Soooo much lineage in martial arts. In most cases it is an imitation of Chinese Martial Arts lineage ("my teacher's teacher's teacher trained under Bruce Lee") or tracing the arts roots back to its Chinese Martial Arts lineage ("Karate originally meant Chinese hand and is probably based on Crane Kung Fu.") And in Chinese Martial Arts, 90% of the time the goal is to do one thing and one thing only: to demonstrate how that style of Martial Arts was derived at the Shoulin Temple.
(This can lead to extremely severe errors in deciding how to train. For example many people decide to train in Wing Chun to try to be like Bruce Lee, tracing Lee's lineage back to Wing Chun master Yip Man. The problem is Bruce Lee hated Wing Chun, the vast majority of his criticisms of Traditional Martial Arts (TMA) were based on his own experiences in Wing Chun. He had much nicer things to say about other TMA like Choy Li Fut. If you want to be like Bruce Lee, the one thing you would never want to do is Wing Chun.)
BUT what was so great about the Shoulin Temple? It was that so many different people went there from around China to seek asylum, and so many of those were mercenaries and soldiers, and because they had time on their hands to refine their arts, evolve their arts, and to spar it out. In other words who did the Shoulin trace their lineages to? They traced their lineage to themselves for being an awesome fight club.
It really is not your lineage that matters. It is the community of people you train with. All around the world right now the martial arts masters of tomorrow are being created in MMA clubs and other serious martial communities full of people willing to spar and improve their hands on ability. Your sparring partners and you coaching each other, that is being your generation's version of The Shoulin Temple.
But didn't the Shoulin have extraordinary powers? Lots of fight club type schools experiment with Yoga and TMA type training. Many of them cross train in weapon martial arts, and some of them even spar with weapons. Compared to TMA schools that don't do this, they have extraordinary powers.
The Summit BJJ club was originally founded as a sort of co-op, and still has the most affordable BJJ training in the area. When they started, the most advanced student they had was a purple belt. When I started the most advanced student was a single brown belt and a few purple belts. I was there when the first student was awarded his black belt and a few of the other members of the club got their brown belts. Now the club has multiple black belts. WHY did their skill improve so much? Because they got together and trained four times a week for several years, and because they had the type of community they needed to pull that off.
At Tres Espadas our contempt for lineage is a core part of our club's ethos. Tres Espadas was founded by rogue students who broke away from Doc Fai Wong's kung fu system because we decided that we didn't share the same vision. They wanted fitness, they wanted to make people better. The first thing they taught was a solid front kick. We wanted to "feed Christians to lions" in the ancient Roman gladiatorial arenas. The first thing our club members would know is how to knife fight. Over the years we have accumulated a lot more hands on actionable Weapon Martial Arts knowledge through sparring than we would have ever learned studying the endless number of weapon forms in Doc Fai Wong's system.
Don't wait for a master to come along and grant you martial arts abilities. Find or found a like minded community willing to train and spar in order to pursue the abilities you seek!
Here I will generally describe what people think "chi" (aka "ki" aka "qi") is, then what I think it is, and then my experience with its limitations as far as martial arts is concerned. In general there are three main explanations of chi: Religious, Alternative Medicine, and Practical.
1.Religious is "chi as life force":
When someone says "chi is the life force in every living thing" that means almost the same thing as the "soul" of any living thing, and is one baby step away from talking about the afterlife or animism.
"No touch" martial arts techniques called "Chi" could be the result of intentional or unintentional psychophysical contitioning from poor martial arts instruction. See my post on Psychic Martial Arts.
When you encounter someone with cult like devotion to chi, you are talking to someone who views chi from a religious perspective.
2. Alternative medicine is where chi theory overlaps with kundalini theory in yoga:
Supposedly there is some kind of energy in the body which you can train to enhance your physical performance.
Some describe this as a some type of bioelectic power running through your nervous system, like an electric eel.
In the very worst cases people think they can use chi to resist martial arts attacks or light stuff on fire with their bare hands.
I first saw this documented in the series "Ring of Fire: An Indonesian Oddesy" (1988), in Part 3: "East of Krakatoa".
3. Practical is seeing chi as something all people have and most athletes develop without necessarily using he word "chi" for it:
Tai Chi intentionally focuses on good posture and physical balance. Doing Tai Chi standing mediation makes you focus on how your spine is aligned with gravity and can be painful if you do not. Forms force you to practice good blance in a similar way, and even have moves that require you to practice balancing on one leg. Stationary push hands is litterally a balance drill with resistance. Moving step push hands is focused sparring concentrating on maintaining and disrupting balance. IT IS NO SUPRISE THEN THAT THE PEER REVIEWED LITERATURE RECOMMENDS TAI CHI TRAINING FOR INJURY PREVENTION (specifically because of posture control and falling prevention) IN OLDER ADLUTS: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1724328/pdf/v035p00148.pdf If we consider how much perfect posture can improve the maximum weight of a squat or deadlift, a combination of good posture and balance could explain the phenomenon the internal martial arts call "chi."
When I discussed chi with BJJ black belt (a purple belt at the time) and Wu Tai Chi lineage master Dmitri Gak, he thought that it chi was simply developing all the small connective muscles between the major muscle groups, especially stabilizer muscles.
The literal translation of "chi" is "air" or "breath" so that any time in athletics when we consciously focus on our breathing, that could be seen as "chi." When I hear BJJ black belts talk about developing a superior sense of balance by way of focusing on their breathing, I am hearing a practical view of "chi."
Some traditional martial arts see chi as "mental focus," or visualizing in your mind what you want your body to do, and/or bringing your mind and body together as one in the moment to be able to react without hesitation. The same concepts exist in western sports psychology.
Some see chi as that secret sauce, the combination of body structure, adrenaline, and emergency stores of chemicals pumping into muscles and the nervous system that allow people to do extraordinary things in emergencies.
Others see chi as type of sensitivity that can be trained by being aware of how your body feels, and by trying to "feel" the intentions of the opponent when you are in contact with them.
None of these practical views on chi excuse the participant from training to learn martial arts technique and sparring, but they do suggest that sparring itself could be a chi-enhancing exercise. These practical views of chi are compatible with each other. I have done Tai Chi standing meditation, the ultimate chi-building exercise, for 30 minutes every day since 2004. I find I am much less likely to get injured the rest of the day after doing it than before doing it. I have also noticed people doing this kind of training continuing to train in full contact martial arts later in life than their peers - and I myself am an example of that, as I did my first full contact martial arts in the late 80's (though I have not trained continuously that entire time.)
In the case of stationary push hands (a blance resistance drill) competition, people who do standing meditation are generally a lot better at stationary push hands than people who don't do standing mediation. I saw this play out at a Tiger Balm Internationals in the early 2000's, and after the push hands competition it was clear that the people who were better at it had about as much experience doing those drills as everyone else, but they also did their standing mediation daily. This is what stationary push hands drill competition looks like:
However, stationary push hands drills-with-resistance should not be confused with push-hands sparring, which is basically no-gi Chinese wrestling, not entirely unlike Sumo, where the objectives are to throw your opponent on the ground or out of the ring:
In 2006 I managed to get myself invited to an in-house push hands tournament for the Wudang Dan Pai, an older form of Tai Chi that is historically parallel to Chen style. WDP teachers train students to fight in Chinese Kickboxing and push hands sparring. I had done the kick boxing side of Tai Chi before, but I hadn't seen the no-gi Chinese wrestling push hands before. The first guy I went up against had a very similar back ground to me, had done some Tai Chi and some kickboxing. I used a lot of "parting the horses mane" type of trips, and beat him by a comfortable margin, 10 to 7. But the second trash talking wrestler had a significant weight advantage on me, had a wider range of grappling experience than me at the time, and had more experience in this type of push hands. I was brutally slammed on the ground several times, and by the end was just keeping my balance to prevent that from happening, which made it easier for him to push me out of the ring... second worst beating of my life, 0 to 10. He was finally beat in the final bout by someone who weighed slightly less than him but had a lot more reach.
