I have been doing full splits almost every time I work out since 1990. Here's a picture of me warming up for the 2018 Pacific North West Warrior Tipon Tipon gathering:
If you want to be able to do this when you are almost 50 like me, pay attention:
Clean living ages well - smoking, drinking, drugs etc. do nothing for you that you can't get from fruit, while wasting your money.
Stretch every day for 10 minutes.
There are two very specific stretches that I have found the most useful, which are Axe Kick Stretches (a dynamic stretch) and the splits (a static stretch.) Of the two, the Axe Kick Stretch is easier and more important, and it is a decent warm-up exercise:
But the more coveted stretch is the splits, which is probably a better cool down exercise for you than a warm up exercise. I have just about much experience doing the splits as anyone else alive on Earth, but I recently found a YouTube video that even helped ME do splits with less pain and effort:
A combat sport is a competitive game that teaches skills that could come in handy if you have to fight to defend yourself, like boxing for example. As a combat sport IBJJF grappling is fine, but BJJ promises to be a more comprehensive self defense system:
Here is a clear path on how BJJ can fulfill that promise of being more than just a combat sport:
White belts should complete the basic self defense instruction you offer ( Pink Belt, Gracie Combatives, etc.) so that all higher belts understand your basic self defense strategies. When white belts are rolling (free sparring,) to prevent injury and provide the most important skills for beginners, the white belts and anyone they are rolling with should going for positions only (not working on submissions outside of completing the self defense instruction.)
Blue belts should focus on learning submissions and take downs. Anyone not rolling with a white belt should start standing up with the goal of submissions on the ground.
Purple belts should develop a working knowledge of striking, through safe free sparring. This does not have to cover everything seen in MMA, but it should include strikes seen as key to making BJJ work in MMA, including curriculum on how to fight while standing up.
Brown belts should practice knife grappling. A knife grappling round should start standing up, with one sparring partner being an attacker with a safety knife and the other sparring partner being a defender trying to take that knife away from the attacker, while the attacker is trying to land as many slashes and stabs on the defender as possible. Once the defender is able to take the knife away from the attacker, the two sparring partners should switch roles and continue. This both develops real knife disarming skills, and prepares them to use a knife, which is another option for dealing with multiple attackers besides running away.
This guarantees that each black belt has more comprehensive training for self defense, and may improve student retention as new material is introduced at each belt level. As I have said from the beginning All Martial Arts Change, and if BJJ does not continue to evolve than it will soon be surpassed by what are now considered lesser martial arts:
Why try to functionalize Aikido instead of do a more "practical" martial art (the most common suggestion being BJJ and/or kumite point fighting)? Because your alternative you have suggested isn't going to get the Aikidoka what they are striving for. There are two issues here: first is technique, and second is ideology.
There are three ranges of Aikido technique.
First there is stand-up grappling, what they would call "clinch" in MMA or Muay Thai. In the case of Aikido it is paramount that they stay on their feet, because it is a self defense oriented system (rather than a pit fighting system) so that they must take the possibility of multiple attackers - who may not yet even be identified - seriously. The only traditional unarmed Budo with this exact objective is Sumo, and Sumo influence on Aikido is no coincidence. This type of grappling is common in other internal martial arts in the form of Push Hands and San Shou.
Second there is knife-range techniques. These include both disarm techniques AND attacking techniques. On one hand being attacked with a knife is one of the most important self defense scenarios to train for, while on the other hand pulling a knife is one of the most practical ways to fight off multiple attackers.
Third there is a walking stick self defense system deeply encoded into Aikido, for the obvious reason that a walking stick is one of the most practical non-lethal ways to defend yourself known to humanity.
More practical martial arts might teach the physical skills needed to do type 1 technique, but only Muay Thai, Sumo and Push Hands fighting actually tries to implement it - so the BJJ, Kumite Point Fighting or whatever else you have probably suggested most likely will not suffice. Sure everyone needs to cross train in grappling if for no other reason than to learn how to escape from the ground, but the only systems that even score grappling escapes are Collegiate Wrestling and Combat Glima, and ground escapes just so happen to be beyond the scope of what most Aikidoka are training for:
And virtually no other martial arts are concerned about ranges 2 and 3 while encouraging free sparring with this kind of technique. A lack of free sparring is the whole problem with Aikido in the first place, so adding your non-sparring dogwater won't do them any good. Alternatives-to-Aikido generally do not combine all three ranges of Aikido technique together in one place as Aikido does.
