as many slashes and stabs on the defender as possible. Once the defender is able to take the knife away from the attacker, the two sparring partners should switch roles and continue. This both develops real knife disarming skills, and prepares them to use a knife, which is another option for dealing with multiple attackers besides running away. 

This guarantees that each black belt has more comprehensive training for self defense, and may improve student retention as new material is introduced at each belt level. As I have said from the beginning All Martial Arts Change, and if BJJ does not continue to evolve than it will soon be surpassed by what are now considered lesser martial arts:

Whykido

 Why try to functionalize Aikido instead of do a more "practical" martial art (the most common suggestion being BJJ and/or kumite point fighting)? Because your alternative you have suggested isn't going to get the Aikidoka what they are striving for. There are two issues here: first is technique, and second is ideology.

There are three ranges of Aikido technique. 

1. First there is stand-up grappling, what they would call "clinch" in MMA or Muay Thai. In the case of Aikido it is paramount that they stay on their feet, because it is a self defense oriented system (rather than a pit fighting system) so that they must take the possibility of multiple attackers - who may not yet even be identified - seriously. The only traditional unarmed Budo with this exact objective is Sumo, and Sumo influence on Aikido is no coincidence. This type of grappling is common in other internal martial arts in the form of Push Hands and San Shou.
2. Second there is knife-range techniques. These include both disarm techniques AND attacking techniques. On one hand being attacked with a knife is one of the most important self defense scenarios to train for, while on the other hand pulling a knife is one of the most practical ways to fight off multiple attackers.
3. Third there is a walking stick self defense system deeply encoded into Aikido, for the obvious reason that a walking stick is one of the most practical non-lethal ways to defend yourself known to humanity.

More practical martial arts might teach the physical skills needed to do type 1 technique, but only Muay Thai, Sumo and Push Hands fighting actually tries to implement it - so the BJJ, Kumite Point Fighting or whatever else you have probably suggested most likely will not suffice. Sure everyone needs to cross train in grappling if for no other reason than to learn how to escape from the ground, but the only systems that even score grappling escapes are Collegiate Wrestling and Combat Glima, and ground escapes just so happen to be beyond the scope of what most Aikidoka are training for:

And virtually no other martial arts are concerned about ranges 2 and 3 while encouraging free sparring with this kind of technique. A lack of free sparring is the whole problem with Aikido in the first place, so adding your non-sparring dogwater won't do them any good. Alternatives-to-Aikido generally do not combine all three ranges of Aikido technique together in one place as Aikido does.

Beyond technique, Aikido has a specific pacifist-lite ideology of trying to bring humanity together in peace and harmony - and even has it's on form of spirituality as it is rife with supernatural theories on Qi. Like BJJ or almost any other belt-ranked martial art, if the practitioner does not have some other religious system they use to morally reflect and improve their behavior, Aikido often fills that void. Asking an Aikidoka to instead become a Judoka isn't ideologically any more practical than asking a Christian to become a Muslim, and it will likewise have a low frequency of success.

While I have incorporated a small fraction of the Aikido I learned into my training, I have no intention of studying more Aikido. However if you want to understand why people are trying to functionalize Aikido, it is because Aikido's ideals represented in both range of technique and ideology are both worthy - and with further training through free sparring - practical:

Martial Truth

The most useful rating system from my POV is a 4 star scale, because people's opinions have limited precision for other people. It's hard to be more useful than "horrible = one star, mediocre = two stars, good = three, and amazing =four stars." Here I am going to extrapolate that to the level of truth of claims about martial arts:

One Star = Mythical. These are ideas that are generally unrelated to reality. An example of such an idea is "if I practice Tai Chi forms long enough, I can develop useful fighting skills without any other type of practice."

Two Stars = Hypothetical. These are ideas that some find helpful in their training, but which do not yet have consistent repeatable results through peer reviewed research. An example of such a claim is "I can feel my Qi when I am practicing my Tai Chi forms."

Three Stars = Theoretical. These are ideas that appear to be rooted in reality, and typically have peer reviewed research backing them up. An example of such a claim is "Tai Chi helps old people develop better balance and avoid injury."

Four Stars = Factual. These are ideas that are unavoidable hard facts of life, proven universally true over time. An example of such as statement is "like any other martial art, to develop practical fighting skills Tai Chi must include regular free sparring."

