So think about it for a minute: why DO you train? What is it that you hope to get out of IMA?
Broadly speaking, I would say that most people fall into the following few paradigms:
- IMA for fun — This probably covers most people. They do it because they enjoy it. They tend to not be serious about training, so I won’t have much to say about this group. But this is widespread. Here in Taiwan, it seems to be common for late-middle age men and women to join some sort of group in the parks that are doing something or other and taiji is as good as anything else. But badminton and dancing are considered about the same thing. The emphasis is on talking, moving a little, and having a good time. I call it “social hour in the park” taiji.
- IMA for health — This applies mostly to taiji. Some people train seriously because of an illness — real or perceived. They may train intensively to cure themselves or ward off illness. I see some people out every morning here and they may do two hours or more of qigong and taiji every day.
- IMA for fighting — This paradigm is more common in xingyi, then baguazhang, and finally taiji, in that order. Obviously, people who adhere to this paradigm are interested in fighting skill.
- IMA for energy work and meditation (qigong and shengong) — All three of the main IMAs can be used for this, but taiji and bagua have more of a corner on this market. The point of this paradigm is to explore and cultivate internal energy with the possibility of the practice reaching near religious levels.
- IMA for IMA’s sake or the “Internal Strength” approach –This paradigm has become more popular in recent years. These people train without regard to health, fighting, or qigong/meditation. The goal here is to develop the arts as arts unto themselves. In the other paradigms, the IMA’s served as a vehicle to something else. Here, the arts are seen as being valuable by themselves. These folks will practice without a martial intent usually, so applications are passed up in favor of endless practice and discussion of jins (IMA skills and powers). This is where you’ll usually find your purists. Except in the case of the “internal strength” folks, where they run roughshod over differences in the IMA’s and might combine aspects of them.
All of these paradigms are naturally valid and all but the first one take IMA’s seriously. So that’s all well and good.
Some points need to be made here:
- Some people combine paradigms. For example, I practice 80 percent for fighting and maybe ten each for health and qigong/meditation. However, everyone practices out of one predominantly.
- A person will often move from one paradigm to another over time. Many people start out in fighting or health and then move on to another later on. I think this is natural.
The problem comes in when a person from one paradigm interacts with a person from another paradigm. If you do taiji and bagua religiously to attain enlightenment, you aren’t likely to have much patience with the guy who takes a class every now and then for fun.
Likewise, a person who subscribes to a fighting paradigm isn’t going to want to hear endless theoretical talk about how he can “open the third eye” unless that will tie into his fighting paradigm in some way.
One of the biggest problems is people from the IMA-for-IMA’s-sake paradigm criticizing those of us from the fighting paradigm. Many times people from that paradigm feel a sense of natural superiority because they don’t practice with all that “lower stuff” like fighting in mind. That’s too crude and primitive, you see. Instead, the taiji or other classics will be mentioned over and over again, and theory will take precedence over everything else.
The problem with the IMA-for-IMA’s-sake paradigm is that they have no metrics to judge progress. Fighters should get better at fighting, health people should get more healthy. But IMA-for-IMA’s-sake people should what? Get better at taiji or bagua as what? How to judge that without recourse to the outside?
So what you get is a bunch of in-bred thinking and metrics. Exercises and interactions will be made up that have no other purpose. For example, person A stands in a contrived position and person B stands in a contrived position opposite A. Can A then use only his mind to push over B? Who cares? Only some IMA-for-IMA’s-sake people.
The skill sets for these different paradigms usually DO NOT cross over.
You may be a health expert, but be clueless about fighting, etc. If you spend most of your time doing exercises that are NOT related to what you hope to achieve, you WILL NOT achieve your goals. It’s just that simple.
So many times, people get confused at what they’re doing and think their abilities in one paradigm extend to everything else. “This way is only way” they say. “This is THE pure art.”
The xingyi teacher I ran into a while back was like that. He didn’t go around looking at other arts or versions of xingyi, yet he spent lots of time putting them down. Why look at them when you’re naturally superior?