Beyond technique, Aikido has a specific pacifist-lite ideology of trying to bring humanity together in peace and harmony - and even has it's on form of spirituality as it is rife with supernatural theories on Qi. Like BJJ or almost any other belt-ranked martial art, if the practitioner does not have some other religious system they use to morally reflect and improve their behavior, Aikido often fills that void. Asking an Aikidoka to instead become a Judoka isn't ideologically any more practical than asking a Christian to become a Muslim, and it will likewise have a low frequency of success.
While I have incorporated a small fraction of the Aikido I learned into my training, I have no intention of studying more Aikido. However if you want to understand why people are trying to functionalize Aikido, it is because Aikido's ideals represented in both range of technique and ideology are both worthy - and with further training through free sparring - practical:
The most useful rating system from my POV is a 4 star scale, because people's opinions have limited precision for other people. It's hard to be more useful than "horrible = one star, mediocre = two stars, good = three, and amazing =four stars." Here I am going to extrapolate that to the level of truth of claims about martial arts:
One Star = Mythical. These are ideas that are generally unrelated to reality. An example of such an idea is "if I practice Tai Chi forms long enough, I can develop useful fighting skills without any other type of practice."
Two Stars = Hypothetical. These are ideas that some find helpful in their training, but which do not yet have consistent repeatable results through peer reviewed research. An example of such a claim is "I can feel my Qi when I am practicing my Tai Chi forms."
Three Stars = Theoretical. These are ideas that appear to be rooted in reality, and typically have peer reviewed research backing them up. An example of such a claim is "Tai Chi helps old people develop better balance and avoid injury."
Four Stars = Factual. These are ideas that are unavoidable hard facts of life, proven universally true over time. An example of such as statement is "like any other martial art, to develop practical fighting skills Tai Chi must include regular free sparring."
Note: You can get a 4 star rating from a 5 star (Likert Scale) survey. In fact 4 star ratings and Likert scales are two sides of the same coin. When you average Likert results they naturally come out on a scale between 1.0 and 5.0, so that virtually all scores come out to be 1.x to 4.x. The Likert scale then for the martial scale of truth would then be: 1 star = criminal: intentional misinformation. 2 stars = mythical: most credible evidence is against, 3 stars = Hypothetical: helpful for some but lacks evidence, 4 stars = Theoretical: most evidences suggests this is true, 5 stars = Factual: obviously true.
I once had a BJJ (Brazillian Jui Jitsu) Apologist suggest to me that I should be grateful that I have had a year of BJJ training, because the rest of my several years of mostly full contact martial arts training had been a huge waste of my life. Considering BJJ's extremely hostile attitude towards other martial arts over the years, I would like to address this extremely misguided notion here and now.
In the course of my security-related professional responsibilities from 2007 to 2017 I was attacked several times on the job and never injured, primarily due to my martial arts training I received in the late 80's through mid 90's. Let's look at what happened, and how using BJJ instead would have changed the outcome.
Veteran
A woman was trying to get into a car while a man who she did not appear to know was yelling sexual insults at her. I approached him asking "do you know her" and he proceeded to throw punches at me for a half of a city block on the side walk before he decided to walk away. I used footwork and head movement from Kickboxing and Aikido to avoid his strikes while staying close enough to him so he would focus on me, so the woman could drive away. I later found out that this attacker was a veteran who was having side effects from back pain medication mixed with alcohol. There were other miscreants observing the situation, but they did not get involved.
Let's look at what BJJ would have had me do instead:
When he threw punches at me, I would have dove for his legs and taken him to the ground.
I would have held him in a dominant position in mount, or gone for a submission.
Either way this would have injured him knowing what we found out later about his health problems.
I would have had to spend a lot more time explaining to the police what happened, and I would have been at risk legally, with possible assault charges.
I would have been let go from my job.
When the other miscreants saw me holding him down, they would have most likely moved in to help him. In that area miscreants usually carry improvised weapons for self defense.
BJJ would have turned a nearly harmless situation for me into a deadly multiple armed attackers scenario, and possibly have gotten me killed or put into prison for assault charges (as I would have been outnumbered as far as witnesses were concerned.)