Note: You can get a 4 star rating from a 5 star (Likert Scale) survey. In fact 4 star ratings and Likert scales are two sides of the same coin. When you average Likert results they naturally come out on a scale between 1.0 and 5.0, so that virtually all scores come out to be 1.x to 4.x. The Likert scale then for the martial scale of truth would then be: 1 star = criminal: intentional misinformation. 2 stars = mythical: most credible evidence is against, 3 stars = Hypothetical: helpful for some but lacks evidence, 4 stars = Theoretical: most evidences suggests this is true, 5 stars = Factual: obviously true.

Just Run

I once had a BJJ (Brazillian Jui Jitsu) Apologist suggest to me that I should be grateful that I have had a year of BJJ training, because the rest of my several years of mostly full contact martial arts training had been a huge waste of my life. Considering BJJ's extremely hostile attitude towards other martial arts over the years, I would like to address this extremely misguided notion here and now.

In the course of my security-related professional responsibilities from 2007 to 2017 I was attacked several times on the job and never injured, primarily due to my martial arts training I received in the late 80's through mid 90's. Let's look at what happened, and how using BJJ instead would have changed the outcome.

Veteran

A woman was trying to get into a car while a man who she did not appear to know was yelling sexual insults at her. I approached him asking "do you know her" and he proceeded to throw punches at me for a half of a city block on the side walk before he decided to walk away. I used footwork and head movement from Kickboxing and Aikido to avoid his strikes while staying close enough to him so he would focus on me, so the woman could drive away. I later found out that this attacker was a veteran who was having side effects from back pain medication mixed with alcohol. There were other miscreants observing the situation, but they did not get involved.

Let's look at what BJJ would have had me do instead:

1. When he threw punches at me, I would have dove for his legs and taken him to the ground. 
2. I would have held him in a dominant position in mount, or gone for a submission. 
3. Either way this would have injured him knowing what we found out later about his health problems.
4. I would have had to spend a lot more time explaining to the police what happened, and I would have been at risk legally, with possible assault charges.
5. I would have been let go from my job.
6. When the other miscreants saw me holding him down, they would have most likely moved in to help him. In that area miscreants usually carry improvised weapons for self defense.

BJJ would have turned a nearly harmless situation for me into a deadly multiple armed attackers scenario, and possibly have gotten me killed or put into prison for assault charges (as I would have been outnumbered as far as witnesses were concerned.)

Shoe Ninja

I was once chasing someone through Seattle's Sodo neighborhood who was having a mental health episode and was in serious physical jeopardy, and I was not allowed to lose direct line of sight of this person. While I was running after them on the side walk, a homeless man jumped at me out of the bushes, perhaps trying to protect the person I was following. This specific stretch of sidewalk often had used syringes on it left behind by heroin users, and this homeless man's presence made that even more likely than usual.

The homeless man started by throwing shoes at me, which I defended against with Aikido footwork and martial arts parries. I used the distancing I learned in Aikido and side stepping from Kickboxing to manage how close he could get to me as I side stepped out in the street to get around him. He was trying to physically escalate with me, but I was past him and on my way before he could get close enough to try to strike me. Shoe Ninja, if you ever read this, I have much respect for the force and accuracy with which you can hurl shoes, I never knew that was possible!

Let's look at what BJJ would have had me do instead:

1. I would have ran straight directly into the Shoe Ninja for the fastest possible takedown.
2. I would have held the Shoe Ninja in a dominant position or gone for a submission.
3. The person for whom I had a professional responsibility to protect during a mental health episode would have kept on running beyond my line of sight while I was trying to grapple the Shoe Ninja.
4. Again I would have been out witnessed, I was not popular in that neighborhood and there were other people watching, so the legal outcome for me could have had severe consequences.
5. I would have lost my job.
6. Possible risk for needle exposure was a known-known at that specific location.

With the training I had this situation was almost harmless to me, but BJJ would have put me on the ground with needles, and the person who I was supposed to be protecting would have been completely exposed to the primary threat they were facing.

Surfer Dude

I once asked a pedestrian to stop loitering in bushes on a length of sidewalk I was responsible for. He was a tall, blonde muscular young man, who's response (probably because of his simultaneous stimulant intake) was to march straight at me trying to grab or hit me. I used Kickboxing and weapon sparring footwork to keep a tree between the two of us as I continued to explain the neighborhood rules and expectations to him. He eventually got distracted and I was able to run away without getting manhandled by this guy (or having to go Mike Tyson on him and/or shut him down with leg kicks.)

