Transcript
Speaker: The Kung Fu Crew Podcast.
Speaker: bringing together practitioners of various styles and schools and their unique perspectives to explore the world of Chinese martial arts.
Speaker: Welcome to the next episode of the Kung Fu Crew podcast.
Speaker: This time around, we will be talking about Tongbei Quan, a northern style of Chinese martial arts with a quite long, illustrious history, probably influenced a lot of other styles and is still one of the major schools of northern Chinese martial arts.
Speaker: My guest is Rosa May, who is now living in Czech Republic in Prague, who has been practicing Tongbei Chuan among other things.
Speaker: She actually has a very long and very diverse history of martial arts herself.
Speaker: And she will be sharing a lot of her insights and ideas about functional martial arts training, specifically about Tongbei.
Speaker: She will be telling us how she learned it and how she is teaching it currently.
Speaker: And I hope you have a great time.
Speaker: I hope you can gain some insights from her wisdom and her experiences.
Speaker: And let's jump into the interview.
Speaker: Today I'm talking to Rosa May from Prague or Praha as it's in Czech, I think, right?
Speaker: Yes, Praha.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Welcome to the podcast.
Speaker: It's great to have you here.
Speaker: Maybe to start, maybe you want to give a quick introduction of yourself so that people know who I'm actually talking to, like what you what you do and where you came from and how you got to be where you are right now.
Speaker: Okay, so my name is Rosa May, and I've been doing martial arts for over 30 years now.
Speaker: That's a long time.
Speaker: It's like, however, my students, it's longer than they've been alive.
Speaker: Yes, I've been doing it a long time.
Speaker: Now I focus primarily on Tongbei Kung Fu, which is a style of northern Kung Fu that's
Speaker: translates as through the back, and it's the mother style of mantis.
Speaker: It has many influences from Shaolin, Kung Fu, Sui Zhao, Tai Chi, Ji Gong, and what people recognize as tongbei are the long swinging arms.
Speaker: So the movements were originally based on like the moves of a white gibbon.
Speaker: So if you were to find a corollary in the movement world, you might think of like one wall handball where the guys are really swacking a ball with long swinging arms.
Speaker: Then you sort of get an idea of where we're coming at in training.
Speaker: But apart from the Tongbei, I was also...
Speaker: First trained in Kali Salat.
Speaker: That was my first style of martial arts.
Speaker: I mean, I did some karate as a kid.
Speaker: Then later on, I trained in Aikido.
Speaker: That was because when I was in dance school, because I'm a professional dancer as well as a martial artist.
Speaker: I was trying to find a supplement to my ballet and modern training.
Speaker: And so I started Aikido and I did that for 13 years.
Speaker: And then when I moved to New York in the 90s, I started training with Lama Kung Fu, which is Tibetan style of martial arts.
Speaker: It's very similar to Choy Lê Phật, and that was with Chan Tai San, and I did that for three years.
Speaker: And then I also, after that, I decided I should really focus on northern styles because it was more suited to my body.
Speaker: And so I started training in traditional mantis, Pi Gua and Ba Ji with Su Chang, so seven star mantis, and also Ba Bu Tang Lang, which is eight step mantis.
Speaker: And at the same time, I was also doing modern wushu, which I've done a lot.
Speaker: And I was also formerly a member of the U.S. wushu team.
Speaker: So I did a lot of tumbling and, I guess, flashy moves, acrobatic stuff, because, you know, when you're young, you want to jump around and kick and...
Speaker: do flashy things.
Speaker: But now I'm really, really focused on functional martial arts training.
Speaker: I think that's my mantra, form equals function.
Speaker: And so that's where I am now.
Speaker: And so what I want to do in my martial arts teachings is actually
Speaker: you know, focus on universal training systems for people where they understand how to get a feedback loop from their training.
Speaker: So they are focused not just on how a move should look, but what is the move used for?
Speaker: And how do you use both your internal and external energy to, you know, reach that goal of how to train your momentum, your targets, use your hips and torque and things like that.
Speaker: Yeah, there's a lot of interesting stuff in there that I think we'll go back to.
Speaker: But first, let's do some housekeeping.
Speaker: And I start with a question that sometimes throws people because most of the time we don't think about it.
Speaker: How would you define martial art?
Speaker: Because you mentioned you're also a dancer and you did modern wushu, which is more based on performance.
Speaker: But how would you define a martial art?
Speaker: What does a training system need in order for you to be called a martial art?
Speaker: Well, I mean, I think martial arts or kung fu, it was—I mean, originally it's a fighting system, you know, and there are many styles of fighting systems.
Speaker: And in martial arts, you know, I mean, I do lots and lots of weapons work because I love all sword work and sticks, single swords, double swords, whip chains, rope darts, you know.
Speaker: And it's a big umbrella term, you know, martial arts, because some people think that martial arts is internal or external.
Speaker: And for me, there is not a separation between internal and external.
Speaker: And that's one of the things that I really love about Tongbei style is that in the training, it integrates both of it.
Speaker: And, you know, in the past, I did do a lot of training in Qigong and Tai Chi as well.
Speaker: Specifically in Taiwan, I did a lot of Tai Chi training in conjunction with my mantis.
Speaker: And
Speaker: You know, the thing is, is that for me, now they are inextricably linked.
Speaker: And the way that we focus on the internal training in the Tongbei is use of vocalization.
Speaker: We call it heng haji.
Speaker: So, you know, you feel the recoil, you feel the response, you know.
Speaker: And that was something that
Speaker: earlier in my martial arts journey, like when I was focused more on the, uh, Northern styles after I had done, you know, three years of llama, which is very similar to Troy Lee foot.
Speaker: Uh, you know, we never made any noise in training.
Speaker: You know, I was like, well, and when you go to competitions, the Southern styles scream, the Northern styles are silent, you know?
Speaker: And I just was never comfortable.