Shoe Ninja
I was once chasing someone through Seattle's Sodo neighborhood who was having a mental health episode and was in serious physical jeopardy, and I was not allowed to lose direct line of sight of this person. While I was running after them on the side walk, a homeless man jumped at me out of the bushes, perhaps trying to protect the person I was following. This specific stretch of sidewalk often had used syringes on it left behind by heroin users, and this homeless man's presence made that even more likely than usual.
The homeless man started by throwing shoes at me, which I defended against with Aikido footwork and martial arts parries. I used the distancing I learned in Aikido and side stepping from Kickboxing to manage how close he could get to me as I side stepped out in the street to get around him. He was trying to physically escalate with me, but I was past him and on my way before he could get close enough to try to strike me. Shoe Ninja, if you ever read this, I have much respect for the force and accuracy with which you can hurl shoes, I never knew that was possible!
Let's look at what BJJ would have had me do instead:
I would have ran straight directly into the Shoe Ninja for the fastest possible takedown.
I would have held the Shoe Ninja in a dominant position or gone for a submission.
The person for whom I had a professional responsibility to protect during a mental health episode would have kept on running beyond my line of sight while I was trying to grapple the Shoe Ninja.
Again I would have been out witnessed, I was not popular in that neighborhood and there were other people watching, so the legal outcome for me could have had severe consequences.
I would have lost my job.
Possible risk for needle exposure was a known-known at that specific location.
With the training I had this situation was almost harmless to me, but BJJ would have put me on the ground with needles, and the person who I was supposed to be protecting would have been completely exposed to the primary threat they were facing.
Surfer Dude
I once asked a pedestrian to stop loitering in bushes on a length of sidewalk I was responsible for. He was a tall, blonde muscular young man, who's response (probably because of his simultaneous stimulant intake) was to march straight at me trying to grab or hit me. I used Kickboxing and weapon sparring footwork to keep a tree between the two of us as I continued to explain the neighborhood rules and expectations to him. He eventually got distracted and I was able to run away without getting manhandled by this guy (or having to go Mike Tyson on him and/or shut him down with leg kicks.)
Let's look at what BJJ would have had me do instead:
When he came at me, I would have changed levels for a take down.
He was a superior physical specimen to myself, so what kind of dominant position or submission I might have gotten with my two stripe white belt (1 year of casual BJJ training) is highly questionable.
Hopefully I would have gotten a dominant position, but this guy had been to the gym before. The odds are that me being on the ground with this guy would have been really bad for my physical safety.
Again the witnesses in this area were hostile towards me, and in this case there were many witnesses. If I had hurt him bad enough to actually stop him from being a threat to me, assault charges would have been likely.
I would have lost my job.
In this situation BJJ would have taken a dangerous situation I was facing, and made it far more dangerous and hazardous, by prolonging a physical confrontation with someone who might have been able to really hurt me.
Amateur Pharmacist
One time I spent about two years on a corner in Sodo preventing amateur pharmacists from conducting trade at that location. One day I was speaking to my supervisor out on that corner when one of these amateur pharmacists approached us with hostile questions regarding our presence. I stood up and he got in my face, and next thing I knew I was facing his back, as if he had stumbled past me.
What had happened is this amateur pharmacist had reeled in at me with a huge head butt, because of my Tai Chi Push Hands and Kickboxing experience, I had dodged and stepped around his attack out of pure reflex. I had to explain to my supervisor later at length in his office as to why I continued to lecture someone who was trying to physically attack me (apparently the "responsible" thing to do once he had attacked me was for me to leave.)
Let's look at what BJJ would have had me do instead:
When his back was exposed, I would have used a sacrifice take down.
I would have nailed side control with this take down.
I would have been fired before I before I passed to mount.
In this situation BJJ would have taken a situation where I got a stern verbal warning, into a situation where I would have been instead unemployed all together.
Xanax Aficionado
One time I was assigned to a neighborhood near numerous medical institutions where anti-anxiety medications were constantly traded illicitly outside, causing various public health problems. Word on the street was some were not pleased by the reduction in trade I had caused with my enthusiastic presence and optimism for the future of the community.
One day a guy walked up to me and pulled out a knife. He more stumbled towards me than walked, and I could see he might not be able to stumble his way down the street least bit make a serious attack at me with the knife, because he was just too benzo-impaired. Using the distancing I learned in Filipino Martial Arts and other weapon sparring, I stayed close enough to retain his attention but too far for him to hit me with a single lunge.
