Classical Confusion, the importance of understanding terminology...

The importance of understanding terminology struck home recently as a group of us I-liq Chuan guys were discussing some of the finer points of the art and came to a startling conclusion; none of us knew what an ankle was.

Of course I don't mean on a level of every day understanding, but as it related specifically to the shen fa of I-Liq Chuan, which requires an entirely different level of comprehension.

If i were to say "I sprained my ankle" then the everyday use of the word is enough to understand my meaning. But if give you the instruction "the center of the ankle should be doing this", then you need to know exactly what I mean by "ankle".

Here's some examples. If I asked you to find the center of the circle below (Figure 1.), it should be fairly easy to come close.

Figure 1.

If I present you with another circle, but this time with a cross, it becomes even easier to find the center (Figure 2.)

Figure 2.

The above two examples could represent increasing levels of understanding. In Figure 1. we have a clear circle, with defined area that clearly visible from it's surroundings. You'd know pretty clearly what the speaker meant by when he or she used the term "ankle". In Figure 2., you're understanding would be like that of a Physical Therapist talking to another PT when they used specific anatomical names like "talus". Your understanding of the term is clear and definitive and you could physically touch the area in question if asked to.

Now find the center of the circle below (Figure 3.).

Figure 3.

It's almost impossible to find because the area of the circle is so poorly defined.

This is the boat my training brothers and I found ourselves in when we realized we'd been making an assumption that when we heard a word, we knew what was meant by that word, because it was one we'd been using our entire lives.

And that was a word in our native tongue. How much more is the problem compounded when you start trying to figure out what the speaker meant when they were speaking in an entirely different language, or when that language tends to carry different meanings for a word when that word is used in the context of martial arts compared to everyday usage, as is the case with Chinese.

I think this is one of the underlying problems with trying to understand the "classics" of the so called "internal" arts.

Let's take a look at an example from The Taijiquan Classic 太極拳論, by Wang, Zong-Yue.

一羽不能加，蠅虫不能落，人不知我，我獨知人，英雄所向無敵，蓋皆由此而及也

A feather cannot be added and a fly cannot land, The opponent does not know me, but I know the opponent. A "hero" has no equal because of this.
-Yang, Jwing-Mings Translation in "Tai Chi Theory & Martial Power"

Ok, sounds pretty cool, but what the hell is that supposed to mean?

Well I can tell you what it means to me as a practitioner of I-Liq Chuan. To us, "no landing" means you deny the opponent the opportunity to apply any force against you (your mass) by maintaining a 45º at the point of contact, while at the same time maintaining a 90º angle to his mass so that you can still apply force against him. In this way, he "doesn't know me" because I haven't given him a link to my center of mass, yet I "know him" because I do have some of his mass. In theory I should be able to feel (and more importantly, affect) his whole structure all the way down to his feet (effectively crushing his control over his own balance), yet all he should be able to feel of me is just the point where contact is being made between us.

This is just one example. Some might agree with my interpretation, some not. Some might agree until they actually feel me do this and then think I'm talking about something else entirely, or disagree based on the amount of force I used. In other words, they read the words I used and assumed that what they read is what I actually meant when I wrote them.

My Sifu (Master Sam F.S. Chin) was discussing this recently during the four day training retreat at his home in Poughkeepsie, New York. To paraphrase, he said "when I read the classics, I get some sudden enlightenment, like, ah yes, I know. I know what that means. But I don't really know if that's what he meant, because I don't have the same experience as him. I only have my own experience and what those words mean to me based on that."

Master Sam F.S. Chin lecturing students during the retreat.

So, with that in mind, do you think you really understood what I meant by all the 45º/90º talk? Unless you train in I-Liq Chuan, you probably don't, if for no other reason than when you separate a single concept from the rest of a series, you lose the proper context in which it's meant to be understood.

How much more misunderstood are the classics?

And what the hell is an ankle?

Double Dose of Dragon Door Delight...

Proud and Powerful.¹

Issue 172 of Power to the People, the e-newsletter by Pavel Tsatsouline had not just one, but TWO real gems this week, both involving Master PT and strength coach, Gray Cook.

...modern fitness has become a sort of sport to itself instead of being what you do to be better at a goal activity. So what is a modern fitness seeker to do?
-Gray Cook

I've been meaning to do some blogging on Gray Cook, and specifically his book "The Athletic Body in Balance", which centers around Cooks "FMS" or "Functional Movement Screen". The brilliance of Cooks method is to identify weakness in your movement pattern and then develop a training regimen that addresses the dysfunction, while at the same time achieve a training effect.

His method is also fairly lean. Instead of a trillion different movements, he's stripped it down to basic movement patterns and then relates exercises back to those.

For example, he identifies the squat, lunge and hurdle step as basic "lower body" movements. As a conditioning tool he reccomends skipping rope, and shows some classic techniques, which he relates bake to the squat (skipping with both feet side-by-side), the lunge (skipping with one foot forward and one foot back) and the hurdle step (skipping with "high knees"). If you've done his FMS you know which of those three patterns is your greatest weakness and you focus on that.

So for example, if you've been identified as having a squat deficency, you'd use the squat style skipping in your conditioning until you've been cleared on that movement pattern.

I used the training methods (in a basic way) laid out in "Athletic Body in Balance" to prepare for my KuoShu match in Baltimore MD last year, and I would say that I was the best prepared athlete in the Unlimited weight class (in terms of GPP).

Beautiful Strength²

The old time strongmen used the Get-Up as an "entrance exam" requiring a 100-pound Get-Up on each side before beginning any other training. The Turkish Wrestlers used the Get-Up to train for combat and grappling. And today the Get-Up represents an opportunity for everyone to regain the "beautiful strength" and symmetry that our so-called fitness routines should bring us.
-Gray Cook

Read the Kalos Sthenos article.

It may be difficult to understand how movements such as crawling or rolling relate to strength and performance enhancement, however development of fundamental movement is the foundation that leads to effective functional performance. This foundation is often neglected in the approaches we take to enhance function and/or performance through exercise programming.

Baby learning to roll over.³

Read Cook's Primitive Movement article.

Here's a partial FMS with analysis:

Credits:
Images can be found in their original form here¹, here² and here³.

Kyuzo Mifune...

Again, not Chinese but I still thought this was really nice. I love how simply, and gracefully he counters the hip throws by just sliding around his opponents hips.

This puts the Jiu (soft) in Judo.

Demo for Chinese New Year...

Here's the demo from today...



Please leave your ideas on what you thought was good or what you thought was bad in the comments.