Speaker: It's like, yeah,
Speaker: Or they call it like the key eye, you know, and I thought it was something very superficial.
Speaker: But with the tombé, it's very much part of the system.
Speaker: So, you know, so back to your your.
Speaker: your question about how do I define martial arts?
Speaker: Martial arts, you know, it is a fighting system, but it's also about wuda.
Speaker: It's about how you conduct yourself in life.
Speaker: It's not just, you know, a training philosophy or physical training system, because I feel like the martial artists that I truly admire in life, I admire as people, you
Speaker: You know, they they're they are great masters and their role models on how do you lead, you know, a meaningful life?
Speaker: How do you create disciples who, you know, go forth and transmit a system?
Speaker: It's not just, oh, I'm a great brawler.
Speaker: Oh, I can I can I can knock everyone down with, you know, my my my one inch punch, you know, or something like this.
Speaker: This is not what we're aiming for.
Speaker: It's like you aim also to like integrate, you know, this fighting system, but it's also the Wuda.
Speaker: It's a way of life, you know.
Speaker: It's how to live in an honorable way, how to respect those around you, how you conduct yourself and your life with humility and generosity, you know, and how to live, you know, meaningful and also a modest life.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, you also mentioned already the term Kung Fu.
Speaker: Do you have a specific term that you refer to when you talk about Chinese martial arts, Kung Fu, Kung Fu, Wushu, or in Taiwan it's Guoshu or something?
Speaker: Or do you even care about these different terms that people use to describe?
Speaker: I am, I, I'm sort of anti-terminology because, uh, you know, I speak Chinese.
Speaker: So a lot of the times when they say, oh no, no, it should be written as opposed to you know, uh, well, I mean, we could be speaking Chinese and then it would be written differently.
Speaker: You know, do you write is one word or do you write it as two words?
Speaker: I mean, you could spend your whole life just, just nitpicking about labels when I just rather be training.
Speaker: Honestly, to me, you could call all of it carrot cake.
Speaker: Call it carrot.
Speaker: You can call it whatever you want.
Speaker: You know, you can call me Kaka.
Speaker: You can call me Rosa May.
Speaker: You can call me whatever.
Speaker: What I do is my martial arts and, you know, what makes sense to me, you know, on, on, on any given day when we're training, you know, sometimes I will be teaching the Tongbei, but then other times I'll be teaching them, you know, a move from Swai Chao or, you know, a joint lock that I learned in Aikido or, you
Speaker: Or like Chiso from Mantis and maybe I Tongbeiify it, you know, so all of this might offend the so-called gatekeepers.
Speaker: But I feel like there's a little bit too much gatekeeping in the martial arts community right now.
Speaker: You know, people want to establish a hierarchy, which I feel is counterproductive.
Speaker: you know, in the long term in martial arts, because all the great martial artists, the people who became legends, even in Tongbei, like Zhang Zi, Zhang Zi, you know, they were all hybrid.
Speaker: They had all studied like, you know, 10 different styles of martial arts.
Speaker: They didn't just have one teacher.
Speaker: They had many teachers.
Speaker: So, you know, this sort of blind faith to one system, one style, one teacher, you know, is something that
Speaker: that it's not necessarily conducive to the evolution of martial arts as a whole.
Speaker: So let's dive into the carrot cake and talk a bit more about martial arts training.
Speaker: Rosa calls martial arts carrot cake.
Speaker: Okay, whatever.
Speaker: That's going to be the headline for the episode.
Speaker: It's not going to be Tongbei with Rosa May.
Speaker: It's going to be carrot cake with Rosa May.
Speaker: It's fine.
Speaker: What I find really interesting, because you mentioned that you trained a lot of stuff over the years and now you focus a lot on Tongbei.
Speaker: How did you get to learn Tongbei?
Speaker: Was it the training method or the style that interested you or was it that the person that you learned from inspired you and thought, oh, this is the guy or the gal I want to learn from?
Speaker: What was it that drew you to Tongbei-Chan specifically?
Speaker: Well, one of my most important influences in martial arts was my ex-husband, Michael Martello, who died—I mean, he died a while back, like in 2009.
Speaker: And he was very famous in the Mantis community.
Speaker: He was a disciple of Teddy Wong in Wing Chun and also of Su Yu Chang in—
Speaker: New York for Mantis Kung Fu, and then also he was disciple of Wang Jie in Taiwan.
Speaker: And he brought a teacher from Tongbei, from Beijing.
Speaker: He brought three teachers from Beijing to organize a training camp, both in Europe and then also in Beijing.
Speaker: And one of them was a Tongbei teacher, you know.
Speaker: And Mike knew I had already done so much, you know, other martial arts style.
Speaker: And, you know, I would say, like,
Speaker: you know, in around the years that he was starting to work with Zhang Xingbing, who is who is my Tongbei teacher now.
Speaker: It was he started working with Zhang Lao.
Speaker: So about 2006 is when he brought him first to Europe.
Speaker: And then Mike died in 2009, and I started working with Zhang Lausi about 2008.
Speaker: And Mike, he showed me some of the exercises from Tongbei, which he did danse, which is a brushing hand, which really looks like this strange folk dance thing.
Speaker: And the applications are not obvious.
Speaker: you know, and I cycle, that's strange.
Speaker: What are you supposed to do with this move, you know?
Speaker: And then he's like, it's real good.
Speaker: Yeah, you got to train this.
Speaker: And so then he said, you know, you should train with Zhang Lausi, you know, the Tongbei, it's going to complete your martial arts.
Speaker: This is going to help you, you know, and that was...
Speaker: You know, he died in 2009, and I started working with Zhang Laos in 2008.
Speaker: And it's like when Mike died, then I was trying to, you know, take over his school in Belgium and also unite the Taiwanese Federation with the Chinese Federation.
Speaker: It was a really, really big mess.