As he looked down at his knife and back up at me, I decided to use a Jedi mind trick, O' Sensei style. I commanded him that "you have to put that thing away right now, or else you are going to get into a whole lot of trouble!" I pointed my finger directing him to put his knife back into his pocket, and used full body language to demonstrate that I actually expected him to do this. He did, he put the knife back in his pocket and stumbled away.
Let's look at what BJJ would have had me do instead:
Impale my jugular vein on his knife as I try to get a take down.
In this situation BJJ would have massively intensified a dangerous situation I was facing and possibly have gotten me killed.
Mariners Fan
There was another stretch of a street in Sodo I was responsible for, and much to my dismay there was a man taking apart a sign with a baseball bat one morning before the sun came up. Not known for being a morning person myself, I yelled some words of discouragement to the baseball bat armed man. He turned towards me and started crossing the street.
Using distancing and strategy I learned in Aikido and weapon sparring, I kept him several yards away form me as I backed up and called the rest of my team in for help. The largest of us got in front of him and employed verbal deescalation while I and another got behind the base ball fan to take him down from behind should he try to attack. This was a combination of Aikido strategy and pure security experience, and we managed to deescalate instead of having to disarm.
Let's look at what BJJ would have had me do instead:
Intercept this guy in the middle of the street, attempting a take down.
I would have been at risk of getting hit with the bat, but I think I could have dove in and grabbed an ankle and put him on the ground with my shoulder before he got me with the bat, but it would have been risky.
Diving in on the pavement like that would have been risky also, because asphalt is not a mat.
Holding up traffic on a busy street before the sun comes up is dangerous also, we could have easily been hit by a large vehicle while we tussled.
There are legal consequences for getting in avoidable fights that hold up traffic.
I would have been fired.
BJJ would again have taken a dangerous situation and made it far more dangerous.
"Just Run"
I can already hear the BJJ apologist's response that I should have "just run" in all of the above situations. In every one of these situations I had a professional obligation to NOT run, there was property and people who needed to be protected, and I was being paid to protect them. But even off the clock I have had situations where I had elderly or children with me near dangerous individuals who were not fit enough to escape without my protection!
If "just running" is a core strategy in BJJ, then they need to train and spar with running techniques, or else they need to stop claiming to be experts in running away. Most BJJ schools have the mats needed for obstacle training (parkour), and falling practiced in BJJ does have some overlap with obstacle training. However, the fact is the only martial art I know of that includes obstacle training and running away is Ninjitsu, so unless BJJ ups their game and adds some kind of Parkour rules to the IBJJF rule set, I find these BJJ claims of escape proficiency extremely problematic.
We have had a hard time describing what "Tres Espadas" is over the years. The best definition has been "a club for weapon free sparring." Phil Gribbin was clearly the founder of the club. As time went on I was more and more involved with the club. Here I will explain some differences Phil and I had now that we've had time to mourn his death, and what these differences may mean for the future of Tres Espadas.
First though I want to point out that though between the two of us we had studied weapon technique from several experts in several styles, in 2010 none of those experts wanted to do what Phil wanted to do: full contact free sparring with weapons - no calling kill shots, no stopping to listen to judge's opinions, no wasting the precious sparring time that you have with frequent formalities, no spending two thirds of the round getting back into position before resuming sparring. Phil saw what the Dog Brothers were doing, and he wanted to make that safer and more casual so a wider range of friends could participate.
For Phil the entertainment value of watching people fight with weapons was more important than any specific technique being mastered. Phil was skilled at fighting with weapons as he demonstrated many times, but it was more important for him that people had fun. Because of this, it was important to Phil that the weapons look like weapons. Phil believed this had the added benefit of making the fighter react to attacks more as if that fighter was being attacked by a real weapon, but the main reason for the LARP weapons was for the spectacle.
I have had a life long passion for both games and martial arts since I was a young teenager. I have never been comfortable mixing the two together, and I am known to be very uncomfortable around people who are LARPing. The biggest disagreement Phil and I had was over sparring equipment - I wanted it to look like martial arts training gear, but Phil didn't want the interference of martial arts organizations that might attract. Phil won primarily because most of the safety gear that was high quality enough to spar with full contact and without significant regular injury was high end LARP gear.
At first most of the Tres Espadas participants were people with martial arts backgrounds from either traditional Asian martial arts, combat sports, or from people used to fighting in the SCA. At that time it was critical for Tres Espadas to NOT have a curriculum, because it was a research laboratory and we wanted as little bias as possible messing with this style vs. style experiment. Beyond that, Phil was very interested in what effect the shape and reach of weapons would have for different combinations of weapons being used against each other.