Let's look at what BJJ would have had me do instead:

1. When he came at me, I would have changed levels for a take down.
2. He was a superior physical specimen to myself, so what kind of dominant position or submission I might have gotten with my two stripe white belt (1 year of casual BJJ training) is highly questionable. 
3. Hopefully I would have gotten a dominant position, but this guy had been to the gym before. The odds are that me being on the ground with this guy would have been really bad for my physical safety.
4. Again the witnesses in this area were hostile towards me, and in this case there were many witnesses. If I had hurt him bad enough to actually stop him from being a threat to me, assault charges would have been likely.
5. I would have lost my job.

In this situation BJJ would have taken a dangerous situation I was facing, and made it far more dangerous and hazardous, by prolonging a physical confrontation with someone who might have been able to really hurt me.

Amateur Pharmacist

One time I spent about two years on a corner in Sodo preventing amateur pharmacists from conducting trade at that location. One day I was speaking to my supervisor out on that corner when one of these amateur pharmacists approached us with hostile questions regarding our presence. I stood up and he got in my face, and next thing I knew I was facing his back, as if he had stumbled past me.

What had happened is this amateur pharmacist had reeled in at me with a huge head butt, because of my Tai Chi Push Hands and Kickboxing experience, I had dodged and stepped around his attack out of pure reflex. I had to explain to my supervisor later at length in his office as to why I continued to lecture someone who was trying to physically attack me (apparently the "responsible" thing to do once he had attacked me was for me to leave.)

Let's look at what BJJ would have had me do instead:

1. When his back was exposed, I would have used a sacrifice take down.
2. I would have nailed side control with this take down.
3. I would have been fired before I before I passed to mount.

In this situation BJJ would have taken a situation where I got a stern verbal warning, into a situation where I would have been instead unemployed all together.

Xanax Aficionado 

One time I was assigned to a neighborhood near numerous medical institutions where anti-anxiety medications were constantly traded illicitly outside, causing various public health problems. Word on the street was some were not pleased by the reduction in trade I had caused with my enthusiastic presence and optimism for the future of the community.

One day a guy walked up to me and pulled out a knife. He more stumbled towards me than walked, and I could see he might not be able to stumble his way down the street least bit make a serious attack at me with the knife, because he was just too benzo-impaired. Using the distancing I learned in Filipino Martial Arts and other weapon sparring, I stayed close enough to retain his attention but too far for him to hit me with a single lunge. 

As he looked down at his knife and back up at me, I decided to use a Jedi mind trick, O' Sensei style. I commanded him that "you have to put that thing away right now, or else you are going to get into a whole lot of trouble!" I pointed my finger directing him to put his knife back into his pocket, and used full body language to demonstrate that I actually expected him to do this. He did, he put the knife back in his pocket and stumbled away.

Let's look at what BJJ would have had me do instead:

1. Impale my jugular vein on his knife as I try to get a take down.

In this situation BJJ would have massively intensified a dangerous situation I was facing and possibly have gotten me killed.

Mariners Fan

 

There was another stretch of a street in Sodo I was responsible for, and much to my dismay there was a man taking apart a sign with a baseball bat one morning before the sun came up. Not known for being a morning person myself, I yelled some words of discouragement to the baseball bat armed man. He turned towards me and started crossing the street.

Using distancing and strategy I learned in Aikido and weapon sparring, I kept him several yards away form me as I backed up and called the rest of my team in for help. The largest of us got in front of him and employed verbal deescalation while I and another got behind the base ball fan to take him down from behind should he try to attack. This was a combination of Aikido strategy and pure security experience, and we managed to deescalate instead of having to disarm.

Let's look at what BJJ would have had me do instead:

1. Intercept this guy in the middle of the street, attempting a take down.
2. I would have been at risk of getting hit with the bat, but I think I could have dove in and grabbed an ankle and put him on the ground with my shoulder before he got me with the bat, but it would have been risky.
3. Diving in on the pavement like that would have been risky also, because asphalt is not a mat.
4. Holding up traffic on a busy street before the sun comes up is dangerous also, we could have easily been hit by a large vehicle while we tussled.
5. There are legal consequences for getting in avoidable fights that hold up traffic.
6. I would have been fired.

BJJ would again have taken a dangerous situation and made it far more dangerous.

"Just Run"

I can already hear the BJJ apologist's response that I should have "just run" in all of the above situations. In every one of these situations I had a professional obligation to NOT run, there was property and people who needed to be protected, and I was being paid to protect them. But even off the clock I have had situations where I had elderly or children with me near dangerous individuals who were not fit enough to escape without my protection! 