He was an IMA-for-IMA’s-sake guy 100%. By HIS metrics, he was the best and I admit that he was incredibly powerful by those standards. Problem was, he thought his abilities applied universally. When he forced the issue with me, I showed him very quickly that his skill set DID NOT extend into the fighting paradigm, as he thought it did.
I write this because you MUST know why you practice in order to progress towards your goal. Once you have figured out what paradigm you fall under, don’t buy into people’s little games where they try to impose metrics from their paradigm onto you. If they don’t fight because “it’s about more than that,” then they have no reason to criticize, period.
Don’t buy into this “oh, he’s using force. That’s not taiji” or “that goes against the taiji classics” nonsense.
Figure out why you practice and don’t let others tell you that what you want out of your art is inferior.
22 responses so far ↓
1 James // Jun 7, 2007 at 6:32 pm
Well said, indeed. Just to stress this applies both ways to all permutations.
Historically I’ve been in the fun, health and meditation strands. In recent years I’ve added some fighting training too.
Some fight-oriented folk here in the UK disparage any other approach to taiji, or even deny the right to use that name for anything other than a full-on martial approach. They usually present their arguments with intensity too. That would be the Wood element I guess.
It can be a bit intimidating if you’re from the health, religious or energy strands of practice.
2 Dojo Rat // Jun 7, 2007 at 11:01 pm
Well, I got my fighting experiance in twenty-years of Taekwon Do and Kenpo. If I was strictly interested in fighting, I would still be doing Kenpo, and learning all there is to learn about the art.
So I would have to say that my transition into IMA (Yang Taiji and Bagua) must have an element of health and practice into my senior years.
I think I have experianced an option you may not have mentioned; I am now viewing my hard style techniques through the “lens” of IMA.
That is, a realization and fascination with the obvious and subtle differences between the way I used to apply technique and the way I do it now.
This means closer range fighting, and more yin or yielding elements.
After all this time, it’s not just for fighting, or just health and meditation. It’s more than a hobby, I think it has become part of me…
3 JessO // Jun 8, 2007 at 2:40 am
Nice post. I think that Dave is being a bit too hard here in the divisions.
I’m a combo of much of the above types, probably most of us are. IMA offers ways to train all of these things and probably more. Which is one of the reasons it’s so cool. Western sports don’t offer much of this stuff, so we turn to martial arts to fill this kind of need.
For instance, I train fighting. I’ve sparred full contact with many different styles. But my goal is always to deepen my sense of awareness, presence and aliveness. Not just technique execution, but keeping my mind awake and present is my goal.
Once in the midst of a match I saw my opponent blink, shut his eyes and throw his punch. This took place in a microsecond of time. Normally I would have missed this in the stress and roar of a full contact session. However, I was training my meditative, awareness senses, and I was able to catch this moment. I FORCED myself to stay awake and in the moment, rather than being distracted by the pain and ego of the “fight”.
Now, is this fighting? Or is this mindfulness? Or could I apply this kind of work to my chi development? All of the above, I think.
So I see a holistic synthesis, ideally, between all of the elements. Without meditation I never would have seen that moment. Without fight traiing I never would have retaliated effectively. Without Chi Gung it wouldn’t have hit him hard enough to send him reeling and stop the match.
But I agree, you can’t claim to be training to fight if you never fight. And you can’t claim to be training the chi if you don’t have any. And you can’t claim to be doing it for fun if you sit around worrying if Chuck Liddell can beat you or not (he CAN!).
I agree with Dave, but I do feel that some of these things do cross over quite nicely. A good topic worthy of many discussion.
-Jess O
4 Patrick Parker // Jun 8, 2007 at 2:46 am
Well, like Dojo Rat, I’ve hopefully got my fighting in the past, though I agree with you that you have to have some metric to keep you on the right path, and that there is really no better metric than the fighting paradigm. Anything else is pretty much theoretical.
Doing it for health benefits as a metric is shaky because you can’t measure non-events. If you do IMA for 10 years without having a heart attack you can’t really say that is a health benefit of the IMA.