But it we had a number of newbies who wanted to do Tres Espadas without having significant previous martial arts experience. At this point I started to ask Phil some very hard questions. His vision, when we reduced it down to the very core, was the Gladiatorial Arenas of ancient Rome. When I accused Phil of essentially wanting to throw newbies to the wolves, he responded "Yes, like Christians to the Lions... Weapon fighting is natural, pain will teach them what not to do."
But it wasn't long before newbies were insisting we teach them something about technique. Phil opened his personal library, a collection of most of the Cold Steel instructional videos, and notes about the weapon technique from our previous training in Filipino and Chinese martial arts. We did not hold lineage in any system, and we had become convinced that any such association or lineage would actually impair the progress of Tres Espadas because of the politics that are inevitably involved in most martial arts organizations.
Unlike Phil most newbies didn't have the appetite to watch dozens of hours of instruction and pouring over old hand written notes over and over again. This is when we came up with the Tres Espadas badge system: each badge was a crash course in how to use each major type of weapon in Tres Espadas. We tried to keep the badges short enough to be completed in one day, and we tried to reduce the amount of techniques in the badges to only the most useful techniques for free sparring (not all techniques that work in stop and go sparring work well in free sparring, and most weapon martial arts in our area at the time did only did stop and go sparring if they sparred at all.)
The badge system however was still too time consuming, and beginners were not getting up to speed fast enough. Also without a uniform - and we were most decidedly against uniforms - where would the badges even go? To this day in the Tres Espadas supplies there are unused little weapon badges meant to go on martial arts uniforms, which we never did figure out how to use. Because of all of this, plus safety concerns for newbies, we beefed up the Tres Espadas orientation to include enough basic weapon technique that newbies would have some basic idea of how to protect themselves in a free sparring round.
And just as we were perfecting that, Phil died. A few years before Phil died, we were approached by real martial arts experts (Lamont Glass of the Black Bird Training Group and Belton Lubas of Warrior's Strength Martial Arts) who were putting together a Dog Brothers style gathering here in Western Washington, to be called the Pacific North West Warrior Tipon Tipon (or Tipon.) Over time it has proven itself to be a gentler, kinder, more newbie friendly gathering than what you typically see at Dog Brothers, and they intentionally attracted the widest variety of martial artists they can at this local Tipon. We considered this project to be extraordinarily important, and we did all we could to get the word out for the first one, but we were not convinced we should participate. One of them told us that they needed a wide variety of opponents and that we should come, even if we didn't think we were "good enough." We didn't make it that first year, and the second year Phil and I showed up as spectators. After Phil's death I participated in the 3rd year, and there has been Tres Espadas participation in most of those Tipons since.
It turns out that they were right about what we had to offer to the Tipon, even though none of us claim to be martial arts masters. But this had a very significant impact on Tres Espadas, which is it forced us to have two separate sets of safety gear: fencing helmets for fighting at Tipons, versus the plastic face shield karate helmets that wouldn't be too hard on the expensive LARP weapons (because the fencing masks literally grate the latex skin of the LARP weapons.)
Up until Phil's death, two gear problems haunted Tres Espadas after all of our research and financial investment into sparring gear. First, we never had neck protection that we felt was adequate - the longer the weapon - for reasons we don't completely understand - the more likely it is to end up in your opponent's throat, regardless of your intentions. Second, we could never get any weapons LARP gear manufacturer to make a sword short enough for us to use as a machete while sparring. This vexed Phil, who was so into machetes that when he finalized the Tres Espadas logo, he modeled the weapons on the logo on machetes produced by Cold Steel (a gladius representing the Gladiatorial Arenas and the democratic nature of Tres Espadas, a Kukri representing the eastern martial arts, and a pirate cutlass, representing a classic machete that has been slightly more weaponized, and reflecting the pirate-like rejection of authority that Tres Espadas is based on.) This forced us to do things we didn't want to do, such as having a "sword badge" instead of a "machete badge," because we just didn't have any sparring machetes.