Speaker: And it was also the beginning, really, of my committed journey in Tongbei, because, you know, my feeling at that point, like around 2008, was like, why do I want to do this?
Speaker: Why do I, I've already done over 20 years of martial arts.
Speaker: Why do I need to do another style?
Speaker: You know?
Speaker: Um, and when I went to Beijing and I started training with loss, I was like, this is so strange.
Speaker: What do 2000 arm swings a day?
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And I did that.
Speaker: I did that for years.
Speaker: It took me three hours every day just to do arm swings because you know, for 2000, I was counting.
Speaker: I was counting every single day because they say you have to do X. I did X.
Speaker: You know what I mean?
Speaker: And I didn't really get it.
Speaker: I don't force my students to do it.
Speaker: I don't think it's the most conducive way, but it's traditional training in China.
Speaker: Do that.
Speaker: So I did that.
Speaker: And when I started training with him, I honestly wasn't very committed to the Tongbei.
Speaker: I didn't understand it.
Speaker: And then later on, it just became much, much more logical.
Speaker: Because when I started working with Zhang Laozi more, and then I started working with some of his disciples, Huang Fei, and also Kim Haakland, who became my husband later on, now my ex, whatever.
Speaker: Anyway...
Speaker: uh we we really tried to train this system of fighting that was that was so interesting to me because the concepts were so different from everything i've learned in the past first you use all this torque what is what is this torque what is this kaiha kaiha which means open close what are you opening closing your lungs no the ribs
Speaker: You use your internal rotation in the stance.
Speaker: So when you're swinging your arms, it's not like you're warming up like a freestyle swimmer.
Speaker: You're actually training your hip rotation, your internal rotation, your torque and your twist with every arm swing.
Speaker: And so this was so odd because, of course, the multiple attack stuff and the strategy I understood for Mantis.
Speaker: You know, internal stuff, how to throw.
Speaker: I understood from doing for, you know, 13 years of Aikido and then, and then also some Swai Chau training, you know, and also push hands in, in, in the parks in Taiwan, you know, but,
Speaker: All the interesting things about the movements and what Zhang Laos would teach me, he'd be like, which means, oh, you have a lot of power in that movement.
Speaker: And when he first saw me, I was like, see, he thinks I'm really powerful.
Speaker: I didn't realize he was insulting me.
Speaker: He was insulting me.
Speaker: He was insulting me when he first saw me.
Speaker: It was like a backhanded compliment.
Speaker: On the one hand, that your intent is so good.
Speaker: You have so much power.
Speaker: I thought I was really powerful.
Speaker: And yet I had nothing, really.
Speaker: And then when he showed me how you actually use release, how to cultivate heavy hands, how to use the arm swings and the whole body, not just the arms, and to really, really release in your movements, that was a game changer for me.
Speaker: Because I was able to apply the tombe principles to everything that I learned.
Speaker: Also, like, there are two movements in one, you know, because you always have a back forth, you have a recoil.
Speaker: So it's not just one, two, but it's, you know, it's one, two.
Speaker: So it's very, very different from everything I trained before.
Speaker: And I was able to apply the Tongbei principles to things that I had practiced in the past, and it was better.
Speaker: And the other thing that Tongbei gave me was it gave me really an entry into freestyle, you know, because when you've done so many forms, and at that point in my martial arts training, I learned over 200 forms, you know, in terms of weapons, empty hand.
Speaker: I counted them.
Speaker: It's like after, you know, you do decades of martial arts, you count how many forms you've learned.
Speaker: And it was sick.
Speaker: You know, how many forms, how many did I actually apply though?
Speaker: In all my modern Wushu training, which I did for what, 15 years?
Speaker: Did we ever learn sword on a target?
Speaker: I mean, we're not talking about when you learn choreography, like a two man set with your training partner, but did we ever train on a target?
Speaker: No, not in 15 years.
Speaker: Never, never, you know.
Speaker: And so this was a huge, huge game changer in my martial arts journey.
Speaker: And, and then so what he started with that, I later developed into my training principles with my students for like target practice training.
Speaker: And I started bringing in concepts that I learned in Kali, like target practice.
Speaker: target practicing systems and I mapped everything out onto like trees and punching bags and then reorganizing it on partner work because I felt like in my Chinese martial arts training, honestly, there was a huge, huge gap between how much you actually touching someone in training, you know, because this was something that Mike and I talked a lot about when he was alive.
Speaker: Because he was a lifetime martial artist as well.
Speaker: And he's like, well, how much partner work we got to do?
Speaker: You know, like, how do I train these students?
Speaker: They can't do nothing.
Speaker: You know, it's like, and then he would start teaching them, uh, just to give a baseline level of the stances of, uh, giving them basic athleticism, you know?
Speaker: Um, but then how do you translate that into something that's functional?
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: You know, when do you introduce like the strikes and when do you introduce partner practice?
Speaker: And many people, I would say in Chinese systems,
Speaker: say, oh, no, no, no, they're not ready for that.
Speaker: First, you build the structure for years and years of basics training, kicking, stance training, breathing training, and then later on, maybe after three or four years, you start the partner training.
Speaker: And I feel like this is a real problem in the Chinese systems because you become better at what you train.
Speaker: So if you train 100% of your times in forms, you're going to be better at forms.
Speaker: You train 100% of your time doing ground throws or kicking, that's what you're going to be good at doing, you know?
Speaker: And so I think that's what, as a martial arts community, you know, we have to be thinking about, you know, not criticizing each other or labeling, you know?
Speaker: I mean, I think in the martial arts community, what's really interesting is like, now I have, you know, through social media, I've met so many people in martial arts, and they're not just doing gong fu, they're not just doing Chinese martial arts.
Speaker: You know, lifetime martial artists from other systems, karate guys, kali guys, balitaowak, you know, guys, and
Speaker: But also longsword guys I talked to, you know, who are even doing like European fencing.
Speaker: And we're we're interested in similar things.