If "just running" is a core strategy in BJJ, then they need to train and spar with running techniques, or else they need to stop claiming to be experts in running away. Most BJJ schools have the mats needed for obstacle training (parkour), and falling practiced in BJJ does have some overlap with obstacle training. However, the fact is the only martial art I know of that includes obstacle training and running away is Ninjitsu, so unless BJJ ups their game and adds some kind of Parkour rules to the IBJJF rule set, I find these BJJ claims of escape proficiency extremely problematic.

Tres Espadas Gear Shift

 We have had a hard time describing what "Tres Espadas" is over the years. The best definition has been "a club for weapon free sparring." Phil Gribbin was clearly the founder of the club. As time went on I was more and more involved with the club. Here I will explain some differences Phil and I had now that we've had time to mourn his death, and what these differences may mean for the future of Tres Espadas.

First though I want to point out that though between the two of us we had studied weapon technique from several experts in several styles, in 2010 none of those experts wanted to do what Phil wanted to do: full contact free sparring with weapons - no calling kill shots, no stopping to listen to judge's opinions, no wasting the precious sparring time that you have with frequent formalities, no spending two thirds of the round getting back into position before resuming sparring. Phil saw what the Dog Brothers were doing, and he wanted to make that safer and more casual so a wider range of friends could participate.

For Phil the entertainment value of watching people fight with weapons was more important than any specific technique being mastered. Phil was skilled at fighting with weapons as he demonstrated many times, but it was more important for him that people had fun. Because of this, it was important to Phil that the weapons look like weapons. Phil believed this had the added benefit of making the fighter react to attacks more as if that fighter was being attacked by a real weapon, but the main reason for the LARP weapons was for the spectacle.

I have had a life long passion for both games and martial arts since I was a young teenager. I have never been comfortable mixing the two together, and I am known to be very uncomfortable around people who are LARPing. The biggest disagreement Phil and I had was over sparring equipment - I wanted it to look like martial arts training gear, but Phil didn't want the interference of martial arts organizations that might attract. Phil won primarily because most of the safety gear that was high quality enough to spar with full contact and without significant regular injury was high end LARP gear.

At first most of the Tres Espadas participants were people with martial arts backgrounds from either traditional Asian martial arts, combat sports, or from people used to fighting in the SCA. At that time it was critical for Tres Espadas to NOT have a curriculum, because it was a research laboratory and we wanted as little bias as possible messing with this style vs. style experiment. Beyond that, Phil was very interested in what effect the shape and reach of weapons would have for different combinations of weapons being used against each other.

But it we had a number of newbies who wanted to do Tres Espadas without having significant previous martial arts experience. At this point I started to ask Phil some very hard questions. His vision, when we reduced it down to the very core, was the Gladiatorial Arenas of ancient Rome. When I accused Phil of essentially wanting to throw newbies to the wolves, he responded "Yes, like Christians to the Lions... Weapon fighting is natural, pain will teach them what not to do."

But it wasn't long before newbies were insisting we teach them something about technique. Phil opened his personal library, a collection of most of the Cold Steel instructional videos, and notes about the weapon technique from our previous training in Filipino and Chinese martial arts. We did not hold lineage in any system, and we had become convinced that any such association or lineage would actually impair the progress of Tres Espadas because of the politics that are inevitably involved in most martial arts organizations.  

Unlike Phil most newbies didn't have the appetite to watch dozens of hours of instruction and pouring over old hand written notes over and over again. This is when we came up with the Tres Espadas badge system: each badge was a crash course in how to use each major type of weapon in Tres Espadas. We tried to keep the badges short enough to be completed in one day, and we tried to reduce the amount of techniques in the badges to only the most useful techniques for free sparring (not all techniques that work in stop and go sparring work well in free sparring, and most weapon martial arts in our area at the time did only did stop and go sparring if they sparred at all.)

The badge system however was still too time consuming, and beginners were not getting up to speed fast enough. Also without a uniform - and we were most decidedly against uniforms - where would the badges even go? To this day in the Tres Espadas supplies there are unused little weapon badges meant to go on martial arts uniforms, which we never did figure out how to use. Because of all of this, plus safety concerns for newbies, we beefed up the Tres Espadas orientation to include enough basic weapon technique that newbies would have some basic idea of how to protect themselves in a free sparring round.