In full contact weapon fighting I have found that relaxing before the sparring makes the whole experience a lot less exhausting and more enjoyable. HOWEVER one time I took this too far, and did standing mediation, yang forms, and deep stretching right before taking on a very-worthy opponent. THIS "CHI TRAINING" IS HOW THE NAGINATA KNOCK OUT HAPPENED:
It can feel nice to get your chi flowing. Your mind relaxes so that you can appreciate life, smell the roses and listen to the birds chirp. HOWEVER I am telling you THAT is the LAST thing you want to do in combat. You WANT your adrenaline going, you NEED your mind to suddenly become hyper vigilant... it's NOT SUPPOSED TO BE COMFORTABLE, IT'S A FIGHT!
However Chi training helped me learn to fight as it improved my mental focus and sense of balance. I have used PRACTICAL Chi training to help myself and others to be better at fighting. Though I am generally skeptical of the above religous and alternative medicine views of what chi is, I generally agree with the practical theories of what chi is.
In Tai Chi, there are 13 main types of movement called the Eight Gates and Five Steps. This is a type of categorization that is used to analyze moves in a fight. Here I will explain what they are and how they apply to combat sports. Tai Chi is more focused on clinching than other ranges of fighting, so these movement styles are usually presented from that perspective.
The Eight Gates are elements of martial arts techniques:
"Ward Off" is posture, especially keeping the opponent at the right distance from your body for what you want to do. It is also "having a good fighting stance." Keeping your hands up is good "Ward Off" in boxing. One example from grappling is "framing" when you are on the bottom and you are trying to avoid someone getting decent side control on you.
"Press" is staying on the opponent - the same concept as "being sticky" - keeping in contact with the opponent so they can't get out of range. In MMA this could be grabbing someone in a Thai clinch to avoid their kicks. In boxing it could be continuously jabbing to judge distance and keep pressure on the opponent.
"Yield" is getting out of the way. When someone pushes at you too hard, you can unbalance them by moving or turning in such a way that they miss most or all of your body. In boxing this could be bobbing and weaving. In grappling if someone is completely overpowering you in the clinch, and you realize you will soon be thrown, and you manage instead to pull guard for a more neutral potion on the ground, this would be another example of yielding movement. In the clinch, if you briefly turn away from your opponent in order to get a Russian tie arm bar, this is actually be categorized as a "roll back", an arm bar as a result of a yield.
"Push" is an attack that accelerates AFTER contact is made with the opponent. In boxing simply shoving the other boxer would be a push. In grappling, going from guard to a "hip bump" to get into full mount is an example of a pushing attack.
"Pluck" is to unbalance an opponent by pulling on them. In Muay Thai if you pull someone with an over hook or under hook in order to sweep them, this is an example of plucking. In grappling most ankle picks are examples of plucks.
"Strike" (or "Elbow") is opposite of Push, it is an attack that fully accelerates before it makes contact with the opponent. Most punches, kicks, knees, elbows etc. are strikes. In grappling striking movement is usually forbidden, but in MMA raining down elbows in mount would be an excellent example of strike.
"Bump" (or "Shoulder") is an attack that begins to accelerate before it makes contact with the target, but tries to keep going at the same speed after it makes contact with the target. In Tai Chi this is a shoulder check, not entirely unlike what you see in some team sports like American Football. In kick boxing a "push kick" intended to knock the opponent back is a good example of a bump. Using a Judo-type foot sweep in grappling, which is moving quickly before it makes contact with the targets leg, and is supposed to keep on moving after it makes contact, is another example of bump movement.
"Split" is moving the opponent's body into two different directions, like blocking the back of their leg with your knee, and then pushing them over your knee... or standing arm bars. In Muay Thai a clinch sweep that aims to make the target's upper body go in a different direction than their lower body could be considered splitting. Virtually all arm bars in submission grappling would be considered splitting in Tai Chi. A "snap double" take down where your head goes forward into their abdomen while your hands pull on the back of their knees is another example of splitting.
The Five Steps are working for position:
"Rooting" is being able to resist moving when someone is trying to move you, for example when someone tries to shove you and then nothing happens and you hold your ground with your feet not moving significantly, this is rooting. Keeping your knees bent in boxing so that you don't get knocked around easily by the force of oncoming punches is good rooting. In grappling, if you have a low mount, and you put your feet in the prayer position to make it difficult for the opponent to throw you off of them, this is an example of rooting.
"Forward step" is moving towards your opponent just like in boxing. In grappling this could be transitioning from a low mount to a high mount.
"Backwards step" is moving away from your opponent, as footwork would normally allow in stand up fighting. On the ground, a back door escape from mount would be an example of backwards step.
"Left step" is moving to your left around the opponent, as footwork normally allows in stand up fighting. On the ground, going from side control with your right side closer to your opponent's head to full mount would be an example of step left step.
"Right step" is moving to your right around the opponent, as footwork normally allows in stand up fighting. On the ground, going from side control with your left side closer to your opponent's head to full mount would be an example of step right step.
Tai Chi is usually cross trained (with other Kung Fu styles,) and I think part of why is because Tai Chi by way of this above theory begs the analysis of other styles. And as you have guessed by now I think the best way for Tai Chi people to learn more about this kind of movement is to cross train in kick boxing or MMA.
Sparring is the most important aspect of any martial art. Every martial arts training session should include a significant amount of sparring. When this does not happen, it's time to start cutting out some of that other stuff that is cutting into sparring time. What should be cut out to make sparring time: calisthenics, drills, warm ups, weight lifting, cardio, forms, kata? That depends on what works for your style, you have to prioritize, and sparring must have top priority.
But this is really about katas and forms isn't it, don't you have Bruce Lee style chip on your shoulder about forms? Not at all, unless kata/forms attempt to substitute for sparring. If I had to draw the line somewhere, I would say that students should be sparring before they finish learning their first kata or form, because they can't truly understand the moves in the form without sparring. If you are getting into a second kata or form and still no sparring, then you are dangerously close to practicing performance arts instead of martial arts.
And I am a critic of Bruce Lee, as a former Choy Lay Fut practitioner I have no end of bad things to say about that disgruntled Wing Chun student... but the value of Bruce Lee's ideas can only be manifested in the same way other martial arts ideas can be manifested, and that is through sparring:
But the really big problem I have had with Bruce Lee is his advocating of leading in with his strong side, and doing lots of back fists like in kumite point fighting... I feel like he was influenced by that element in his day, and more importantly his "Art of Jeet Kune Do" was used to justify that nonsense almost destroying the martial arts scene in the USA.