Speaker: You know, what joins us is is much stronger than what divides us, you know, and the people who are genuinely out there putting in the work every day.
Speaker: I feel like we have a lot of common ground.
Speaker: A lot.
Speaker: So if I understand this correctly, though, it's quite interesting.
Speaker: I mean, you mentioned in the beginning, like you were doing the Tongbei stuff and you didn't really understand what it was, which I can totally relate to because in our Chen style, it's the same for a lot of beginners.
Speaker: And when you look at something like Xin Yi Liu He Chuan, also it looks like really weird from the outside and you think, what is that for?
Speaker: But then you discovered, oh, there's a really like kind of, let's say, high level body mechanics behind it and a way of using the body.
Speaker: But if I also understand you correctly, this heavier emphasis on partner work was actually something that you felt was kind of this is how you teach now.
Speaker: It's not how it was approached in Beijing.
Speaker: In Beijing, you were following the traditional route of saying, oh, you practice this, you practice the body mechanics, but then you can apply it on your own time, sort of?
Speaker: Or was there a lot of partner practice when you learned in Beijing from Zhang Laosheng and the other guys there?
Speaker: Tang also would demonstrate techniques on me, which was amazing.
Speaker: Like when you feel the power of the master, oh my God, you know, it was just like, he would throw me around like nothing.
Speaker: I just couldn't stop laughing because he was so powerful.
Speaker: But a lot of people...
Speaker: People say that, you know, I think that's what strikes people and what attracts them to certain masters is you sense, you know, how like, like when I worked with my Tai Chi teacher in, in, in, in Taiwan, Wang Jie, you know, when he would do his, uh, Tuiso on me, and then also the, the Qina, which is like joint locking, you know,
Speaker: It was like disappearing into a black hole, you know, which is like you have to sense that through feeling and touch.
Speaker: And there's a lot of transmission of martial arts that is done through touch.
Speaker: And so when you see, you know, YouTube videos or whatever, it is limited because the transmission is not just a form or whatever.
Speaker: That said, you know, what...
Speaker: What amazed me in Beijing was the teachers themselves, like Zhang Laose and his teacher Zhang Fushan, he's like the godfather of Tongbei in Beijing now.
Speaker: He was Dong Shu-Shen's disciple.
Speaker: Our godfather of Tongbei is already third generation, Wu Xing Tongbei.
Speaker: And Zhang Liu has also developed, because he came from Baiyuan Tongbei, which is white ape, Tongbei, which is ox street, white ape.
Speaker: ape-style Tongbei because it used to be when he was a teenager, that was where all the famous martial artists hung out in Beijing at this place called Yujia.
Speaker: And so it formed a community.
Speaker: And so what I'm saying is you feel that.
Speaker: And they were all amazing fighters.
Speaker: So what is it
Speaker: that is missing from the training because then when he was trained people, you know, they didn't have the contact.
Speaker: And yet he and his training brothers, you know, the other great disciples of Zhang Fushan, you know, they were all great fighters and could demonstrate this stuff, you know.
Speaker: So where was the break in training, you know?
Speaker: And a lot of it was just like they had gotten it from other systems.
Speaker: Like they had been doing Swaichao,
Speaker: They had been doing full contact sparring.
Speaker: A lot of the guys were street fighters.
Speaker: And so they had been getting their information from different sources and then applying the concepts that they had learned from Tongbei.
Speaker: He was like this elbow concept.
Speaker: I'm not supposed to say that.
Speaker: Don't show this to outsiders because an MMA fighter can get this and they're going to apply it.
Speaker: And it's an illegal move.
Speaker: And it's like, oh, yeah, OK, I get it.
Speaker: I get it.
Speaker: But no no great martial artists ever came from just doing one repetitive, you know, one move, like repetitive arm swings over and over.
Speaker: So what when I teach, I really try to build a system that puts the partner work and the target work.
Speaker: in the training, you know, so that from day one students know what they're doing, you know, and I actually teach forms like weapons forms even I'll teach whole weapon forms like with me out or with the sword broadsword or whatever.
Speaker: I'll actually teach it on a tree, you know, I'll do all the cuts on a tree because, you know, I would say this is the big problem.
Speaker: especially like in weapons work it becomes very very abstract and ornamental because you know especially in modern wushu when i was doing uh like uh say a flowery move which is called a flower you know right a floretti basically um
Speaker: which people call fancy senseless spinning.
Speaker: What is that?
Speaker: It's actually a parry attack.
Speaker: It's built into it, but it comes so far from the original application that people don't know if they're parrying or if they're attacking because if they actually did, it would show in their body mechanics.
Speaker: They would move the rest of their body to get out of the way.
Speaker: They just wouldn't stand there with their arm out
Speaker: senselessly spinning a pretty circle you know this becomes this becomes very superficial you know and nobody wants to be called you know superficial uh but it has become that way and i don't think that it has to be that way because i i was able to to teach like um san saijan san saijan three treasures sword which is really like one of these quintessential
Speaker: traditional sword forms, a lot of us learn it in mantis.
Speaker: I was able to teach it to one of my students in China, not China, in Belgium.
Speaker: He was a member of the Belgian wushu team.
Speaker: He did like sports karate, modern wushu.
Speaker: And then in one hour, I said, okay, look, these are your hitting targets.
Speaker: I'm going to teach this whole form to you in one hour.
Speaker: And I'm going to show you all the targets on a tree.
Speaker: And then we're going to do the form.
Speaker: And he did it.
Speaker: You know, and so you have a guy who's who's really like, hi, Randy, if you're listening to this podcast.
Speaker: So he was who really could do any stance, you know, but to say, oh, the modern people, they just don't get it.
Speaker: When I explained it to him, yeah, he had to think about it a little bit, but then he totally got it.
Speaker: And then my feeling was like, well, why can't we do this in modern Wushu?
Speaker: Why don't they each sword on a target?