And just as we were perfecting that, Phil died. A few years before Phil died, we were approached by real martial arts experts (Lamont Glass of the Black Bird Training Group and Belton Lubas of Warrior's Strength Martial Arts) who were putting together a Dog Brothers style gathering here in Western Washington, to be called the Pacific North West Warrior Tipon Tipon (or Tipon.) Over time it has proven itself to be a gentler, kinder, more newbie friendly gathering than what you typically see at Dog Brothers, and they intentionally attracted the widest variety of martial artists they can at this local Tipon. We considered this project to be extraordinarily important, and we did all we could to get the word out for the first one, but we were not convinced we should participate. One of them told us that they needed a wide variety of opponents and that we should come, even if we didn't think we were "good enough." We didn't make it that first year, and the second year Phil and I showed up as spectators. After Phil's death I participated in the 3rd year, and there has been Tres Espadas participation in most of those Tipons since.

It turns out that they were right about what we had to offer to the Tipon, even though none of us claim to be martial arts masters. But this had a very significant impact on Tres Espadas, which is it forced us to have two separate sets of safety gear: fencing helmets for fighting at Tipons, versus the plastic face shield karate helmets that wouldn't be too hard on the expensive LARP weapons (because the fencing masks literally grate the latex skin of the LARP weapons.)

Up until Phil's death, two gear problems haunted Tres Espadas after all of our research and financial investment into sparring gear. First, we never had neck protection that we felt was adequate - the longer the weapon - for reasons we don't completely understand - the more likely it is to end up in your opponent's throat, regardless of your intentions. Second, we could never get any weapons LARP gear manufacturer to make a sword short enough for us to use as a machete while sparring. This vexed Phil, who was so into machetes that when he finalized the Tres Espadas logo, he modeled the weapons on the logo on machetes produced by Cold Steel (a gladius representing the Gladiatorial Arenas and the democratic nature of Tres Espadas, a Kukri representing the eastern martial arts, and a pirate cutlass, representing a classic machete that has been slightly more weaponized, and reflecting the pirate-like rejection of authority that Tres Espadas is based on.) This forced us to do things we didn't want to do, such as having a "sword badge" instead of a "machete badge," because we just didn't have any sparring machetes.

At the last Tipon (years after Phil's death,) the famous Blood and Iron Martial Arts school from British Columbia introduced Tres Espadas members to a new brand of sparring weapon, Nihonzashi. Nihonzashi had been producing sparring weapons for traditional Japanese sword fighting arts to be able to spar with, which would have a similar heft to a real sword. If you swing a Nihonzashi sparring katana around, it really feels like you are swinging a katana or boken around rather than some hollow bamboo toy. But what Blood and Iron had brought was western Long Swords that Nihonzashi recently started to manufacture for HEMA type groups.

Upon further investigation, we discovered Nihozashi manufactured a Wakizashi. In theory, this would be the perfect sparring machete - it would look like a martial arts training weapon instead of a LARP weapon, but instead handle like a sword, and not like a flimsy fiberglass and latex sword, but like a bokken or steel sword. Funds were tight, and soon the pandemic shut down most martial arts practice in our area. But that question remained: was the Nihonzashi sparring wakizashi the holy grail for Tres Espadas?

Then it was my birthday, so I ordered a pair. Our hardest padded sparring sticks - the Dog Brothers issued super-hard action flex - were falling apart after almost a decade of abuse and we needed replacements. We recently tested the Nihonzashi Wakizashi:

First, swinging them the wakizashi is considerably more taxing than anything else we spar with. This is generally a good thing, because though not recognized outside of our club, inside of Tres Espadas it is well understood that our wrist and hand conditioning is not up to par with many other weapon fighters who spend a lot more time in drills and katas than we do strengthening their lower arms and grip. This will make sparing itself such a conditioning exercise, as well as help keep us honest about our ability to wield real metal weapons, and our need for appropriate conditioning to wield such weapons.

Second, they are about as painful as the Dog Brothers issue super hard action flex - they don't get the same speed, momentum, and whipping effect, but the strikes have more weight behind them. This again is basically good news - Tres Espadas was never meant to be a stick fighting club - Tres Espadas was always supposed to be about knifes, machetes, hatchets and spears, the weapons of survival that you might actually have to use some day. The extra heft is also more like a randomly obtained improvised weapon - rather than like a well crafted baton or staff - improvised weapons being our main practical justification for training weapons in today's pre-apocalyptic world.

