So I’ve been making some good progress lately IMO. My area of focus with my teacher is doing tuishou/sanshou (push hands and sparring) with most everything (including striking, kicking, qinna’s, throwing, etc.) all eventually being thrown into the mix. The idea is to put ALL our applications from taiji, xingyi, and bagua into the tuishou and then the sanshou. This is a pretty tall order.
Long story short: I got my butt handed to me in so many ways this week. There are just a ton of considerations that need to be addressed and I have so many areas that need to be tightened up.
Somehow, the topic of patience and time got brought up and my teacher reminded me that it will take years of us doing this practice for me to integrate all the movements and come out with a top-notch game. Doesn’t mean I can’t play with others in the meantime naturally, just that there’s a lot to learn.
This led me to this conclusion: what you practice is what you know.
If you’re practicing something that doesn’t look like it’s going to lead you to what you want, you’d better switch fast. Because what you practice on a daily basis is what you know. If you want to be doing material with a martial focus, then you need to training that daily.
Forms practice is great, I do it all the time. But if you’re being told that it will take years before getting to push hands and the more martial focus of the practice, then you might want to re-think training at that school.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Frédo // May 27, 2007 at 3:53 pm
There was a saying, for those dedicated who used to train at least more than 3 hours a day: “Three years the small mastery, 5 years the medium one, 10 the big one”
The fact is that a lot of teachers refer to years of training for a level that used to be considered as the small mastery (which would, at least, allow the martial artist to face any combat situation against people not especially trained). It is most probably due to the fact that people do not train as much as they used to and, maybe also sometimes, that a teacher who lives from his art may want to keep his students as long as possible.
Furthermore, it may also be interesting to notice that, in the old days, the aim of a good student was to reach, or even go beyond, the level of his master within 3 to 5 years (him being younger and the master giving the student in a very short time clues to improve his skills and his training that took months, maybe years, to find out for the master). Of course, allowing one to reach or go beyond your level was a great risk in the days where martial arts had a real martial value for the society, so the masters would only give the clues to a happy few (and not that many, certainly under five), the ones they would totally trust, especially with their lives.
My 0.0000000000005 Hongkies
2 hakchigi // May 28, 2007 at 9:43 am
“Forms practice is great, I do it all the time. But if you’re being told that it will take years before getting to push hands and the more martial focus of the practice, then you might want to re-think training at that school.”
Completely agree… My Yang teacher had me doing push hands from frist class…
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