I recently asked about BJJ people learning material from books. Here’s my answer, which some of you have already hinted at in the comments.
Arts like judo and BJJ are “alive” in the sense that they are about what you can actually do, rather than where you got your material.
This is a great advantage of combat sports. Skills talk, BS walks. You can either get out there on the mat and do what you claim to do, or you can’t. If you learned some stuff from books and videos, but you can make it work, then it’s seen as being legitimate.
Now let me be clear: I’m not talking about people that just learned everything right from the beginning from a book. What I saw was serious BJJ guys taking outside sources and trying out the stuff to see if it would work. They already had some solid training with a live teacher before they did this kind of stuff.
They could also very clearly tell you if an author was full of it or not because they would try out the moves. Stuff that didn’t work or wasn’t well-illustrated got panned, as it should.
As I said before, this was a very refreshing experience for me, but also a bit of a sad one because I primarily do CMA’s. We have a real problem with legitimacy in CMA’s, and this is a Gordian knot with no solution, IMO.
PH doesn’t fit the bill because few groups agree on what is and isn’t taiji, let alone what is and isn’t PH. This is one reason that I like PH competitions. Many people step back and say “but that isn’t taiji,” and they sometimes have a good point. But getting out there and putting your stuff on the line is just the way to go. It’s the only way to make it alive.
So my hat’s off to guys that have real skills they can use on the mat, whether they learned from a book or not.
9 responses so far ↓
1 baichi // Mar 4, 2007 at 6:08 pm
Why is there no solution to the problem? Is your highest priority in training to have other people agree with what you do?
2 Yuxian // Mar 4, 2007 at 7:35 pm
Oops I didn’t see this latest post prior to posting in the other thread.
Good post. There is a solution. CMA needs to be more involved in a variety of sports combat environment.
The Yiquan guys in Beijing have made their foray in MMA. There is sanda and shuajiao. It’s still too little but there is hope.
3 mo // Mar 4, 2007 at 10:39 pm
just to clarify things a bit. the guys who competed in the mma tournament in beijing may have put down yiquan as their art but i assure you that they do sport sanda, as taught in the universities. i attended the art of war tournament, and i went to see their yiquan group practice. they were doing standard sanda drills, no hint of yiquan training at all.
4 Yuxian // Mar 5, 2007 at 8:18 am
Hi Mo,
Thanks for the info. That was interesting. Do you know who the “yiquan” fighters’ coach was? And if so, was he a yiquan teacher?
5 chessman71 // Mar 5, 2007 at 9:14 am
I don’t remember the names, myself. But I have heard of the YiQuan guys putting together a team and then fighting the BeiDa sanda team. Why on earth they would go out and challenge one of the top teams in China was beyond me. Apparently they thought their “internal skills” would protect them. They were VERY wrong.
I heard that every one of them got beat really badly.
Since then, I have seen clips of sanda sparring as done by YiQuan guys. Without saying anything potentially offensive, I would simply say that taking the “xing” out of what is essentially xingyi was not a very good idea. Having to re-invent the wheel can really hold you back.
6 Yuxian // Mar 5, 2007 at 11:26 am
Wow the yiquan guys have got guts! Do you know which Yiquan groups the fighters came from and what year this took place?
I visisted and trained briefly for two days at Cui Rui Bin’s school back in 2002. One of the senior student told me that Cui was planning to put together a team to fight Muay Thai in Thailand. I wonder if Cui’s school was involved in the event mentioned above. Cui was a good teacher and I think had alot to offer but when the senior student told me that idea, I thought they should conquer sanda first before even thinking of muay thai.
7 chessman71 // Mar 5, 2007 at 6:18 pm
I don’t know speciifically, but it could very well be the teacher you just mentioned. I read about it on the old Neijia List years ago.
Te story went that the teacher had lots of fighting experience when he was younger, but he had no idea about sanda as a sport, and had zero knowledge about coaching and athletics. The BeiDa sanda team is basically a group of Olympic-level athletes that do sanda all day long.
Putting the YiQuan goes up against them when the YiQuan guys had zero experience was a disaster. If I remember correctly, there were lots of first-round knockouts. Not the way to start out!
Let me know if you find out more info!
8 tim // Mar 6, 2007 at 9:50 am
Are you sure it was the Beijing Daxue sanda team? Because when I was there in the late 90s there were some guys who were good but also just a lot of regular kids.
Oh and they were really in to the Jun Fan JKD structure combined with shuai jiao.
9 chessman71 // Mar 6, 2007 at 10:01 am
The story may still be found in the Neijia Archives over to the left. I thought it was BeiDa, but maybe not. I heard that a lot of those guys went on to the “King of Sanda” competitions.
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