Third they don't flex. Your parries and blocks actually work. This would be a first for a Tres Espadas sparring weapon. Here's what this means for the future of the club, assuming that these weapons will continue to be popular with the club members: 

1. Good bye LARP gear. No more frivolous Calimacil, no more pricey Karate helmets with plastic face shields. We will keep and use the ones we have, but we probably won't replace them as they expire.
2. Most of the time you will be sparring with a Fencing mask, because the actionflex staff, Nihonzashi wakizashi and Cold Steel rubber Tanto all work well with the Fencing mask and will be our most common sparring weapons.
3. This means that in order to own your own head gear, you don't have to buy two helmets, just the least expensive one - the fencing masks.
4. The more people own their own head gear, the more hygienic Tres Espadas becomes, as sharing helmets is definitely the least sanitary thing we do at the club.
5. This means that functionally, there may be in the future a sort of Tres Espadas uniform, namely, the fencing mask itself.
6. This means Tres Espadas members may finally have a place to put their badges - on the neck guard of their fencing mask!

This is all tentative, depending on what club members decide after the pandemic as time goes forward. I would point out that this fits the vision of what Phil had in mind: a club that would continue to evolve to develop the best practices and gear set for weapon free sparring. The change is that it is probably going in more of a martial arts aesthetic direction than a LARP aesthetic direction.

Chen Ziqiang vs Xu Xiaodong

I have heard that Tai Chi master Chen Ziqiang (as a coach) has had a standing challenge against MMA fighter (and fake master exposer) Xu Xiaodong for YEARS now. The challenge is that Chen Ziqiang has a team of fighters, any one of which is eager to fight Xu Xiaodong. Below is the evidence why I think this challenge exists and why I think the story is credible. But before I go on, I just want to say that I am a huge fan of both of these men, as they are both very important voices in the global Chinese Martial Arts community when it comes to advocating for the practice of sparring. They have both dedicated their lives to practicing martial arts in the most legitimate way they could.

If you don't know already, Xu Xiaodong is a MMA fighter who exposes delusional martial arts masters the old fashioned way, by challenging them to fights:

Because of the overlap with Chinese Yoga (chi kung,) Tai Chi has the worst reputation for producing people who think they can fight, but who can't. Xu Xiaodong has beat up some (so-called) Tai Chi masters over this.

However Tai Chi is just as legitimate of a martial art as Karate if you practice a complete form of Tai Chi that does more than line dancing and yoga and has actual sparring in it. Right now the most respected Tai Chi master in the world is the head coach at the birthplace of Tai Chi (Chen Village,) Chen Ziqiang. Chen Ziqiang is known for his clinch skills, and there are various YouTube videos of his fights and doing his Tai Chi wrestling against other Tai Chi fighters.

So with Xu Xiaodong berating Tai Chi, and Chen Ziqiang being the foremost defender of Tai Chi, it makes sense that Ziqiang made this challenge. Because this claim was printed in a magazine, I am going to have to here show some pictures from that magazine, which show why I was interested in this particular issue of the magazine, and where it describes this challenges explicitly. So this is the cover of the magazine I refer to:

When I thumbed through the magazine at Barnes and Noble, I noticed something unique about this issue, which is it had back to back articles from the Choy Li Fut/Tai Chi organization I originally learned Tai Chi from (Doc Fai Wong's organization,) next to an article from the Tai Chi celebrity I am most interested in meeting in the future, Chen Ziqiang (the article itself written by a different Choy Li Fut organization.) Here's the table of contents:

Here's the front page of the 4 Tenets of Tai Chi article by people from Doc Fai Wong's organization (totally unrelated to this challenge other than some wonder if people from this organization spar enough, this is just illustrating part why I was personally so interested in this issue):

And the article immediately after that was this Chen Ziqiang one:

Now this was the article I had the highest expectations for, and to be frank I was disappointed - Chen Ziqiang actually just showed off a few of the most generic applications of Tai Chi known, and they weren't even Chen style specific, almost like an explanation of how to apply the techniques shown in the Doc Fai Wong article before.

But that article ends with a huge bang. Chen Ziqiang mentions Xu Xiaodong, and explains that there are huge problems in the Chinese Martial Arts from people not sparring enough. He goes on to explain that Xu Xiadong is helping to illustrate this problem. But then Chen Ziqiang criticizes Xu Xiadong:

Yes, that is indeed a "Choy Lee Fut: Chile" shirt that guy is wearing. Anyhow that paragraph on the left quotes Chen Ziqiang as saying word for word:

...the situation that I am going to tell you happened while I was in Europe. I arranged four of my students of all body sizes, some of them tall heavier, short, or lighter, to pay a visit to Xu Xiaodong. I offered Xu to pick any of them and test his sparring skills under any rules. But he refused to choose and spar with any of my students. A hundred percent of the people who Xu chooses to fight are the ones he can confidently defeat. So, he uses this kind of arrangement to show off his skills and make his declarations. There were three reporters who accompanied my students on their visit to Xu and recorded the whole interaction on video. Since Xu could not turn this situation to his own advantage, he got scared and even called the police. When the police arrived, he asked the police to take away my students. The police refused to take my students away, because the were not doing anything wrong. The police even asked Xu that if he was such a good fighter why he still needed their protection...