BUT Bruce Lee didn't advocate kumite point fighting, he advocated serious sparring, MMA to be specific. To be real sparring (and not fencing) sparring must be:
Free sparring - not stop and go, not talking about good hits, no judges calling points, no interruptions except for safety reasons, no preset attacks, no preset defenses.
Safe - the purpose of sparring is to train, so that if you accidentally injure your opponent so they can't spar anymore, you have impaired your own training. In sparring you need to keep your opponent safe, opposite of a fight.
Real sparring is then "safe contact sparring." But your martial arts moves are too deadly to spar with? One of the best martial arts when it comes to dedicated sparring time in every class is BJJ, and there are NO more dangerous moves than limb destruction and deadly chokes, which is exactly the attacks they focus on training in.
But what about eye gouging? The basic Shoulin straight attack to the face is a palm strike combined with an eye rake, called a Tiger Claw. The style that incorporates this perhaps the most is Hun Gar, and they are known for their brawling and sparring. Here they are doing focused sparring with Tiger Claws:
Even the deadly Ninja can spar:
Deadly weapons? Spar:
Traditional weapon martial arts without any sparring tradition like Archery? Spar:
But what if you are doing McDojo karate fighting or no sparring at all, isn't it best for the ideologically impaired to simply never spar at all? If these two can spar, so can you:
As rare as serious Tai Chi may be, even serious Tai Chi people spar:
I once attended a BJJ club were some of the senior members went rock climbing together, and considered it relevant BJJ conditioning. They even named their club after the practice, but they didn't make people climb a rock climbing wall in BJJ class. You would have had to attend the club for a while before getting invited to go rock climbing with them. Sparring for all students came a long time before this club's signature conditioning technique. Consider that before asking students to learn two katas before doing any contact free sparring - is your club there to teach conditioning, or is it there to teach martial arts?
Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) is "God's gift" to Traditional Martial Arts (TMA.) At least in the USA it has saved the martial arts community from kumite point fighting, and it has has given a training opportunity for all martial artists to make sure they have all their bases covered for real fighting. Some have accused me of trying to save all of martial arts through full contact free sparring...
I started doing martial arts in the late 80's, purely for self defense reasons. I joined a school that was part American full contact karate and part Filipino Martial Arts (the master of that style had some sort of WEKAF background.) Our first few months of practice was getting used to full contact beat-em-up sparring, where we really got our hands dirty learning to throw down.
Then the tournament was announced. A point fighting kumite tournament. We needed to do things a little different, and do a different kind of sparring. I didn't realize it at the time, but our stances became very long, our sparring became no contact, and worst of all we learned to freeze up whenever we thought we scored a point or someone else was scoring a point on us. It was the opposite of self defense training.
Then we actually fought in the 1989 Lakeside Invitational tournament in WA. I remember the master's last words of advice to me: "it isn't very effective for self defense, but if you throw a back fist instead of a straight punch it will be easier for the judges to see." I got 2nd place in my division.
Within an hour that same master packed up his bags and walked out of the tournament, never to return to a kumite tournament again, almost immediately seeking out the kickboxing community and training his students in leg kicks. (The reason he walked out was he was kicking his opponents in the head so quickly the judges weren't calling his kicks as points... until he finally kicked his opponent in the head so hard that he fell down... and then the judges still didn't see it, even though his opponent was complaining about contact.) This was just as kick boxing was starting to pick up in the USA:
What happened in the 80's was that most martial arts schools became kumite point fighting schools. If you were doing Kung Fu, you were just doing Chinese-flavored kumite point fighting, Tae Kwon Do was reduced to Korean flavored kumite point fighting. At that Lakeside Invitational tournament, there was even a "Judo Boxing" club there doing point fighting, pulling other fighters to the ground and then scoring with a light jab towards their opponent's head... even grappling was turning into grappling flavored kumite point fighting. One guy I know tried to go into a point fighting tournament with his style listed as "Muay Thai."
Movements like the UFC no holds barred and K-1 striking professional tournament pulled Martial Arts in the USA out of its death spiral, and got a real conversation about effective self defense started again. Suddenly few could ignore the importance of ground fighting, and even less could ignore the importance of clinch grappling. And everyone could see one thing brighter above all others: no matter what your martial art was, your most important training activity you did was full contact free sparring. Where before everything was just a different flavor of kumite point fighting, now everything was becoming another flavor of MMA, a very significant improvement, and for most martial arts a badly needed return to ancient tradition!
Don't get me wrong, MMA has its blind spots just like all other martial arts. But what I want to point out here is how it can help you with your study of martial arts today. MMA covers all the athletic bases of fighting: conditioning, clinching, ground fighting for submission, stand up striking and plenty of sparring. No matter what your martial art is, MMA can help you make sure you have all your bases covered.
In summary, two points here:
MMA saved martial arts in the USA from turning most martial arts schools from being different flavors of kumite point fighting to being different flavors of MMA, returning to the ancient ways of full contact free sparring.
MMA can save YOUR martial arts skills by making sure you have all the basic conditioning, ground fighting, clinch grappling, stand up striking and sparring you need to realistically prepare for an unarmed combat situation.
I do mediocre full contact weapon sparring and Tai Chi. Do I also go work out at the MMA gym and try to get beat up a few times a week? Absolutely. Why? Because training the way I do, I want to make sure my critical blind spots are covered:
There is a fantasy martial art skill where a short Asian man is able to toss around larger opponents like a rag doll. This is shown in martial arts demos (like most Aikido randori,) but usually does not show up in sparring. The consensus on Bullshido.net is that the following video is not fake:
IF that larger guy really is a wrestler, he's definitely out of practice, because wrestlers train really hard and have great conditioning, and would not be out of breath that quickly. But the fantasy isn't throwing around other skilled grapplers, the fantasy is throwing around larger opponents, and that is clearly happening there.
THAT is the skill people doing internal martial arts such as Aikido, Pa Kua and Tai Chi are trying to develop, and it is no coincidence that the master in the video above practices Tai Chi. But he got that skill by training to fight in these kind of tournaments:
But are these two videos really connected, are they really the same thing? Here's what happens in one of those tournaments when the opponents are not evenly matched in terms of size, conditioning and skill:
There's that Aikido skill again, tossing people like rag dolls, this time in an open tournament.
But the above video before that, the 2nd video with the evenly matched opponents reminded you of something, didn't it... Sumo: the ring size and format, objectives and techniques are similar. Though I didn't quite grasp the significance of this at the time, in the early 90's I had a short, stocky friend from Japan who had used his sport Sumo training effectively in self defense, at least once against multiple opponents:
The fact is the Mongolians spread this kind of grappling all over Asia and Eastern Europe if they didn't have it before. This kind of grappling's application on battle field is obvious: it is better for you to be on your feet and worse for your enemy to be prone. Time and again this type of stand-up grappling to throw the opponent on the ground is found in culture after culture, all over the world.
THAT is the skill that made Aikido famous. So how come most Aikidoka can't do it? Because they don't do that type of grappling. How come the early Aikido masters could do it? First, the Aikido founder probably did Chinese internal martial arts and probably had significant tai chi type sparring skills, BUT even if he did not, his involvement in Sumo is well documented. Other early Aikido masters also had Sumo backgrounds! Aikido is supposed to be like Tai Chi in that it is supposed to grant Sumo power to people not large enough to be Sumo wrestlers. But that skill can only be achieved by training in that skill directly, as shown in the above videos: Kata and forms may or may not be appropriate conditioning for that kind of sparring, but they are no substitute for that kind of sparring!