I’d say my motivation is fighting, fun, and meditation. But for me, the meditation aspect is really just an obsessive facination with the kinesthesia and eficient biomechanics.
5 jonathan liljeblad // Jun 8, 2007 at 3:06 am
the other dark aspects of this are:
1) when proponents of the various contingents go from just being “impatient” to outright hostile. in which case, they’re not just people with preferences, but rather ideologues with agendas–agendas that mean insisting their way is the ONLY “right” way and that all other ways need to be suppressed. i don’ think this is what life was ever meant to be about.
2) when nefarious representatives start misleading people about what they teach in an attempt to get more business–for example, a teacher who treats IMA as social exercise starts telling people he’s teaching self-defense, with the hope of drawing more students, even though he has not intention of teaching self-defense. in which case, this becomes lying, and worse, puts victims in danger by making them believe they are gaining abilities when they’re really not.
i kind of had a similar experience with the past year’s World Tai Chi & Qi-Gong Day in LA…it was rife with pot-smoking hippies discussing immortality and sexual energy, even as they claimed to be teaching self-defense. i was really troubled by this–enough that i devoted entire posts on the topic on my own blog about the nature of public shows and how people treat tai chi.
i’m thinking the entire fractious nature of so many cliques is what drives some martial artists to become recluses–in effect, they just get frustrated with the situation, and just say “screw it” and go off and do their own thing, going so far as to not take students or make appearances with colleagues.
6 james // Jun 8, 2007 at 3:54 am
I eventually ended up learning IMA because I was very ill with ME/CFS when I was in my early twenties. I have to say that there are very real measuring sticks for me in my health orientated training: getting rid of migraines, helping deal with my exhaustion problem and (recently after my rather mad last few years of continent changing) dealing with erratic sleep patterns, jet lag and insomnia. I can literally get rid of a migraine by doing my form. I am not talking about slight headaches, but something that used to have me in bed for 3 days. Likewise i can cope with long flights and disturbed sleep patterns significantly better than in my pre IMA days (I mostly do taiji, but learnt martially focused Xingyi in the UK for a while)
Actually i am presently being driven mad by my teacher here who seems to be most interested in us doing the form “exactly right” in external terms and having a “harmonious attitude” as we join with the energy of the sky. ;(
7 chessman71 // Jun 8, 2007 at 6:42 am
Jess,
If you’re doing meditation, etc. but the INTENT is still for fighting, then fighting is your paradigm.
The post is trying to describe WHY people train. The elements can and should mix to some degree for each paradigm. But that doesn’t mean that one person doesn’t primarily train for one reason.
8 Hermann // Jun 8, 2007 at 8:45 am
Nice post with lots of interesting opinions, but still very theoretical and not always necessarilly a must.
I came out of western competitive swimming, looking for bodywork without an enemy/opponent to overcome, just working for myself, without knowing any developing direction.
Second phase was the fighting paradigm, it lasted some 8 to 10 years, comming to the conclusion that IMA is much more, really. Getting hurt or hurting is no fun forever.
Third phase, getting older with first ailments, health should be the topic, but it is not. I just lost the knowledge of why I’m doing it. I don’t know it anymore.
It just feels fine, I do it for the sake of it, for the energies developed for daily live, a kind of aimlessness.
Could there be an approach for training without any hope for concrete results?
My old master always said to me: The only constant in the universe is movement, so you better move, too, in this way or that way, never mind. Otherwise you will be hit in your motionlessness by motion.
Master Yoda?
9 chessman71 // Jun 8, 2007 at 10:34 am
Some posts are meant to put others into perspective and flesh out what I’m thinking on the blog. This one is an example.
I would put what you’re talking about in the fun category, for lack of a better one.
10 Kreese // Jun 8, 2007 at 12:25 pm
The part about having no metric hits home for me. I for one want to get better and better at something. I think IMA for wellbeing and happiness is the most dangerous path because it is rife for opportunities to fall into self-delusion. Who is really to say that IMA is holier than boxing or swimming? That’s why martial arts for fighting is so much more honest and may prove to be a valid tool for spirituality depending on how you define spirituality.