Speaker: Why don't that?
Speaker: Because you know what?
Speaker: It would take if you're every modern Wushu person is already training two hours a day, minimum, minimum, if you're going to competition, why wouldn't they train 15 minutes on a target?
Speaker: You know, that would completely change the game of modern.
Speaker: You wouldn't get all these haters saying, oh, it's just fake shit.
Speaker: Sorry.
Speaker: You know, you could easily implement target striking systems into all Chinese martial arts, implement partner partner usage programs.
Speaker: Show me all the techniques that you're doing in Mantis.
Speaker: White tiger washes its face.
Speaker: Show it to me on a partner.
Speaker: Show me how you're going to do that on a tree or on a target or on a punching bag.
Speaker: And then show on a partner.
Speaker: And then show me your students doing that.
Speaker: That's an interesting point because when you mentioned that Zhang Laoxiao was super powerful, this is something that a lot of other people also mentioned, like the teacher was super powerful and smooth and could explain a lot.
Speaker: But the question then is, can the students do the same?
Speaker: Because that's where you actually see whether the training method makes sense.
Speaker: But what I'm really interested in is if somebody came to Prague and wanted to learn from you, like wanted to learn Tongbei from you, how would you start?
Speaker: Would you also start with the arm swings?
Speaker: And then how would you move on from there?
Speaker: Like, what would be a typical progression?
Speaker: What would it be like?
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: On day one, we start, I do teach the tongbei basics, but I don't have them do like hundreds of arm swings on day one, forward and backwards, rojian sunbei, which is like the backwards one actually translate as massaging the shoulders.
Speaker: Sunbei, the forward arm swing, translates as through the back.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So, uh, these are two basics or twin.
Speaker: So, which is circular hand, which is, uh, like an equivalent of a long swinging hook punch, but not a haymaker.
Speaker: You know, it's not these wild swinging things.
Speaker: It's very, very technical, you know, doing all this, I feel it's counterproductive.
Speaker: Why?
Speaker: Because it's tedious.
Speaker: It's tedious.
Speaker: And to someone who comes in and is not committed to martial arts training and just wants to take a look,
Speaker: It's boring.
Speaker: It's boring.
Speaker: It's not boring to me because I've committed myself to martial arts and I love it.
Speaker: You could tell me to do this.
Speaker: And if this is, you can tell me to like, okay, you have to crack your knuckles for two hours a day, every day, and this will get you to a true enlightenment.
Speaker: I would probably do that.
Speaker: You know, if someone did, I was really naive and stupid.
Speaker: So, you know, I would do that, but I think it's not a productive way to train.
Speaker: So honestly, when new people come in, I give them a stick.
Speaker: I say,
Speaker: Day one, bring a stick that's about shoulder height.
Speaker: If you don't have a training staff, which, you know, usually we have like the guns or the staffs that people get in martial arts stores.
Speaker: And it's, um, it's, it's got a little bit of weight to it and has a thicker, thicker end and a thinner end.
Speaker: You know, if you don't have that, you can bring a Joe like from Aikido, or you can bring a broomstick.
Speaker: Broomsticks work too.
Speaker: People are always like, oh, one, you can't start with weapons until after at least one year of training.
Speaker: Maybe after three years of training, you can still with weapons.
Speaker: No, I start with weapons on day one.
Speaker: The thing is, is that what I show is that the weapon, I teach striking drills, like a day one striking drill that shows them the X, which is a target, high, middle, low, which is the upper, the head, the center, groin, and then also leg shots.
Speaker: So they have an idea of what they're aiming for and then how to swing from the hips.
Speaker: And so they'll all learn.
Speaker: I have a day one staff form that I made up.
Speaker: It's like it's based on the movements of the short staff in Tongbei.
Speaker: But what's really interesting, and I teach bang, which is the short staff, differently than my Tongbei teacher and also different than my Tongbei brothers because...
Speaker: What I did was I took the Tongbei basics, like the arm swings, and I remapped them out so that they match exactly the short staff movement.
Speaker: So they see that a palm strike in Tongbei with its torque, with its stance, is exactly like Yaza, which is a temple strike with the staff.
Speaker: You know, so there's no separation between empty hand and weapons work, you know, so they see that.
Speaker: And also with the staff, you get an idea of how to swing the hips because you'll say, OK, like a baseball.
Speaker: Now, this is like a hip check in hockey.
Speaker: You know, this is a temple strike.
Speaker: And, you know, all these things come together and you see the staff also shows center line.
Speaker: So they have the center line awareness.
Speaker: They have an idea of targets and then they learn to start to use the hips and they appreciate heavy hands and then also like a loose arm posture.
Speaker: I always say, okay, day one, your arms are no longer arms.
Speaker: They're ropes.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: You want to think more like a rope dart paradigm with a really, really heavy rock at the end.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Those are your hands and the source, the origin of your arms, uh, is not from the shoulders, which is, which is really a fallacy.
Speaker: The, the, the, the, it should start in the back, you know, like, like, um,
Speaker: like the middle of your back so that you're thinking, you know, much more like an ape, like monkey style swinging, you know, and it really is a game changer for them.
Speaker: Like I have one student now, he used to be a professional baseball player, which...
Speaker: Oh, my God, that's like a perfect, perfect, you know, mapping of a sport that's complementary to martial arts because they understand what they're in great physical condition and they can they can throw at anything and they can strike targets.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And yet his stance after, you know, a lifetime of playing baseball or whatever is really different than martial arts stance, you know, because.
Speaker: In martial arts, you're thinking about protecting your internal organs.
Speaker: So a lot of things when I would say, you know, close your ribs, close your ribs, you know, let your arms hang, because he has sort of this, you know, athletic stance where you have the sternum up.
Speaker: And it's like ting shong, hanshong, you know, ting shong is more like...
Speaker: what you call like a soldier stance, you know, with your with your chest up, shoulders back, you know.