As a martial arts critic, I would ask "why don't we see this in MMA?" First of all we have, just for example in UFC 1 a kickboxer* used exactly that sort of technique to take out a Sumo practitioner:
Second of all, MMA by way of BJJ and Sambo is highly influenced by Judo. Kano added a rare school of techniques to his Judo when he created the sport of Judo, which were the ground fighting techniques that are now ubiquitous in MMA. With added techniques for ground fighting, it made the most sense to try to fall on your opponents when you throw them, keep them pinned, and from there try to submit them. They teach the most deadly and effective unarmed self defense skills known to mankind: chokes, limb destruction and slamming heads on the ground. Yet ALL training has blind spots. Throwing the opponent on the ground with you still standing is a blind spot for this kind of training.
*But notice that this is the objective for most combat sports: in boxing and kickboxing, knocking the guy off of his feet is plan A. This is the only way to score in Knock Down Karate. Though it has very limited amounts of clinch time allowed, Chinese kickboxing actually allows numerous throws to this same end. Numerous indigenous grappling arts have the same objective. But as I have mentioned before, the combat sport where I see the most internal martial arts skill is in Thai Kickboxing:
No wonder Muay Thai has a great reputation for handling larger opponents or multiple opponents, with their footwork, practical striking, and throw-the-opponent-down style of grappling. Here's an example of Muay Thai technique being used to train people to take on multiple opponents:
So in many ways, Muay Thai IS the REAL Aikido. But how could Aikido, Tai Chi and Muay Thai be almost exactly the same thing? Listen carefully to how this kickboxing & MMA coach explains his encounter with a Tai Chi master starting at 8 minutes, 45 seconds:
When people are trying to figure out the application of various techniques from Chinese Martial Arts forms (katas), my most common piece of advice is "what would that move be for if a Thai Boxer was doing it in a kick boxing match?" This is most particularly true of one of the most esoteric martial arts, Tai Chi. In fact, the person who originally taught me both kickboxing and Tai Chi marveled how similar Tai Chi was to Muay Thai in contrast to other kickboxing and martial arts, and wondered how closely related the two arts might be in actual lineage.
(He wasn't the only Kung Fu teacher out there teaching both Kicboxing and Tai Chi side by side, just for example:
Chinese kickboxing in general scores high for landing Tai Chi style takedowns.)
The most obvious example of how Tai Chi moves resemble Muay Thai techniques is blocking leg kicks:
Compare that Muay Thai block for leg kicks to the basic Tai Chi technique called "Golden Rooster":
But as I have gone on to explore other schools of Tai Chi, I have come the conclusion that real Tai Chi (as with other Martial Arts,) is found in the sparring more so than the forms. Let's take for example the most laughably obscure move in Tai Chi forms, called "Wave Hands Like Clouds":
There are so many conflicting ideas out there about how Wave Hands Like Clouds it would be used in self defense - head locks, blocks, wrist strikes, groin strikes, elbow strikes, joint locks, breaking wrist grips - with almost no consensus on what this infamous technique could possibly be for. But it wasn't until later in life when I was taking classes from MMA coaches and fighters that it started to dawn on me what this was actually most likely for... going for what is sometimes called in Muay Thai a "steering wheel grip":
But in Chinese kickboxing the clinch time is far more limited than in Muay Thai, so we don't see this as extensively. So let's look at one of the greatest Tai Chi masters of our time sparring, Chen ZiQiang:
And there you have it, the power of steering wheel grips demonstrated in sparring by a Tai Chi master, used in an almost identical way as it is used by Muay Thai champs. And just in case you think that is too-good-to-be-true or that somehow Chen ZiQiang has unique skills, here are other Tai Chi practitioners sparring using the same sort of techniques (especially before arm drag throws and in the case of the guy in the yellow shirt):
Muay Thai is called "the art of 8 limbs," and Tai Chi is considered to have "8 Gates" or types of attacks, one of which is "elbow":
What is full contact elbow fighting called in today's world? Muay Thai.
I have noticed so many similarities between Muay Thai and Tai Chi over the years that it seems to me that if you spar full contact using the 8 gates and techniques found in the forms with a modest amount of safety gear, you will get something nearly identical to Muay Thai. When free sparring is pursued seriously, the differences between various martial arts become much smaller:
I have gotten into some arguments on the internet with some people who know a lot more about martial arts than me, some of them BJJ blackbelts. It has been educational. But there is a concept that I have discovered, a sort of yin-yang of how martial arts propagate:
Martial arts have infrastructure: what does it take to keep the community of that martial art going? What does it cost in terms of time, money, space, specialized training equipment, etc? How big of a population do you have to have in order to have enough practitioners to keep the art going?
All martial arts have a degree of encapsulation (in other words what their scope is, how many techniques they teach, and how big of a range of techniques.) An example of a very encapsulated martial art is Boxing: It's punches, and defense against punches.
An example of a martial art with low encapsulation is Choy Lay Fut kung fu - it has a certain style of ergonomic "soft" movement, and any technique they can adapt to that form of movement gets grafted into that system. Choy Lay Fut has multiple bare knuckle versions of every boxing punch. Most Choy Lay Fut schools have absorbed Yang style Tai Chi, largely because of its compatible principles. With 30+ weapons (including spade and bench), you probably haven't heard of a kung fu weapon that isn't covered in that style:
So what is more practical for self defense, boxing which covers only punches, or Choy Lay Fut which covers every martial art technique I have ever heard of including numerous concealed weapons (like double daggers and chain whips,) with the exception of some BJJ escapes and passes, a few obscure Mantis sweeps, and head buts? Boxing is FAR more practical, because in boxing you spend much more time sparring in your first year of training than a Choy Lay Fut person will (and the Choy Lay Fut student will spend most of their training time practicing forms some of which are hundreds of moves long.) Encapsulation, and encapsulation alone makes boxing more effective. There is a wider range of techniques commonly sparred with in Choy Lay Fut than in boxing, including most Muay Thai techniques. But boxing's focus allows the student to get to a self-defense ready level of competence much faster, and allows more time for the most important martial art exercise of all, sparring!
Encapsulation also reduces need for infrastructure. For example, to do wrestling, you only need 3 things: people, mats and space. Wrestling is extremely common in the USA. Boxing needs more infrastructure, with rings, multiple types of bags and protective gear. But add the 30+ weapons of Choy Lay Fut to all that, and that art needs drastically more infrastructure still.
Low infrastructure has helped propagate martial arts with low infrastructure: BJJ is one of the most common martial arts in the USA now, even though it is one of the newest martial arts in the USA. Low infrastructure martial arts allow the customer to pick exactly what they want to learn. For example I once had a Japanese Jujitsu black belt friend who wanted to learn 3-sectional Staff. I talked to my Choy Lay Fut instructor, and determined it would take this black belt at least a year of training in Kung Fu before he would know the prerequisite essentials before he could learn that weapon.
This is part of why FMA (Arnis, Kali, Esgrima) is so popular, is its forms are simple and 2 person, sparring is somewhat common, and it tries to teach the techniques that apply to a variety of weapons in a brief amount of time. It also focuses on the weapons the participant is most likely to have available.