11 Moving… Still… » Blog Archive » Training Styles // Jun 8, 2007 at 6:14 pm
[...] Formosa Neijia - Exploring Taiwan’s Martial Arts » Why do you train? IMA paradigms So think about it for a minute: why DO you train? What is it that you hope to get out of IMA?… [...]
12 Jose de Freitas // Jun 9, 2007 at 12:55 am
I think Hermann is very right: we may change our focus from year to year, even from week to week. In the end, IMHO, if it isn’t fun from your perspective, then I suppose you’ll quit.
I’ve been hammering at this crazy weird thing we call martial arts (and our wives and friends sometimes call “that guy’s sort of idiot hobby”) for the last 24 years of my life, and pretty much all the people I knew that trained with mostly one focus in mind eventually drifted away and quit. One of the problems is defining fun: even if you practice for fighting, if in the long run you don’t have fun, you’ll quit - or else you are in even bigger trouble than I care to imagine, from a pathological point of view… So you can change your focus from time to time. I’ve gone from being interested in fighting, to being totally uninterested and practicing for health and shengong motives, to being again interested in fighting etc… Also, how do you define “training for fighting”? It is a truism that in today’s world, martial arts training for fighting is about as inefficient an investment as they come. Six months of weight lifting at the gym, a couple of self defense seminars, and most of all getting a gun or two and being good at using them will probably equal 10 years of dojo training! Certainly, I do not train for fighting as some would put it. Nothing would freak me out more than being on a fight and I’m sure to run away from one as fast as I can! But I LOVE knowing applications and working at them, do not mind being thrown around and even subject myself to sparring (which I have come to sort of tolerate), just because the fighting aspects of the MAs are so cool. Does this mean I train for fighting? No way, IMO. But I can apply a lot of apps full speed and demo the stuff I learned. So, by some standards I am training for fighting. But from my perspective, the coolness of the applications, the anatomical precision of them, the nastiness, the flow etc… are a huge part of the FUN of the martial arts. Also, the MAs fulfill a weird need of human contact, in a very close way. So, is this fun or fighting? Again, the fact that I am still practicing MAs is directly related to qigong. I had quit Karate after ten years, and only started Taiji and Xingyi later because they had qigong (qigong practice saved my life and I became very interested in the whys and hows and wherefores of qigong and chinese medicine), and I basically nowadays refuse to practice stuff that doesn’t at least advance my health perspective. It’s hard to define focuses in the MAs because it’s hard defining human personalities.
People who have trained for years always train for more than one reason, I guess.
13 Jose de Freitas // Jun 9, 2007 at 12:58 am
Sorry for that huge paragraph. I meant to cut into two or more bits, but forgot…
14 james // Jun 9, 2007 at 4:13 am
It is true that the whole practice can easily drop into self delusion. And if i wanted to learn self defense I´d do krav magna. I am having this problem with my teacher at the moment: more and more I feel the school is metaphorically doing a slow dance to new age music: there is a lot of talk about qigong and energy and lineage and what the master says, but I don´t get much sense of reality, whether for you that means good circulation to your feet and hands or the ability to win a fight. But when I practice standing and form on my own I break a sweat in an unheated Santiago flat first thing in the morning in the winter. Something is happening!
15 jonathan liljeblad // Jun 9, 2007 at 5:30 am
i thought of another paradigm you may add to the list:
historical & cultural preservation. some of the people i’ve met in TCMA say their ulterior goal is to see TCMA preserved, so it is not forgotten. they see teaching TCMA as an act of oral history, and passing on the accumulated knowledge of previous masters to the next generation.
my Sifu seems to be in this group, since he constantly insists that we keep things in perspective and in the context of the historical role of martial arts–and how that role may have evolved to changing conditions and societal needs. i notice that Adam Hsu, in his writings, also seems to reference this idea. both are in the Wutan organization, so i don’t know if this is something endemic to Wutan, but i suspect it’s something worth noting.