Speaker: And so that's what a lot of athletes will use.
Speaker: Whereas in Tongbei, we use more of this sort of like hansheng, which is almost like a slumpy posture.
Speaker: But you'll see it in you.
Speaker: If you watch like one wall handball players, they do it.
Speaker: They do it in order to harness their energy.
Speaker: It's almost like they make their backs concave in order to access their center and also to close the ribs, which protects the internal organ.
Speaker: And this gives you better access to the Dantian.
Speaker: So even the whole thing about changing the posture, changing the way that they think about their limbs and how they generate power, that's pretty much my day one.
Speaker: Long answer.
Speaker: Sorry.
Speaker: No, no.
Speaker: I think that's really interesting.
Speaker: You mentioned, I mean, you know, practicing form on forms or just techniques on trees and also showing it on a partner.
Speaker: How do you go about partner work?
Speaker: How do you like do you include sparring or wrestling type of practice?
Speaker: How do you like do you have drills that lead there or how do you do this?
Speaker: I show them basically like all the tombei basics have trajectories and usage.
Speaker: Like that's what I loved about the tombei.
Speaker: That's because, okay, in other Chinese styles that I had studied, I mean, if you do judo, you go in and you're grappling with people.
Speaker: Aikido, okay, you throw people.
Speaker: So everything is partnering work.
Speaker: But in the Chinese styles, there was always, okay, you learn forms, now you do sparring.
Speaker: And then there was no...
Speaker: there's no relation between the sparring and the forms.
Speaker: It's just like, in that case, you may as well just do, you should do Western boxing.
Speaker: Everybody can just do MMA.
Speaker: What's your validation for this training system?
Speaker: Are you just doing forms for aesthetics so you have a better structure?
Speaker: And then when you spar, you just like jab, punch, jab, punch, hook.
Speaker: You know, we're doing Bas Rutten now.
Speaker: So it has nothing to do with your Chinese martial arts training.
Speaker: Well, then what are you doing that for?
Speaker: You know, for me, what the game changer was in Tongbei was it was 100% exactly what you learn in the striking and all the basics, which, you know, have the arm swings, the pizang, the axing fist, the forward backward movements.
Speaker: You know, when you when you would have like ma mei zhang or li mao pushu, which is like the links springs, springs on
Speaker: spring springs on the mouse yes this is the translation the links uh pounces on the mouse when you have moves like this they're immediately applicable it's not an abstract thing you know and so it's really interesting because because of the tombay i started thinking about function and it's like okay i'm re-changing all the partnering because
Speaker: In the Mantis, when I did that, there was too much a dichotomy, even between that and then when you learn two-man sets.
Speaker: You know, like there are 12 Mantis basics, and then, okay, this is it on a partner.
Speaker: And you would do it with a partner, and you'd be like, well, this is odd.
Speaker: This is odd and somewhat illogical.
Speaker: It felt very, very choreographed.
Speaker: You know, and so I would feel like, OK, it's not really real.
Speaker: I mean, I can kind of see this application, but it's not as seamless as, say, like when you're doing Tue So with someone and you feel like, oh, I'm uprooting them.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Tue So meaning push hands like in Tai Chi, you know, because then you're feeling that or like when you're doing Sua Chao, which is Chinese wrestling and the guys are gripping your jacket and they're throwing each other.
Speaker: You know, you're like, OK, this works.
Speaker: This doesn't work.
Speaker: You know what I mean?
Speaker: And so like with the partnering work with my students, I really try and start that from day one.
Speaker: So if I show a technique like circular hands into twin, so pie twin, so which is like circular hands into palm strike, you better know what you're doing.
Speaker: You know, how are you applying it?
Speaker: And it's it's difficult.
Speaker: It's difficult to teach at the beginning, say if they don't have any fighting experience, but it's really, really important because without that, they can't even gauge distance.
Speaker: Learning forms...
Speaker: just empty forms without actually striking a target.
Speaker: It's why I do almost all my training.
Speaker: I remap everything for my students onto a tree because we're always training in nature, like all our trainings are outside in the forest or in a park.
Speaker: So we're always hitting trees.
Speaker: You have to understand the distance to target.
Speaker: And are you hitting high, middle, low?
Speaker: Is this movement, say in a weapon, is this an attack or is it a parry or is it both?
Speaker: You know what I mean?
Speaker: Without this understanding, you don't become a well-functioning, thinking, strategic martial artist.
Speaker: I feel like it's gaping in.
Speaker: And for people who say, oh, yeah, you should do martial arts, and then 10 years later you can learn fai jing.
Speaker: Fajing is how you cultivate internal power and how you're actually going to show your immense martial power.
Speaker: And I teach that from day one.
Speaker: It's part of the Heng Ha Jing training in the Tongbei.
Speaker: It's like there's no secrets.
Speaker: For me, there should not be separation between empty hand and weapons work.
Speaker: People should learn on targets.
Speaker: They should practice on targets.
Speaker: They should be able to map their forms onto a target first
Speaker: And then the student should show the empty hand forms.
Speaker: If that's what I leave behind in martial arts, I consider that a huge success.
Speaker: Like, everybody, go show me your form on a tree.
Speaker: Teach your forms.
Speaker: Every form that you have, tai chi, whatever, on a tree.
Speaker: And then have your student show the form.
Speaker: Because at first, when I started experimenting with this technique, I would...
Speaker: teach the form like a miao dao form, which is, it's like a leaf saber sword.
Speaker: It looks kind of like a katana.
Speaker: And I teach that form to one of my students.
Speaker: And, you know, he was supremely gifted.
Speaker: He was a, he's a circus acrobat and does like one arm handstands.
Speaker: He was amazing.
Speaker: And so he was really great at learning stuff.
Speaker: And then I'd say, okay, so I teach it to him on a tree and he could strike all the targets.