Combat sports in general have an advantage here. Even though it seems like MMA is not well encapsulated, it is somewhat focused: it doesn't worry about obscure self-defense scenarios, weapons, uniforms, etc. It also shares infrastructure with other combat sports, so that an MMA gym can share space with boxing, kickboxing, wrestling and BJJ.
The most important infrastructure for any martial art is participation. Each individual participant has limited time they can spend training. The more time a martial art practices techniques participants are not interested in, the more those arts are wasting the resource of participation. Encapsulation keeps a martial art focused, preserving participation infrastructure.
Some arts will grow, some will shrink into obscurity. I believe encapsulation and infrastructure will be major influences on this evolutionary process.
What is the difference between a performance art and a martial art? Let us consider for a moment Professional Wrestling:
We can all agree that Professional Wrestling:
Is athletically demanding.
Requires martial arts related skills like falling and moves that come from martial arts.
Training in it could help you in a real life self defense situation.
Is NOT a martial art.
Why is it not a martial art? Very simple: no sparring. Sparring delivers on the following promise: practicing this art will give you actionable combat skill when being attacked by another human being. This can only be accomplished through sparring. Only through sparring can you actually practice against someone really trying to attack you... anything short of that is not sparring.
When martial arts show off parts of their martial arts that are NOT sparring, such as forms or Kata for example, they are performing, even if they are performing an exercise that they use to help them get better at sparring. Martial arts that lose sparring, such as many Tai Chi classes for example, have thus degenerated into only being a performance art, and are no longer a martial art. (See also: What is Tai Chi?)
I believe that this is true of all combat sports, self defense systems, combatives, etc.: when they spar they are a martial art, and without sparring they are performance arts. Wrestling is a martial art, but javelin throwing is a performance art. Olympic Boxing IS a martial art, Olympic Archery is NOT a martial art. Don't get me wrong, some Archery people spar with their archery, and they are thus martial artists:
What if in boxing we had an Olympic event for judging heavy bag hitting, using a similar scoring system to how figure skating in judged. Would heavy bag hitting be a legitimate martial art? Of course not, that would be a performance art. At some martial arts tournaments breaking inanimate objects is considered a martial arts event. This is as ridiculous as a punching bag competition. Breaking inanimate objects is a performance art practiced far and wide outside of the martial arts.
Same goes for competing in Kata, Forms, and fake sparring like Kumite Point Fighting or Stationary Push Hands. All of that is performance arts: impressive conditioning exercises that in the absence of sparring or fighting amount to a performance to the audience. You may as well be having a Yoga competition: meaningless in terms of actionable self defense skills! Performance arts may or may not be used as conditioning exercises for martial arts, but no school without serious sparring should be considered a martial arts school (it should be considered a performance arts school instead.)
I am not saying here that only combat sports are real martial arts. I have been in plenty of traditional martial arts classes that have had their own styles of serious sparring. Let's take the very worst case scenario, Capoeira. It has all the traditional excuses: sparring was forbidden by colonizers, the techniques are too dangerous to spar with, it is supposed to be more dance than self defense, it is a cultural exercise more so than a self defense system, it is more valued as a form of exercise than as a fighting style, etc. etc. This is the sad excuse for a martial art that Capoeira most typically is:
Far less relevant to self defense than say Professional Wrestling, no-contact fake sparring. Clearly more intended to impress potential sexual partners than it is to prepare someone for self defense. But what if I told you that even in the Capoeira community there are people who spar? Check it out:
If Capoeira can spar, so can YOUR martial art. It is really a decision the instructors of the class make, and it is a moral decision: are we going to deliver on the promise of helping our students develop actionable combat skills, or are we just going to make them feel good about themselves?
I will take this one step farther: any system of physical exercise can potentially be a martial art, if it adds sparring. When I first started attending BJJ, the club I attended (called "Summit" and who's logo looked like a mountain) inner circle/higher ranked belt members frequently went rock climbing together. They praised how rock climbing made them stronger on the mat. This particular club at the time was 99% ground fighting, and sport only (no combatives.) But you wouldn't have wanted to get in a fight with any of these guys, they shut down serious grapplers who showed up to the club on a regular basis. It was like a Rock Climbing club that used BJJ tournament rules as a sparring practice, and it was an awesome martial art in and of itself.
I will go so far as to say that Tap Dancing could be a martial art, if it added a relevant type of full contact sparring. Behold:
Fall Conference has concluded, with a historical announcement about Sunday meetings going from 3 hours every Sunday down to 2 hours, and 12 new temples, many of them in remote or destitute parts of the southern hemisphere - everything was pretty progressive and exiting. But the strange thing is this has all be side tracked by Elder Oaks talk that was a rehash of all our current politically incorrect beliefs. What was Elder Oaks thinking?
Before you can understand what Elder Oaks was doing there, you first have to understand the ongoing debate that has dominated General Conference since I can remember. The Church has been making an awkward transition from a theocracy to a spiritual practice since Utah joined the United States. At one point in those days of yore The Church was running a form of Christian Socialism called "The United Order" and was anti-slavery, just as progressive as you can possibly imagine for that era. As The Church has assimilated slowly into its place as a global religion instead of a local theocracy, it has taken political positions similar to other major Christian religions.
But if you are a member of The Church, those political positions do not weigh on your day to day life. What takes its toll on your life is how much time your religion takes up out of your day. As an all volunteer ministry, you donate significant amounts of time keeping your local congregation going in volunteer assigned positions called "callings." The Church puts other demands on your time. Consider the expectations I had as a 16 year old member of The Church:
Go to Church for 3 hours each Sunday.
Go to Boy Scouts once a week and try to become an Eagle Scout (no small task.)
Have a part time job to save money to serve a mission (I got employee of the month at my local Safeway.)
Go to an hour of early morning Seminary each day before school.
Participate in extra curricular activities, particularly athletics.
Do well in school, doing lots of homework.
Socialize with other youth from Church.
Practice personal prayer and scripture study.
Participate in family prayer and scripture study.
Get adequate rest to do some fraction of the above.
Obviously that was impossible, and I chose to do martial arts instead of much of the above. But in the past The Church was an entire society/ethnicity/culture/theocracy that completely consumed the time of the people in it (as most cultures do.)
The debate inside of The Church is about "how much time should members have to spend doing things related to The Church?" On a local level you might call this a power struggle between the Stake Presidents, (who's job it is to administrate the church in their area and thus need lots of volunteer man hours to help them do that,) and the Temple Presidents (who need people to have lots of free time to meditate, spiritually develop themselves, and thus spend time at their temple.) If you pay attention to General Conference carefully, you will see some people are clearly on one side or the other, and others are caught in between in the fray between these two opposing factions.
This conference was a near total scorched earth victory in this great tug of war, with the 3 hour church meetings being reduced to 2 hour church meetings. The divorce between the Boy Scouts of America and The Church was another such victory. The Church is focused on becoming a serious spiritual practice rather than an all consuming volunteer activity.
Elder Oaks is the most single outspoken proponent of members spending as much time as they possibly can doing church stuff... to listen to some of his previous talks, you would think doing anything that was not in direct service to the faith could be considered a senseless waste of your life. So from an internal perspective as a member of The Church, Elder Oaks is the most conservative Apostle, the one who embraces the old theocratic lifestyle more so than the others.