This amounts to a standing challenge to Xu Xiadong from the Chen Village (where Chen Ziqiang is the head coach.) The Chen Villiage's main export is Tai Chi training, and they are known for these incredibly long training days, something like you would expect from a Muay Thai camp in Thailand. Some have suggested training up to 12 hours a day... starting off with a long run, then standing mediation practice, then form practice. That would only get you to about 4 hours... apparently the rest of the day varies from day to day and includes various weapons training, conditioning, and various forms of push hands and sparring. Consider what real traditional Tai Chi sparring looks like in the first place:

Though Tai Chi people are known for using San Shou as a type of competition and the San Shou two-man forms in Tai Chi actually predate the San Shou tournament rule set, what you see above is more like no-Gi Enshin with unlimited clinch time. After reading accounts of what Sumo and Mongolian Wrestling were like in the ancient empires they originated in, I suspect that this is the rule set most Asian martial arts sparring originates from: the goal is to take down the opponent while you remain standing, no strikes to the head allowed.

But Chen Ziqiang frequently travels the world helping to spread Chen Tai Chi far and wide. He himself has fought with San Shou rules. He fully understands the difference between MMA and San Shou, and if Chen Ziqiang says he has students who will fight under any rule set, this tells me that they are sparring and training several different ways in the Chen Villiage. Maybe that would explain this:

There Chen Village Taijiquan Denver states "The upcoming generation of young masters at the village, whom we are trying to bring to the US MMA scene." Why hasn't Xu Xiaodong given Chen Village a reality check if all Tai Chi fighters are as useless as Xu says they are?

Racism vs Prejudice

Racism and Racial Prejudice in today's English are two totally different things. I keep having to explain this to people over and over and over again. One of the main purposes of this blog is for me to have links to my explanations instead of having to repeat myself over and over.

When I was living in the Columbia City neighborhood of Seattle, some of the young black children ages 10 to 13 affectionately called me their "Racist Dad." Them not being my children, I kept them at arms length. If I wasn't 100% sure their mothers knew they were at my place they were not allowed inside, but we had many frank conversations through the screen door of the door of my apartment - or if I wasn't answering the door that day - through the screen of the window closest to my computer.

Topics included largely sex questions. Why won't the Muslim girls at school give hugs? Is it good to watch Hentai? How old should I be when I have my first girlfriend? How old should I be when I have sex? (Hentai: ask your mom. Muslims: there are real cultural differences that need to be respected if we want to have nice things. Everything else: dating is for college, not high school, because in high school you aren't adequately empowered to make your own decisions yet, so it's not really dating, just making dating-like mistakes. This is WA, everyone goes to college, ideally community college.)

At this same time I had an altercation with a Neo Nazi at a local clothing store, who was trying to cut in line, who became upset with me when I didn't back him as a fellow white man. While he was stink eyeing me in the back of the line, I accidentally let the word "boy" slip out of my mouth while we were arguing, and like most of my altercations I have been in I solved this problem with strategy and footwork. The end result was I almost ran him over with my car as he was trying to follow me out of the parking lot on his old broken BMX (I had already ascertained he must have recently been released from prison based on his appearance, body language and lack of social resilience.) This was not my proudest moment when it comes to martial arts.

At the time I was only recently retired from left-wing activism with Seattle Indymedia. So the next time the black kids wanted to know if "Racist Dad" was there, I said "common guys, why are you always calling me Racist? Is it my haircut? What did I do? You know my kids, they are half Chinese, I can't be the most racist person you have met!"

They gave me this look like "you need to learn to be cool white boy" and explained "you need to see the Racist Cat." It didn't take them long for them to convince me I had NO idea of what they were talking about when they said "Racist":

Racism - to them - was a total ignorance around ethnicity, and a pure focus on skin tone preference. Beyond that they believed it had to do with a deep part of the primitive brain - it was a base instinct that couldn't be helped. To them, someone being overtly racist wasn't an insult - it was just being mammalian. This is part of why they were coming to me with tans-cultural questions around Muslims and Hentai, because they were running into questions about race that didn't make sense to their preadolescent world view.

