The Way of Least Resistance

In my recent article  on zhan zhuang I referred to martial arts teachers who start "believing their own hype" and the tendency this has to make the teacher's students more prone to becoming complicit (usually unconsciously) in the process. This is something today's marital artists commonly call "teacher chi" (a term first coined, I believe, by respected uechi ryu karate instructor  Dana Sheets ). In my experience, you often (though by no means always) see "teacher chi" in schools that test "pushing" . Now I want to be clear that in general I think tests of "pushing" are fine: solid structure can give you a good foundation for developing a strong push.  If such tests are presented appropriately, I have no issue with them at all.  An example of an unobjectionable "pushing test" is the yiquan one below. Nonetheless, I think that the data gained from such a "test of pushing" is of limited value.  Wh...

Introduction There is a tendency in the Chinese, and increasingly in the Japanese, martial arts to venerate “standing post” training - what is known as zhan zhuang (站樁 - literally “standing like a post”).  In particular the internal arts of China are known for this practise.  Even more particularly, the art of yiquan (意拳 - literally “concept fist”) focuses almost entirely on this as a martial training method. Yiquan, which is also called “da cheng quan” (大成拳 - literally “great achievement boxing”), was developed by xingyiquan master Wang Xiangzhai (26 November 1885 - 12 July 1963).  One of his students was the Taiwan-based martial artist Wang Shujin (a master of xingyiquan, baguazhang and taijiquan who happens to have also been one of my grandmaster Chen Pan Ling's main students). In Japan the yiquan tradition was continued by Kenichi Sawai, founder of the school of taikiken (体気拳 - literally “mind and spirit fist”). So what is the point of “standing post traini...

Today I had the rare honour of speaking with internal martial arts master, teacher and historian CS Tang at his studio in Hong Kong. Over our 2 hour interview we discussed many different topics covering xingyi, bagua (the Gao style of Zhang Junfeng in particular), taiji, Chen Pan-Ling, Wang Shujin, yiquan, shaolin, competition wushu and factors giving rise to change and evolution in all these martial arts systems. In the context of these discussions, I floated some of my theories of the relationships between various schools. As I predicted, Master Tang had quite a different take on things: for a start we discussed my long-held theory about the relationship between the zhan bu (battle stance) of xingyi (sometimes called "rowing stance" and seen in the "san ti" posture) and sanzhan/saamchien/sanzhan . Master Tang felt that xingyi's stance was of northern origin and was completely unrelated to the southern sanzhan-type stances. The fact that they might share ...