Speaker: He was really good at using like, you
Speaker: momentum and his hips and I was like okay so this is what it looks like without the tree and then I'd say follow along and then it got really weird and then I'd be like oh you know what don't follow along I'm not going to show you what it's supposed to look like you show me what it's supposed to look like without ever seeing the form without hitting a target and he did it this was what happened years ago and that was a huge light bulb moment I was like yes I
Speaker: This, this is it.
Speaker: This is it.
Speaker: Because, okay, yeah, maybe if you compared it to that particular form, because he was doing 二路喵道, which is really, you know, a seminal喵道 form, and people do it
Speaker: in China and people do it in competitions, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker: People might not even recognize it as that form, but what he had learned in one day of training was more valid than these people who had been doing it like 10 years and then in competition because they couldn't do one technique.
Speaker: He was ready to go slice hedges and everything.
Speaker: You know, he knew if he was knocking off someone's head, if he was aiming for the knee, he knew how to strike with his hips.
Speaker: And I was like, that is crazy.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: I don't I'm not going to show you the form or how it should look, because this is how it should look.
Speaker: You know what I mean?
Speaker: And he did it.
Speaker: And that that was a it was a really big light bulb moment for me, you know, as a martial artist and as a teacher and practitioner, you know, that that, you know, people can learn this way.
Speaker: It doesn't need to be corrected.
Speaker: It doesn't need to be correct.
Speaker: If anything, let's correct the forms.
Speaker: Let's take out all the superfluous ornamental parts and remap it this way.
Speaker: And then what's left behind is something that we can use.
Speaker: You mentioned a lot of tree hitting.
Speaker: That really reminds me of a video I saw of old school Tongbei practitioners, I think also in Beijing, where they were very creative in terms of how to practice hitting against actual stuff.
Speaker: They had a lot of different bags and different... Oh, I watched that video too!
Speaker: And I thought, hey, this is actually cool because, you know, I mean, why not use modern equipment or improvised equipment, you know, to achieve what you want to achieve.
Speaker: But I would assume that then there is a lot of conditioning in Tongbei.
Speaker: Is there like also, you know, like toughening up the hands or the arms or is that like, is it just happening as a side product when you use trees a lot or is it something that you specifically do like...
Speaker: You know, there's a lot of fallacy in terms of like what I call conditioning, because it used to be that like my training brothers back in the 90s when we were at Lama Kung Fu, there were a lot of guys that would train for Sanda and or, you know, like the ring sparring.
Speaker: And they would condition themselves by, you know, drinking protein shakes, doing lots of weights.
Speaker: And then they would keep on banging their thighs with bricks and cinder blocks, you know, to toughen it up and get calluses.
Speaker: And our training is a little bit different in that way.
Speaker: And that when you're striking, okay, the paradigm in Tongbei is not necessarily that you need like these bricks because you're not striking.
Speaker: the idea is that you're not really training your body to be like, how do you say, like a Megatron.
Speaker: You're not training yourself to be a transformer or a robot, right?
Speaker: So you're not training yourself to have iron palms.
Speaker: You're training yourself, if you were to think like a rope dart that...
Speaker: that has a really heavy weight at the end.
Speaker: So it's sort of irrelevant what you're doing because it's almost like, okay, you're going to fight the Tasmanian devil.
Speaker: What are you going to do?
Speaker: You go in and you're going to go fight a chimpanzee.
Speaker: Who's going to win?
Speaker: That chimpanzee is going to win.
Speaker: You know, it's like there's a certain different kind of thing where it's not like, oh, you have to have iron palm and resist or whatever, because you're really, really learning.
Speaker: What we say is, 要用整个身体的力。
Speaker: is you use the power of your whole body.
Speaker: And that was like, you know, the backhanded compliment that Zhang Lao-se said when he first saw me training my other forms before I was really committed to the which is like, wow, you got a lot of power, you know?
Speaker: And he was insulting me because...
Speaker: I had all the intent in the world, could do all these stances and, you know, but he saw it as useless because when they actually build the power in the Tongbei, they do it through release.
Speaker: The paradigm is really shifted.
Speaker: And so a lot of times what I tell my students is that your arms are not arms.
Speaker: These are not muscles.
Speaker: You don't need to use your bicep or your tricep.
Speaker: It's almost like, you know, when you think about
Speaker: released arms, you might think, oh, release is noodley and weak or whatever, as opposed to a strong, structured, muscular brace in your arms.
Speaker: But what you're really thinking about training is that if you had like kettlebells attached to the end of ropes and you're swinging those, I mean, you're, you know, a reasonably weighted kettlebell.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: and how much power that would have, you know, because you have this heavy object at the end of a rope and you can smash.
Speaker: I mean, imagine taking that and you're going to go smash a piece of wood or something.
Speaker: It's incredibly heavy, but you're using the momentum of the swing and the hip to generate that power and the heaviness that is the heaviness in your hands and the use of torque and momentum that you're getting from the hips
Speaker: and transmitting through the back becomes the power of your swing.
Speaker: And that's incredibly, incredibly heavy and powerful.
Speaker: When Zhang Laose was demonstrating on me and my students, it's amazing because over the years when he's been doing more and more of the wuxing training that has a lot of the sort of internal mechanism built into it, his
Speaker: arms it's like it's it's like a cannon landing on you it's heavier and heavier it's it completely throws you off because it's so relaxed you train not to become uh
Speaker: you know, more muscular.
Speaker: In fact, he, he, he considers lifting weights counterproductive to your martial arts training.
Speaker: You must learn to use your center because the muscles only hinder you because you're thinking about this rope with a kettlebell at the end paradigm.
Speaker: Uh, if you have extra weighted muscles on your arms, it's actually going to, uh, it's actually going to block the trajectory of
Speaker: of the swing, you know?
Speaker: Um, and so, uh, he, he, he really, uh, believes in that training principle and I see it applied, you know, how, how powerful it can be, you know, and I'm, I'm not, uh, I'm not a particularly, uh,
Speaker: large or bulky person, but I can generate a lot of power and I can move big people because I use these principles.