Obviously Elder Oaks wasn't really able to do his usual thing at conference where 1/3 of the membership's Sunday duties were just excused. Instead, he just focused on his other extraordinarily conservative views. The apostles are not supposed to agree on everything, and it is refreshing to me that even with the frustration of not really being able to tell who the progressive minds within the apostleship are, we can at least see who the most conservative one is. I appreciate Elder Oak's transparency on this, even if his positions make it harder for me be a member of The Church:
I have updated the "What Is Tai Chi" page on this blog to include a new 4th section called "Combat Sports Participation", after the Plumb Blossom Federation removed an article where Doc Fai Wong praised BJJ, and after I argued with people on Bullshido.net about "How to Fix Aikido." (Turns out the best full contact sparring rules for Aikido, for both historical and functional reasons, might be Sumo sparring rules.) In that time I realized I never met a good Tai Chi instructor who didn't also at least encourage his Tai Chi students to participate in some form of Combat Sport. So in my view Tai Chi includes four main elements of training: standing mediation, stationary push hands drills, moving step push hands sparring, and combat sports participation. Here is the new section on Combat Sports Participation if you are already familiar with my "What Is Tai Chi?" page:
Combat Sports Participation
Every solid Tai Chi instructor I have encountered also coached some form of full contact fighting beyond moving step push hands. In my case my first Tai Chi instructor Vern Miller (Doc Fai Wong's first student officially endorsed to start his own school) was also a boxing and kickboxing coach who trained various successful fighters, the most famous of which was Margaret Macgregor. It is very common for Tai Chi instructors to also train their students in Chinese Kickboxing. I have also heard of Tai Chi masters encouraged their students to cross train in Judo, Knock Down Karate, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, Muay Thai and many different styles of full-contact Kung Fu (Choy Li Fut, Hung Gar, Pa Kua, Hsing-I, etc.)
There were various old-fashioned types of Tai Chi with lots of deep stances and hard core Chinese Wrestling and Fencing techniques. The most common was Chen style Tai Chi. As Chen style became very popular, one branch became more popular than the others, which is Yang style - now the world's most common style of Tai Chi, known for their slow moving forms. Yang has also had a few break off variations, the most common of which is Wu style Tai Chi. Chen (older than Yang) and Wu (newer than Yang) are still often taught as full contact martial arts. This idea that "Tai Chi is just exercise" has NO historical basis, and comes from the lazy practices of many substandard Yang style Tai Chi instructors (though not all Yang style instructors are substandard.)
Tai Chi is usually taught with other martial arts. This is common of many good martial arts, because good martial arts tend to focus on a particular range of self defense techniques. In MMA the four most common Martial Arts offer deeper understanding of Tai Chi:
One of my Brazilian Jiu Jitsu instructors was Wu style Tai Chi master Dmitriy Gak. He agreed with me that the one martial art that does what Tai Chi aspires to more than any other in MMA is Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Yang style Grand Master Doc Fai Wong has also made similar claims. When it comes to absorbing a larger, stronger opponent's attack and defeating them with their own energy, BJJ is where it is at.
Vern Miller once pointed out to me the alarming similarities between Muay Thai and Tai Chi. If you are familiar with both arts than you know what I am talking about, with the aggressive use of cat stances when fighting, the hand positioning in fighting stances, Golden Rooster, etc. However since I more recently got exposure to striking for MMA specifically, I found even more similarities, especially when it comes to weight shifting. Muay Thai is more like Tai Chi than any Chinese martial art I know of. One of the 8 Gates is "elbow," and there isn't anything more "elbow" than Muay Thai. Even the take downs in Muay Thai are similar to Tai Chi take downs.
Boxing, more than any other martial art, will teach you what those five steps are all about. That ideal of being able to take on multiple opponents, the idea of being able to put an opponent at a disadvantage simply by getting out of his way, that stuff is all extremely manifested in boxing training.
Compared to the other internal martial arts, Tai Chi is a wrestling style. Of the 8 Gates wrestling covers splitting and plucking like no other, but wrestling also teaches some of the other 13 principles as well.
The reason why Tai Chi is so often cross trained with other martial arts is not only because other martial arts help us understand Tai Chi better, but also because training in multiple martial arts has always been a best practice for fighters and martial artists.
Critics of "Traditional Martial Arts" often forget that martial arts weren't originally for fighting in a ring. They were typically preparing people for life and death conflicts using weapons. Many say this side of the martial arts has always been codified in kata and never sparred with, but historical research time and again reveals weapon sparring practices among warriors using safety gear, in almost every culture.
But isn't this what Aikido is trying to avoid, violent conflict? Violence is on a continuum. We can all agree that it is less lethal to slice someone's face with a knife than it is to shoot them in the head. Both will probably end the fight, but one is clearly less violent than the other.
But aren't weapon fighting techniques too deadly to spar with? In 2018 it is more than possible to find adequate safety equipment for weapon sparring. In fact at least one major branch of Aikido, popularly referred to as Tomiki Aikido, is highly focused on multiple types of sparring, the most famous of which is their knife-vs-unarmed sparring:
Aikido pacifist ideology justifies a lack of sparring when taken to a religious extreme. But let me be clear, many Aikido techniques have practical application in fighting... consider this first 90 second round I fought in at the 2018 North West Warrior Tipon Tipon (first 90 seconds of this video):
There was lots of non-stop foot footwork, a knife disarm applied to me while I was resisting 100%, and I used shoulder roll (I originally learned in Aikido back in high school) to pick up a lost weapon. Why can't most Aikido guys brawl like that? Simply put it is because of a lack of sparring. Tomiki and Hatenkai Aikido practitioners probably would bring a lot of executable technique into a fight like mine above. But what can the average Aikido sensei who has not been lucky enough to have access to Tomiki or Hatenkai do to inject a healthy does of practical application to his school?
Get head and face protection and sparring swords, and start sparring with your Aikido sword technique. Spar as if they were bokens, continuously like a boxing round (NOT stop and go like fencing.) Practice using your Aikido footwork, entering and blending as you spar, and tons of circular footwork as well. Start at half speed, and work your way up in speed and contact level, and wear cups.
Do Randori with two people attacking, while one person protects themselves with a sparring sword (the two attackers will need the face and head protection.)
Then do the same with sparring knives.
Once you get to this point, then start exploring how to use the most basic and simple Aikido throws in your weapon sparring.
Next let take this contact sparring into your randori. Have have one person protect themselves against an opponent with a sparring weapon. Have them practice against two people with sparring weapons. Get creative and mix it up in some full contact randori.
Once you are comfortable with this full contact randori... add in Aikido atemi... whatever strikes is you defend against in your kata, front kick, punch to the body etc. Work this atemi into your one on one weapon sparring and randori.
Once you are used to sparring and doing randori using these techniques full contact, your last step is to train for a compete in Traditional full contact Jujitsu, also known as "Sport Jujitsu", and not to be confused with Brazilian Jujitsu. Sport Jujitsu is not from Brazil, it includes stand up striking, and stand up throws are just as important as the ground fighting. Aikido must take its place along side other forms of traditional Japanese Jujitsu in full contact competition if it is to be considered an authentic martial art with real history and technique.
You may need to train with like-minded martial arts (such as Enshin Karate or Brazilian Jui Jitsu) in order to adequately prepare for Sport Jujitsu.
But once you are full contact weapon sparring in randori and competing in Sport Jujitsu, you have saved your Aikido school and preserved your art for the next generation.
