Thanks to Mokuren Dojo for this link.
This clip shows the possibilities when the notion of play beyond obvious martial application is added to your training. It’s called contact improvisation — a form of post-modern dance that uses continuous points of contact to determine motion. Notice their great ability to stick, adhere and follow — something that I greatly admired about the recent Sam Masich video that I noted here.
Look at the one finger sticking exercise. Imagine the possibilities available to you martially if you could do that to any part of your opponent’s body. Qinna can flow naturally from that.
The floor work shown here is amazing. They can stick, adhere, and follow their partner throughout a full range of motion. They never break contact. How can that not be useful for groundfighting?
One thing that I think people need to be clear about is the separation of training vs. fighting. Just because the ultimate goal is fighting skills DOES NOT mean that everything we do has to be full contact. Seriously, isn’t that just obvious?
In order to improve flow and sticking, those equalities need to be singled out and explored without concerns about martial application. In order to develop something, we often need to single it out and through experimentation, follow it wherever it will lead. After the skills are gained, they can be integrated into your overall game and the drills that built them can be dropped for a time.
There is no chance that this type of play alone will create bad habits. You don’t protect yourself when you do pushups. Is that building bad habits? I don’t think about someone coming up and applying a chokehold on me from behind when I’m punching the heavy bag. Am I missing the point of heavy bag work? I don’t think so. I’m suggesting that you should do this type of play as part of your overall training, not focus on this to the exclusion of everything else.
For those of you willing to try it, I think you’ll find it both rewarding and actually fun. This type of play can really help you break down barriers related to your body movement that pure martial arts may be allowing you to hide from others, particularly through your fear.
13 responses so far ↓
1 faik // Jun 24, 2007 at 8:00 pm
“This type of play can really help you break down barriers related to your body movement that pure martial arts may be allowing you to hide from others, particularly through your fear”
I don’t get it! What do you mean by that?!
People’s perception of the movements through proprioceptive sense organs like touch, pressure or temperature can vary a lot and its complex activity. If you “listen” with your fingers or any part of your body, you can be affected by that because this “feeling” is guided action. This action (listening) creates kinesthetic feel for the person that is different from the one he or she experiences when performing the movement in an unassisted fashion. For example your perception of the feel associated with the action of standing up from a seated position can be distorted if someone else assists you during a demonstration of a movement.
When you do push ups, nobody assists you when you perform that movement. You don’t wait and “listen” to the muscles of your body when you push up or go down.
2 taijiquestion // Jun 24, 2007 at 11:56 pm
Hmmm… “the better you can move, the better you can fight”? I get that part for sure.
I think you’re saying that if all one’s training is traditional fight-related and strength-related, and “everyone else” is doing the same tried-and-true things to train, then how does one really get an edge over the competition? Training more of the same, up to overtraining? Why not be a master of movement instead?
Muhammad Ali had all the strength and the boxing techniques that the other guys did, but he made sure he always had something more. His “tricks” weren’t to some peoples’ taste but it made the difference of who got the victory belt in the end.
This can relate to all kinds of things. Many years ago I used to hear about “Tai Chi posture” and think, man, no way am I ever going to look like that! I want “Marine Corps” body posture! I was afraid of being wimpy and so I ignored tai chi for years and did more pushups instead.
3 Kreese // Jun 25, 2007 at 4:50 am
Tigers and wolves, for example, learn to hunt and fight by playing. Their play does simulate hunting and fighting, however. I am curious whether skills need to be learned in context just as conditioning is also context specific. How far away from from the martial context can you learn a skill and still expect it to be expressed when under pressure?
4 faik // Jun 25, 2007 at 4:02 pm
“How far away from the martial context can you learn a skill and still expect it to be expressed when under pressure?”
I’ll give you one example of that right now. Let’s say you want to reach with your hand a cup of coffee, or tea you want to drink. The cup is on the table btw. You’ll not think which hand you want to reach with. Won’t you? If you were right or left hand person, you would not think like: ok, now I want to use left or right hand to drink coffee. You would just use your dominate hand. But, under such calm situation you could use either. What if you would be under pressure like: Suddenly, your daughter (which is 2 years old) was near the table and wants to “grab” the cup. You could say that your reactions would be either “jumping” from your chair to your daughter to stop her, or for the cup to “lift” it with the dominate hand. My point is, when under major pressure, the deep habits push through and you can’t control that.
5 JessO // Jun 26, 2007 at 2:49 am
I sparred with a Contact Improv guy a few times. Not sure why he wanted to fight, but he did. He had nice fluid movement, but it was fairly purposeless. I was trying to play light and not hurt him. He jabbed out full speed and flicked me in the eye, that hurt. So I used Pi Quan, and pushed his head on the ground and sorta crushed it into the floor because my eye hurt pretty bad. He had done it to my friend earlier and we’d asked him to watch it, so I was kinda pissed.