Speaker: And what is interesting to me too is you don't have to have perfect tongbei or use of these concepts in order to make it work.
Speaker: You know, like if you use your Tai Chi, and I'm not saying everybody needs to practice Tombe, but you use a couple of these principles and you start applying it, whether the principle comes from, you know, learning, teaching forms, learning forms on a target or on a tree, and then applying it to your martial arts, showing it in your partnering work, or you use the sort of release of the heavy hands, using the arms like a rope instead of blocking them.
Speaker: with the arms, you know, using it more like a rope dart swing or a whip chain, you know.
Speaker: These are principles that can be applied universally and can improve like any martial artist.
Speaker: Concepts such as target training, which I think on the whole, Filipino systems do better than Chinese martial arts systems.
Speaker: Sorry, I do believe that.
Speaker: They are better at understanding.
Speaker: They have even the 12-strike system, 10-strike systems.
Speaker: You can develop your own charts.
Speaker: You can do your own different kinds of mapping of strikes.
Speaker: You know, this is all fair game.
Speaker: You know, I think that the future of martial arts has to be evolution, you know, rather than saying, oh, this is not correct or this is the wrong stance.
Speaker: We need to be like intensively researching.
Speaker: You know, my whole mantra now is proprioceptive feedback loop.
Speaker: what is your proprioceptive feedback loop?
Speaker: Like, how do you know if it's right?
Speaker: How do you know if you're doing, you know, if you're building internal energy correctly by doing sang zhuang one hour or stance training, you know, one hour every day, do you just feel it, you know, or are you doing neurolinguistic programming and telling people to fall when you aim your hand at them?
Speaker: You know, I mean, to me, this is like, they're, they're,
Speaker: I really want people to do the no-nonsense approach to martial arts where it doesn't have to be about acknowledging the power of this person or this master or whatever, but let's become good researchers.
Speaker: Let's stay curious.
Speaker: Let's support each other.
Speaker: All this shit talking can just stop immediately.
Speaker: People who are bad-mouthing each other or the keyboard warriors can all go home and go train.
Speaker: Let's support each other.
Speaker: We don't need to say this style is better than that style.
Speaker: You know, I, yes, I focus on the tombe and the weapons and, you know, functional training, but I don't, you know, I consider myself a student for life.
Speaker: That's actually a really nice thought.
Speaker: I think it's a great finish because I was thinking, I mean, we could probably talk about this for three more hours.
Speaker: I have the feeling, but we all have busy lives and we have other stuff to do.
Speaker: And also, you know, in entertainment, it's always about leaving people wanting more.
Speaker: So maybe we keep some of this stuff for season two or three.
Speaker: That's the second slice of pie or cake.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: But at the end of an episode, I usually ask like, okay, what are you hoping for?
Speaker: You know, like a direction of development for the community.
Speaker: But I think you already answered that by yourself with this idea of, yeah, what's the feedback loop?
Speaker: Let's do a bit more experimenting and researching and trying out stuff.
Speaker: And I think that's
Speaker: If you ask me, that's actually a great hope or vision for the future.
Speaker: I don't know if you want to add anything to this, but I think it's great.
Speaker: I think you put it pretty well.
Speaker: you know, people who are forms trainers, if they can start remapping it onto targets.
Speaker: And this is not just for like traditionalists, but also for modern martial artists, sports karate people, modern wushu people, you know, start practicing on a target.
Speaker: And also the other thing I must emphasize, because a lot of people also in the martial arts community, you know, are doing training for competition.
Speaker: And because in competition, you know, people get really fixated on the difficulty of a move.
Speaker: And so, like, for example, in modern Wushu, all our jump kicks are on one side, you know, and the aerials are on one side.
Speaker: You always do your spinning jump kicks to one side, right-legged landing.
Speaker: And, you know, you accumulate over a decade, two decades of that, and it's a recipe for disaster.
Speaker: You know, I mean, I have two fake hips now.
Speaker: I'm double bionic.
Speaker: You know, I had double hip replacement surgery because all the really flexible people who trained in modern Wushu, two of my Wushu training brothers, also double hip replacements, and they got it in their 30s.
Speaker: You know what I mean?
Speaker: It's just like it's a recipe for disaster.
Speaker: You know, I think we have to have balanced training.
Speaker: We have to have functional training and support each other as a community.
Speaker: Yeah, I think that's a beautiful thought.
Speaker: So thank you for part one of the carrot cake lectures.
Speaker: Now I'm hungry for some reason.
Speaker: I completely invalidated myself.
Speaker: No, I think it was great.
Speaker: And yeah, let's so let's definitely talk about, you know, maybe in the second season to, you know, dive deeper into some of these really interesting aspects.
Speaker: And yeah, until then, you know, I
Speaker: I hope you'll be well.
Speaker: Maybe I'll see you in Prague at some point.
Speaker: Yes, come to us in Prague.
Speaker: Everybody come train with us in the forest in Prague.
Speaker: We call it Terracotta training because in the forest you have multiple target training.
Speaker: So every tree is like a soldier that you're fighting against.
Speaker: So it's super cool.
Speaker: Okay, cool.
Speaker: Yeah, maybe some listeners from the podcast will also show up.
Speaker: We'll see.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Thank you very much.
Speaker: And I'll talk to you in the second season.
Speaker: Yes, and happy holidays.
Speaker: Thank you, you too.
Speaker: Bye-bye.
Speaker: Thanks for listening to this episode.
Speaker: I hope you had a great time.
Speaker: The next episode will air next month.
Speaker: And until then, feel free to check out our Instagram account, where we also feature some of the people we talk to, other practitioners and teachers of Chinese martial arts, and anything else that might be interesting in the world of Kung Fu.
Speaker: Thanks, take care, and hope to meet again.