At the last Tipon (years after Phil's death,) the famous Blood and Iron Martial Arts school from British Columbia introduced Tres Espadas members to a new brand of sparring weapon, Nihonzashi. Nihonzashi had been producing sparring weapons for traditional Japanese sword fighting arts to be able to spar with, which would have a similar heft to a real sword. If you swing a Nihonzashi sparring katana around, it really feels like you are swinging a katana or boken around rather than some hollow bamboo toy. But what Blood and Iron had brought was western Long Swords that Nihonzashi recently started to manufacture for HEMA type groups.
Upon further investigation, we discovered Nihozashi manufactured a Wakizashi. In theory, this would be the perfect sparring machete - it would look like a martial arts training weapon instead of a LARP weapon, but instead handle like a sword, and not like a flimsy fiberglass and latex sword, but like a bokken or steel sword. Funds were tight, and soon the pandemic shut down most martial arts practice in our area. But that question remained: was the Nihonzashi sparring wakizashi the holy grail for Tres Espadas?
Then it was my birthday, so I ordered a pair. Our hardest padded sparring sticks - the Dog Brothers issued super-hard action flex - were falling apart after almost a decade of abuse and we needed replacements. We recently tested the Nihonzashi Wakizashi:
First, swinging them the wakizashi is considerably more taxing than anything else we spar with. This is generally a good thing, because though not recognized outside of our club, inside of Tres Espadas it is well understood that our wrist and hand conditioning is not up to par with many other weapon fighters who spend a lot more time in drills and katas than we do strengthening their lower arms and grip. This will make sparing itself such a conditioning exercise, as well as help keep us honest about our ability to wield real metal weapons, and our need for appropriate conditioning to wield such weapons.
Second, they are about as painful as the Dog Brothers issue super hard action flex - they don't get the same speed, momentum, and whipping effect, but the strikes have more weight behind them. This again is basically good news - Tres Espadas was never meant to be a stick fighting club - Tres Espadas was always supposed to be about knifes, machetes, hatchets and spears, the weapons of survival that you might actually have to use some day. The extra heft is also more like a randomly obtained improvised weapon - rather than like a well crafted baton or staff - improvised weapons being our main practical justification for training weapons in today's pre-apocalyptic world.
Third they don't flex. Your parries and blocks actually work. This would be a first for a Tres Espadas sparring weapon. Here's what this means for the future of the club, assuming that these weapons will continue to be popular with the club members:
Good bye LARP gear. No more frivolous Calimacil, no more pricey Karate helmets with plastic face shields. We will keep and use the ones we have, but we probably won't replace them as they expire.
Most of the time you will be sparring with a Fencing mask, because the actionflex staff, Nihonzashi wakizashi and Cold Steel rubber Tanto all work well with the Fencing mask and will be our most common sparring weapons.
This means that in order to own your own head gear, you don't have to buy two helmets, just the least expensive one - the fencing masks.
The more people own their own head gear, the more hygienic Tres Espadas becomes, as sharing helmets is definitely the least sanitary thing we do at the club.
This means that functionally, there may be in the future a sort of Tres Espadas uniform, namely, the fencing mask itself.
This means Tres Espadas members may finally have a place to put their badges - on the neck guard of their fencing mask!
This is all tentative, depending on what club members decide after the pandemic as time goes forward. I would point out that this fits the vision of what Phil had in mind: a club that would continue to evolve to develop the best practices and gear set for weapon free sparring. The change is that it is probably going in more of a martial arts aesthetic direction than a LARP aesthetic direction.
I have heard that Tai Chi master Chen Ziqiang (as a coach) has had a standing challenge against MMA fighter (and fake master exposer) Xu Xiaodong for YEARS now. The challenge is that Chen Ziqiang has a team of fighters, any one of which is eager to fight Xu Xiaodong. Below is the evidence why I think this challenge exists and why I think the story is credible. But before I go on, I just want to say that I am a huge fan of both of these men, as they are both very important voices in the global Chinese Martial Arts community when it comes to advocating for the practice of sparring. They have both dedicated their lives to practicing martial arts in the most legitimate way they could.
If you don't know already, Xu Xiaodong is a MMA fighter who exposes delusional martial arts masters the old fashioned way, by challenging them to fights:
Because of the overlap with Chinese Yoga (chi kung,) Tai Chi has the worst reputation for producing people who think they can fight, but who can't. Xu Xiaodong has beat up some (so-called) Tai Chi masters over this.