He kept squirming around so I squashed his head some more. I must admit that dude got on my nerves.
Seems like CI is pretty cool training though. You never know what new stuff you’ll come up with doing that kind of thing. Not sure if it mixes well with martial arts unless you train both.
-Jess O
6 chessman71 // Jun 26, 2007 at 9:53 am
Well, I wasn’t really talking about doing contact improv by itself. I meant to *perhaps* do some of it as part of an overall fight training program.
7 taijiquestion // Jun 26, 2007 at 11:30 am
That’s a weird story, JessO. You make the guy out to be either reckless or a menace; or both. Invitation to spar and he goes for the EYE? And then no follow-up with solid gungfu (this is assuming he’s vicious, that’s what he shoulda done, go for the crushing move). And then you rightfully applied the crushing move and rubbed it in some more, not enough to hospitalize, but something he’d remember.
I’ve read other stories like this though, including from Chessman. I guess the moral is that there are some idiots out there. I ought to remember that when I advance beyond the friendly confines of my taiji class.
8 Kreese // Jun 26, 2007 at 10:31 pm
Faik,
If you were attacked with a knife and your instinct is to reach out to block, I think you could override this reflex. Reaching out for a cup of coffee is not really a skill, anyway. Martial art is more than knee-jerk reaction.
9 JessO // Jun 27, 2007 at 1:25 am
taijiquestion-
no doubt that guy was a hell of a menace. I just told it cause that’s my only experience with CI.
I think CI can help martial artists learn something about their own emotions and ego by being very soft and non-competitive.
I think, however that some CI people should cut loose and do some fighting cause they are holding their aggression way too deep and have no outlet. Like this dude who was stabbing eyes left and right in a very passive aggressive way. So I got pissed and squashed his head on the ground. Not exactly a mature thing to do on my part but it sure felt right.
Sparring really brings up a lot of emotional stuff for a lot of people, including myself. You just never know what will come up out of your depths, it’s some very powerful stuff. It’s also one of the funnest parts of martial arts.
-Jess O
10 Scott // Jun 27, 2007 at 10:51 am
I’m really glad you guys are broadening the conversation to include other kinds of training. If I had more discipline I would just ignore this but… Karl Frost, the guy in the video used to be my housemate. He has probably grown into a really great human being, but I remember him as kind of a con-artist. He was also one of the most passive aggressive people I’ve ever met. He had this habit of smiling with his lower row of teeth, like a chimpanzee claiming territory. That still gets my back up just thinking about it.
Since he claims that he learned some of what he teaches from me…in like a couple days of training, I feel qualified in saying I think CI’s sensitivity (tingjin) training is totally superficial. I think he got that spinning around the center-line exercise he does in the beginning from me. George Xu used to have us do the finger exercise but we actually grabbed the finger so you had to move all over the place to avoid getting it snapped.
Train a lot of CI and you will develop, what George Xu calls, Tofu skills. That is, enough softness to injure only your self.
I did contact improv for a few years back in the eighties. A lot of dancers get too caught up in formal technique and contact improv certainly helps them let go of that. It also offers a lot to the small part of the dance world that is emotionally afraid to touch each other in interesting ways including, lifts, throws, etc…But let’s face it, it isn’t very interesting to watch.
And people! there is another reason I think it won’t really help your training, I must confess, that when I danced with women I’d almost always get a raging boner. That made it kind of hard to dance, not to mention all the social complications for a young man of my virility.
PS. Don’t pushups make your arms stiff?
I think I’ll do a blog on this in a couple of days, at “Weakness with a twist”
11 chessman71 // Jun 28, 2007 at 8:43 am
Scott,
Now that was interesting. Thanks for chiming in on this. The background info is always welcome.
My teacher has told me that CI could help me with some areas of my game. I keep closing down instead of opening up. I do that so I don’t get hit. Because I always close down and protect myself so much, I can have a tendency to break the flow, as it were. he has told me many times that CI, in general, can have positive effects on training IF it isn’t done too much.
Personally, I just would like to incorporate this aspect of training into my push hands. i think that would be enough.
So do you have any suggestions for getting the benefits of CI while avoiding the weaknesses, other than what I’ve mentioned?
BTW, I added you to the blogroll.
12 Scott // Jun 28, 2007 at 1:42 pm
Hey thanks for adding me to the blogroll, I’ve been meaning to put you on mine too.
I wrote a long answer to your question and posted it on my blog under the title ‘Tuishou vs. Roushou’
Here is a little exerpt:
“…roushou allows slapping with a soft hand. The basic rule is that I can only slap with as much force as I can get sliding off of my partner’s defense. The harder or more actively my partner defends, the harder and more often they get hit. And of course, the same goes for me. So first you learn to defend lightly, than not to defend at all.”
Check out the rest at “Weakness with a Twist”
13 junae.lansu.net : Contact improv // Jul 14, 2007 at 6:35 am
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