And they were calling me Racist because I was White. They couldn't very well call me the N-word, could they? White people are notoriously not-offended by the most sincere hisses of "cracker," "honkey," "white trash," "wigger," "Opie," or even "Alabama." The only thing that REALLY offends white people is being called racist because they are white. Therefore, the best racist term to use against whites IS "racist", what I call "spelling 'racist' with at 'w', W-H-I-T-E."

In an era where people are calling for "anti-racism" instead of "multiculturalism", appealing to individual organizations for reparations instead when democracy has not delivered at the government level, it is really important for people to understand the difference between racism and racial prejudice. The word racism CAN mean a hundred different things in today's world, but if we are going to communicate with others in any way that makes sense, we have to use the word in the most common way that it is used. That way is this: racism means the negative side effects (usually mistreatment from other human beings) on the planet Earth from not being born white.

A "racist black man" then is not a black man who is prejudice against white people, but a black man who is prejudice against people for NOT BEING WHITE:

What then is discrimination against white people? That is racial prejudice. Racial prejudice can be had by anyone of any race against anyone of any race for being whatever race they are. If you are "ashamed to be white," you are being racially prejudiced against yourself. If you are a black person hating on an Asian for being Asian, you are being racially prejudice. If you are a black person hating on an Asian for not being White, then you are expressing racism.

We don't live in a fair world, and it is not advantageous to think that we do. Our modern world is built on a backbone of European Colonialism. Most countries on Earth have the political boundaries they do because some white dude said it should be that way. This is not because most of the Earth is white people, the world is over 50% Asian. This is because the economically globalized world as we know it today was established by a succession of European Empires. The world is a better place for it, but this process was not without its negative consequences - all progress has a shadow of unforeseen consequences that becomes the next generation's challenges to overcome. A global power structure that prefers whites was a very real thing, and to this day you are better off being born white than being born any other race.

When we talk about racism in today's world, it's this white vs everyone else dynamic that is being referred to.  Whites don't experience racism unless you are using the word racism in a very informal way that is ONLY slang for racial prejudice. Yes, people can be racially prejudice against Whites, and in the part of Columbia City where I lived I was in the minority as a white person. 

Now, according to my taxonomy here "anti-racist" could be considered "anti-white." And what the workplace reparations are asking for is for white workers to accept less pay than non-white workers, in order for the organization to be able to afford higher wages for non-white workers. To be clear, the vast majority of my friends who are not white are against that when it is spelled out clearly, but I myself personally support it. And that is where I am guilty of almost genocidal racism.

I once embraced the corporate lifestyle, occasionally working such long hours that I would sleep in my employers emergency shelter instead of going home to sleep, until I was fired for in retaliation against a union I helped to establish. When I was fired I had a chance to see what the lifestyle had done to my family and my own body - and it was not good. When I realized my children's health had been negatively impacted by my career choices, that was it, I snapped, and I have only worked on call or part time positions ever since. We have to live our lives, enjoy the time God has given us, be the people who were were born to be, not spend every waking hour helping someone else get richer. The way I do that is working part time.

With advanced training and competency in management and leadership, there is always pressure for me to do more for any organization I work for. However that is the cost of having me as an employee, you get my talent, but it's part time, and you will simply have to endure your lust for that time which you can not have. One of the most important things I do to maintain my lifestyle is to always be training my next supervisor, and to always be helping my current supervisor to be the best they can, helping them with their long term career goals whenever possible (within my established limitations.)

So guess what if you aren't white? I trained my female, Asian, LGBT replacement at that corporate style job I was fired from. I spent about six months getting her better at my job than I was, sensing already that the lifestyle was not working for me. Time after time my coworkers have since been trained by me to lead me, and then become my leader. And in today's world, non-whites have an advantage to getting promoted, and so that means I am more likely to help a non-white or non-male work their way up. 

So yes, I use non-whites as cannon fodder to protect my privileged lifestyle, guilty as charged. I am not proud of it, but it's not the 1860's anymore and you can't rape the willing. This is mostly all due to institutional forces beyond my control. Meanwhile I love other cultures and the advantages of living in a multicultural environment. 

There you have it: racism is ALMOST BY DEFINITION "institutional," where as racial prejudice is a personal feeling an individual has. Racism is the fall out from European colonization, where as racial prejudice is unfair stereotyping based on ethnicity. Racism and prejudice are not the same thing, and it is time to start using your big boy words.