However Tai Chi is just as legitimate of a martial art as Karate if you practice a complete form of Tai Chi that does more than line dancing and yoga and has actual sparring in it. Right now the most respected Tai Chi master in the world is the head coach at the birthplace of Tai Chi (Chen Village,) Chen Ziqiang. Chen Ziqiang is known for his clinch skills, and there are various YouTube videos of his fights and doing his Tai Chi wrestling against other Tai Chi fighters.
So with Xu Xiaodong berating Tai Chi, and Chen Ziqiang being the foremost defender of Tai Chi, it makes sense that Ziqiang made this challenge. Because this claim was printed in a magazine, I am going to have to here show some pictures from that magazine, which show why I was interested in this particular issue of the magazine, and where it describes this challenges explicitly. So this is the cover of the magazine I refer to:
When I thumbed through the magazine at Barnes and Noble, I noticed something unique about this issue, which is it had back to back articles from the Choy Li Fut/Tai Chi organization I originally learned Tai Chi from (Doc Fai Wong's organization,) next to an article from the Tai Chi celebrity I am most interested in meeting in the future, Chen Ziqiang (the article itself written by a different Choy Li Fut organization.) Here's the table of contents:
Here's the front page of the 4 Tenets of Tai Chi article by people from Doc Fai Wong's organization (totally unrelated to this challenge other than some wonder if people from this organization spar enough, this is just illustrating part why I was personally so interested in this issue):
And the article immediately after that was this Chen Ziqiang one:
Now this was the article I had the highest expectations for, and to be frank I was disappointed - Chen Ziqiang actually just showed off a few of the most generic applications of Tai Chi known, and they weren't even Chen style specific, almost like an explanation of how to apply the techniques shown in the Doc Fai Wong article before.
But that article ends with a huge bang. Chen Ziqiang mentions Xu Xiaodong, and explains that there are huge problems in the Chinese Martial Arts from people not sparring enough. He goes on to explain that Xu Xiadong is helping to illustrate this problem. But then Chen Ziqiang criticizes Xu Xiadong:
Yes, that is indeed a "Choy Lee Fut: Chile" shirt that guy is wearing. Anyhow that paragraph on the left quotes Chen Ziqiang as saying word for word:
...the situation that I am going to tell you happened while I was in Europe. I arranged four of my students of all body sizes, some of them tall heavier, short, or lighter, to pay a visit to Xu Xiaodong. I offered Xu to pick any of them and test his sparring skills under any rules. But he refused to choose and spar with any of my students. A hundred percent of the people who Xu chooses to fight are the ones he can confidently defeat. So, he uses this kind of arrangement to show off his skills and make his declarations. There were three reporters who accompanied my students on their visit to Xu and recorded the whole interaction on video. Since Xu could not turn this situation to his own advantage, he got scared and even called the police. When the police arrived, he asked the police to take away my students. The police refused to take my students away, because the were not doing anything wrong. The police even asked Xu that if he was such a good fighter why he still needed their protection...
This amounts to a standing challenge to Xu Xiadong from the Chen Village (where Chen Ziqiang is the head coach.) The Chen Villiage's main export is Tai Chi training, and they are known for these incredibly long training days, something like you would expect from a Muay Thai camp in Thailand. Some have suggested training up to 12 hours a day... starting off with a long run, then standing mediation practice, then form practice. That would only get you to about 4 hours... apparently the rest of the day varies from day to day and includes various weapons training, conditioning, and various forms of push hands and sparring. Consider what real traditional Tai Chi sparring looks like in the first place:
Though Tai Chi people are known for using San Shou as a type of competition and the San Shou two-man forms in Tai Chi actually predate the San Shou tournament rule set, what you see above is more like no-Gi Enshin with unlimited clinch time. After reading accounts of what Sumo and Mongolian Wrestling were like in the ancient empires they originated in, I suspect that this is the rule set most Asian martial arts sparring originates from: the goal is to take down the opponent while you remain standing, no strikes to the head allowed.
But Chen Ziqiang frequently travels the world helping to spread Chen Tai Chi far and wide. He himself has fought with San Shou rules. He fully understands the difference between MMA and San Shou, and if Chen Ziqiang says he has students who will fight under any rule set, this tells me that they are sparring and training several different ways in the Chen Villiage. Maybe that would explain this:
There Chen Village Taijiquan Denver states "The upcoming generation of young masters at the village, whom we are trying to bring to the US MMA scene." Why hasn't Xu Xiaodong given Chen Village a reality check if all Tai Chi fighters are as useless as Xu says they are?