Seattle has turned into a lefty distopian nightmare. There are many great and wonderful things about the place, and lots of people who used to live there still work there, for all of those good reasons. However the housing crisis, inflated by investors using Seattle's real-estate market as a piggy bank, and shockingly bad transportation policy has made Seattle basically unlivable for families. Here I will get into some details, and the one and only solution to Seattle's problems (driverless cars.)
People who think Seattle is family friendly, for some reason, seem to love to point out yuppie waterfront-neighborhood Belltown as the ideal example. It is the last place I have worked or lived in, including some of the worst neighborhoods in Pittsburgh, that I would ever want to raise a family in:
A quick glance on Redfin suggests the prices on condos in Belltown range from just under $400,000 to just over $2,000,000. People with kids have responsibilities beyond showing up to work on time and doing all that off-the-clock training their employer demands, and have precious little time for sucking up to bosses after hours, and as a result generally don't have the kind of priorities it takes to afford an $800,000 condo. And news flash: healthy kids make noise, and they don't wait to go outside to do it; smart and active children should be arguing with their parents, running around the house, jumping off of furniture, wrestling, playing loud music and otherwise being completely incompatible with condo life. So that's $800,000 for a condo that is bad for your kids.
Families having fled Belltown long ago, it has been for decades now one giant Jerry-Springer-like singles club, and as a result has the worst crime rate in Metro Seattle. No hard working kid from a mid west college or India, with serious intentions of starting a family, is going to be interested in living in that cesspool. Seriously, when vigilantes in Seattle go looking for crime to stop, they go to Belltown:
So every lefty Utopian scheme imaginable has been applied to Belltown and completely failed the future of he human race. And it's not like bus stops connect you to buses that go anywhere of significance in Belltown, nor would there be any parking, nor is there a light rail stop in Belltown. You better not need to go anywhere during rush our, because you simply aren't going to get there. Though not as bad as Belltown, the rest of Seattle suffers from similar problems.
And here's what they are doing to fix the problem: replacing a major transportation viaduct with a tunnel of less capacity, and trying to establish tolls on roads down town. All of this will push more traffic onto I-5, which already routinely comes to a stand still almost every rush hour. In other words an impressively disastrous problem is about to get a lot worse.
How did this happen; aren't commies supposed to be good at infrastructure building? In the 1970's America was preparing for the future with huge infrastructure projects, most importantly serious subway systems, which are now the backbones of major metropolitan areas like NYC, Chicago, LA and Atlanta. Atlanta!? Isn't Seattle bigger than that? How did they get one and Seattle didn't? Atlanta got Seattle's subway because voters in Seattle didn't want one!
See, it is a simple issue of ideology vs. pragmatism. You can have all the post-modern, marxist, misandry-based, city-wide-strike having, granola eating ideology you want, but if you have no thought in the world for practicality, then your ideology:
Has never mattered.
Currently does not matter in any meaningful way.
Never will matter at any possible point in the future.
And now we get to the heart of the problem with popular solutions to Seattle's problems, which is that everyone should just simply ride the bus or a bike to work. The problem for parents is time. Every second we are not with our kids, we are risking raising future prostitutes, violent criminals or Belltown inhabitants. If we indulge in the guilty pleasure of taking time for ourselves to go to the gym, take a shower or sleep, that time is incredibly precious.
The problem with the Bus or a Bike is it demands your attention. You can't e-mail or watch the news on your bike for hopefully-obvious-reasons-to-even-someone-like-you. But you can't do this on the Bus either, because the bus also demands your attention, the bus driver does not guarantee you will get off the bus when you are supposed to. Because it is so easy to miss your stop on a bus, it is impossible to accomplish meaningful activity on a bus ride.
I take an hour long ferry ride to Seattle for work. It is never too crowded to have a seat. I don't have to drive, I don't have to peddle and dodge texting drivers, and when the boat stops, if the legions of fellow commuters getting up and leaving doesn't catch my attention, ferry staff will personally come by and make sure I know it is time to get off the one and only possible stop for the vehicle. I get tons of work done on the ferry. I even occasionally get some Netflix in on the ferry - real, actual entertainment - an unheard of luxury for most parents.
My co-workers try to express sympathy for the long commute. But when they leave the workplace at 4PM, how long do you think it takes them to get home? They might only live 20 minutes away at 2 AM in the morning, but in Seattle rush our traffic that often takes longer and ends up being more expensive than my ferry ride. When I lived in Seattle I used to take crowded buses to work that took just as long. I even rode my bike and admittedly got to work a few minutes quicker, but it was incredibly dangerous and it was easy to get a flat tire, so it wasn't very reliable.
And *driving* to work in a car in Seattle - if it isn't painfully obvious already - is no kind of solution. The experience is dreadful, terribly slow traffic with horrible drivers. Parking is... I don't even know how to explain it to someone who doesn't live in Seattle... but essentially the Seattle City Council has for decades tried to prevent people from driving downtown by not having parking spaces... you can easily pay over $20 a day for parking downtown, and it's not likely to be very close to the destination your are trying to get to.
Taxis are too expensive for anyone to commute to work daily in. Ubers though more affordable have other problems that illustrate other problems from driver-based transportation: if you can trust the driver to get you where you are going without constantly looking over their shoulder, they will often want to talk with you, making it impossible for you to be productive. Then there is the question of reliability, will your Uber driver show up on time, if at all?
So the solution is ferry rides for all parents. What that means in practice is diverless cars. In a driverless vehicle you will be able to stretch out your feet and relax, almost as well as on a ferry. You will be able to pull out your cellphone or laptop and get very caught up on many things you need to do, and you might even be able to get caught up on your favorite Youtube channel. It will show up much faster than a bus or ferry, and will be a lot more affordable than an Uber, least bit a Taxi.
Some cities can get by with condos and subways, and still end up being family friendly. Not Seattle, our history has been catastrophically consumed by ideological delusions trumping practical reality. But there is a way out of this mess in the future, and that is driverless cars. No city's future is as dependent on this emerging technology as Seattle!
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
You can't fight a Tank or a Drone with an AR-15. The NRA has been selling us on a lie: guns can project us from military evils. Hand held firearms are not nearly enough.
Can you fight off a chemical weapon attack on civilians with an AR-15?
Can you fight off a jet fighter dropping barrel bombs on civilians with an AR-15?
Can you stop a nuclear dirty bomb with an AR-15?
Small arms are of little consequence in today's world. The 2nd Amendment clearly guarantees weapons sufficient to support a "well regulated militia." But no such weapons have in anyone's living memory been legal in the USA.
The NRA is a pawn, who keeps us too docile to demand the weapons of consequence guaranteed to us by the 2nd amendment.
This blog post is going to be about the changes in the LDS priesthood and why they are important. This change is being overshadowed in the media by the fact that they called the first two men of color to be apostles. But what no one is talking about that is far more significant: one of these men of color is in a mixed race relationship... at least until yesterday some LDS still thought that was wrong... This apostle in his appearance is obviously far-east Asian, and his wife is obviously not:
Any individual LDS congregation (typically called a "Ward," and represents a specific geographical area,) has two major bodies by which the work in the church is done. One is female, called the "Relief Society," and the other is male, called "The Priesthood." Traditionally the priesthood has been divided into two groups, the "Elder's Quorum" for the child-bearing aged men and the "High Priests Quorum" for the older men.
