Internal Skill

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:

Muay T(h)ai Chi

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:

Encapsulation and Infrastructure

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:

1. 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?
2. 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.

Martial Arts vs. Performance Arts

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:

1. Is athletically demanding.
2. Requires martial arts related skills like falling and moves that come from martial arts.
3. Training in it could help you in a real life self defense situation.
4. 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:

Blog Labels

I have updated this blog by labeling each of the over 100 blog posts as one or more of the following:

1. Martial Arts: make no mistake, though I write about martial arts, I also practice them.
2. Ideology: I talk about religion and politics far more than is considered polite.
3. Entertainment: for everything that isn't clearly Martial Arts and/or Ideology.

Progressive vs Conservative in The Restored Church

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:

Update: What is Tai Chi?

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3.  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.
4. 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.