16 thomas // Jun 9, 2007 at 8:02 am
dave c., here ya go:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlNWOk5kRvI&mode=related&search=
;- )
17 chessman71 // Jun 9, 2007 at 8:47 am
Tom,
Why do those classes always have better looking women? That’s it, I take back everything I said.
18 seeker6 // Jun 9, 2007 at 3:48 pm
I practice for fun and I take kung fu seriously.
19 taijiquestion // Jun 9, 2007 at 11:04 pm
What about IMA for self-defense? This could be considered as falling under the “fighting” classification but does it? I mean, aside from professional soldiers, the growth of so-called IMA (and MA in general)was a personal-defense issue for individuals, clans, and communities, was it not?
So there’s the category of most of us, “I like doing this, it’s good for me, and it’ll come in handy if I ever get jumped on the street”.
Then there are people who are firstly looking to feel safer on the street; and may reap additional side benefits also. Not that IMA is the first choice for this paradigm! Before my last trip abroad I boned up on “The SAS Self-Defense Handbook”.
You may well have covered this subject in full on your other posts. I just thought that breaking down these various groups may have hidden pitfalls. Mostly because we ARE drawing from established traditions, however they get changed. Like Rock and Roll, eastern martial arts were more holistic in the old days. You got an integrated experience that did what it did, and left the rest to other genres of life. Now we have a lot more “fusion” going on and though evolution and grafting-of-elements has always been around, now as with rock & roll there is a lot more derivative product (as is inevitable) and also the Fusion-forms are more of a mishmash, what with that much more history and predecessors to draw from. And yet “purity”, though a nice ideal, unavoidably may seem a bit quaint or simply outdated in a practical, everyday sense.
So what’s my point? You said: “I practice 80 percent for fighting and maybe ten each for health and qigong/meditation.” Well, without the fighting types, the rest of us would probably not have any MA to talk about! And yet I’ll bet you actually feel you get most of the “health & meditation” you need from your fighting pursuits. It’s what you do, and it feels good. As for me, I may never put gloves on, and yet I’ll want to kick some ass one day if a good fight comes my way. Hope I’ll have the right stuff that time, we don’t get a second chance as I learned in my teens the first time I caught a sucker punch in the mouth! Didn’t see it coming, that was my first mistake. Thought I could talk my way out of trouble, that maybe wasn’t a mistake but I still needed to be ready for that straight jab.
20 Kreese // Jun 9, 2007 at 11:11 pm
Practicing to fight _is_ preserving tradition. It’s creating new tradition.
Unless one is working with some level of resistance and/or contact I (personally) wouldn’t even pretend to be preparing to win any fight I wouldn’t already be able to win.
21 chessman71 // Jun 10, 2007 at 9:42 am
Kreese,
Yes, excellent point. But that can be tough to sell over here.
Taijiquestion,
Fusion in CMA is nothing new. There was a huge amount of fusion going on at around the turn of the century. Sparring gear from the West was introduced, boxing and wrestling were added, as were Western exercises. Mixed martial arts is nothing new in China. The problem is, we’ve had a backlash of sorts and lost ALL the ground we had gained in CMA. More and more, people are retreaing into their fantasy worlds.
22 taijiquestion // Jun 10, 2007 at 12:01 pm
Well, you talk like a fighter, and I mean that as a compliment. I agree with those who say that if one REALLY doesn’t want to fight, then swimming, ikebana, and dozens of other pursuits are great ways to relax, exercise, and cultivate oneself.
Me, I prefer not to fight mostly. But if it comes down to it, I want to WIN, or more precisely in my case, to have choices and be in control of the situation. Accepting others’ impositions gets old after a while.
I thought that a mini-golden age of fighting was in progress and I felt that I was reaping part of the benefit with Chen style taijiquan finding its way out of China and almost right to my doorstep. Then I decided that I could take up Yang style and still get the right stuff. But you’ve been doing the quest for a long time and if you see big trouble shaping up in what might look like a rosy picture, me and others are obliged to listen closely.
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