The Relief Society has been one solid body, with no age division. Priesthood and the Relief Society both have similar functions, and their primarily responsibility is what is called "ministering." In a church with a lay ministry, this is how they are able to reach out to members of their ward and see what their needs may be. Don't have enough food for that month? Going through a family emergency and need more social support? Need help teaching your kids how to grieve for a recently deceased pet? Your ministering brothers or sisters from your LDS ward are trying to check in with you once a month to see if you can use their help. Christianity 101.
Now, before I explain the change, understand that it is a going assumption throughout the Church that the visiting teaching (Relief Society) is generally more frequent and effective than the home teaching (Priesthood.) This is why so many LDS women eye-roll and giggle "I don't think we really need it" when the Media asks them "don't you think you should have the priesthood like the men do?" Because it is a constant source of humor in the LDS faith that the women are already more effective at being disciples of Christ than the men are.
So here's the change in the priesthood: that age division has been nuked. There are no more ward-level "high priest groups." Now all men are in the same "elder's quorum," just like all women are in the "relief society." The message to the men is simple: "The priesthood isn't your own personal boy's club. You are expected to be as effective as the Relief Society now."
They also took a step to make the Relief Society more like the Elder's Quorum. Ministering is always performed in pairs. The Elder's Quorum has been able to have male youth age 14 to 18 pair up with older Priesthood in order to minister, expanding the available pool of ministering brothers. They announced today that female youth age 14 to 18 may now be ministering sisters in the same way.
IF the LDS were going to give women the priesthood (and they made all kinds of Freudian slips that suggested that this is right around the corner,) these would be a critical first steps. (Mormons are of three different categories on that topic:
"Orthodox" types are concerned that the current structure helps to keep men involved in family life in the face of misandry and careerism, and that we shouldn't "give women the priesthood," since women are already more effective disciples of Christ without the priesthood.
"Ordain Women" types think it is important to have sexual equality in religious practices, and we should empower women by giving them the priesthood.
"Sunstone" types think the woman are already given the priesthood when they go to the Temple, and that it wasn't until the mid 1900's that for cultural reasons they formally stopped performing rituals like faith healing on their own.
Regardless of what category most LDS fall into, it isn't a huge significant controversy to them, and it is just one difference of opinion one LDS can have with another LDS. I personally sympathize with all three views.) At any rate, this is a huge unisex structural change that will have a positive effect on the behavior of Mormons, helping us be better Christians and more sensitive to the increasing diversity that is inevitable with an increasing population.
Tres Espadas does not actually have "lineage" per say, because no professional instructors ever gave us permission or endorsement to start the club. Instead we have influences. Here are those influences, giving credit even though it may not be wanted...
1. Cold Steel - No living Tres Espadas members have had correspondence with Lynn Thompson, and no member has ever met him (least bit trained with him) in person, but his instructional videos are easily the most influential influence on technique in our club. HOWEVER, we don't endorse all of his material, a lot of the strategy to us seems like it is based on fencing style stop and go sparring, and since that is heresy to Tres Espadas, we spar continuously, and so that makes which, how and when techniques are applied different. To be clear, Thompson has studied numerous martial arts, but the ones he is most vocal about are Filipino Martial Arts (FMA):
2. Dog Brothers - showed us that Gatherings (what we at Tres Espadas call "Tipons" because of the local Warrior Tipon Tipon North West gathering) were possible. Get together and really fight without it being a competition, as safely as possible, with different martial arts schools, continuously without the stop and go fencing nonsense? That inspired this Tres Espadas to form in the first place. More recently at the local Tipon we have seen people who train to participate in Dog Brothers, and that has influenced us as well. To be clear, most people participating in Dog Brothers study FMA explicitly. We do NOT consider ourselves to be a serious as most of the people participating in Tipons, as we are more fans than participants:
3. Doc Fai Wong - or more specifically his first student to be endorsed to start his own branch of Doc Fai Wong's Tai Chi & Choy Lay Fut system, Vern Miller, is the guy that really taught the original Tres Espadas members to brawl back in the day. We learned various staff, dagger and Tai Chi forms from him, but his Sanda-derived Duch-style kickboxing system changed how we saw martial arts forever. He is why we can never return to stop-and-go sparring. You know those long range knife swipes we catch people with when they are retreating? Very Choy Lay Fut there. With that said, no Tres Espadas members ever did weapon sparring of any kind when studying Doc Fai Wong's system, though we have been able to apply some of the moves in sparring since:
4. Dave Bird - mostly by way of Dave Coplan, was the older Tres Espadas members first martial arts master. Known for his FMA and kickboxing, he gave us our first experiences with Arnis and contact sparring in the late 80's:
5. SCA - Or more specifically the now deceased martial arts master Jess Roe who had studied everything from FMA to Budo to Chinese Martial Arts to US Naval Cutlass fighting. He would have been the first to tell you that the serious side of SCA martial arts was originally founded on FMA, which they adapted to western weapon simulations. I recently had a well respected FMA instructor and HEMA (European weapon martial arts) participant comment that as HEMA adopts continuous sparring they should not become WEKAF (a sport form of FMA stick fighting.) But I have to wonder how far removed HEMA is from FMA if SCA of 40 years ago was closely related to FMA:
5. Esgrima Criolla - South American Knife Fighting, which involves a lot more than knives. If I had to classify Tres Espadas as a Martial Art (which I don't), I might classify it as an Esgrima Criolla club. FMA practitioners in South America have resurrected this nearly lost art form, and we have had some direct correspondence with them over the years on Facebook:
6. Aikido (Honolulu Hombu Dojo) - by way of Bruce Baumann, he was focused on teaching us self-defense, bokenjitsu and Samurai strategy. Our "never stop moving" footwork strategy and dive rolling for weapons goes back to our Aikido from early 90's high school. Our swift overhead counters really go back to Aikido style bokenjitsu as much as they do Choy Lay Fut. Also our tendency to look at Tai Chi as a martial art rather than a yoga style is rooted back to our earlier Aikido days.
7. MMA - more recently various Tres Espadas members have taken to studying boxing, wrestling, BJJ and MMA generally and have started to incorporate that knowledge into the Tres Esapadas repertoire of techniques.
So a final note on FMA: when FMA was codified, they drew on Martial Arts from all over the Philippines. That is an ethnically diverse place, meaning they were drawing from martial arts from all over Asia and parts of Europe. FMA is one of the first weapon MMAs to incorporate martial arts from around the globe. As a result, FMA has 99% of all the weapon techniques from all other martial arts.
Because of the fighting and sparring traditions in FMA, many FMA schools have a truly deep and vast understanding of weapon martial arts. As a result FMA has become a shared language for talking about weapon martial arts (for example almost everyone exposed to FMA can tell you what the 12 angles of attack are) and it has been used as a basis to bring back mostly lost western arts such as SCA fighting, Esgrima Criolla, and probably somewhere along the line even HEMA.
Tres Espadas has been known to irreverently mock lineage. However we appreciate the fact that as recently as the 1900's people in East Asia were getting chased out of their homes and killed over the Martial Arts knowledge they possessed, and that in each generation teachers of the martial arts sacrifice vast amounts of time and other resources in order to pass their knowledge on. Though the nature of our club leads us to eschew lineage, we have great respect for the masters who exposed any of their knowledge to us.
