Transcript
Speaker: The Gung Fu Crew Podcast, bringing together practitioners of various styles in schools and their unique perspectives to explore the world of Chinese martial arts.
Speaker: This is episode number 12 of the Kung Fu Group podcast, featuring another southern style of Chinese martial arts.
Speaker: The style we will talk about is called Wu Zuchuan, or Five Ancestor Boxing, which is quite interesting because it is an amalgamation of several different lineages or traditions of southern Chinese martial arts.
Speaker: And my guest, Russ Smith, is very knowledgeable about this particular style, but also brings in a background of
Speaker: Gojo Ryu Karate, a very specific old Okinawan style of karate, which has very direct connections to southern Chinese martial arts, which makes it quite interesting.
Speaker: And he also has a very structured approach to martial arts, which I personally appreciate and which I think translates very well into the podcast format.
Speaker: I hope that you agree with me and I hope that you find the episode as interesting as I did.
Speaker: Welcome to the next episode of the Kung Fu Crew podcast.
Speaker: Now we have an interesting episode ahead of us and I'm very happy that Russ Smith can be here with me, an expert in various martial arts actually.
Speaker: Maybe you want to introduce yourself just so that the listeners know who I'm talking to.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Thank you so much for having me, Daniel.
Speaker: It's a pleasure to be here.
Speaker: Yeah, I have been training various martial arts for about 40 years now.
Speaker: I started in Okinawan styles, and now I practice very heavily some Chinese Kung Fu.
Speaker: So I think it'll be fun to discuss some of those things today.
Speaker: Yeah, so before we go into the details, what I usually do at the beginning of the podcast is a little bit of housekeeping in the sense of let's talk about some terms and definitions because I find it interesting depending on which terms people use and how they define it, they might have a slightly different perspective on martial arts, not because of those definitions.
Speaker: I think it's the other way around, but the terms and definitions sometimes show what people actually think about all of this.
Speaker: How would you define martial arts?
Speaker: What would make a method of training a martial art in your view?
Speaker: Sure, yeah.
Speaker: I know some people are fairly sticklers about the idea of the term martial art, as in it must be related to military practice.
Speaker: And I take a much more colloquial perspective on that.
Speaker: I just feel that martial arts encompasses a lot of civilian self-defense competition, as well as things that
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: defense and counter-control measures.
Speaker: These are kind of the ways that I think about a style of martial arts, or at least, right?
Speaker: I think of a style equating to a curriculum where the goal is essentially something like defend yourself against control and assert enough counter-control to be able to stop the engagement.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: Could mean fleeing, could mean a lot of things, knowledge of local laws and the ability to de-escalate scenarios and things that don't encounter the physical aspect.
Speaker: However, the physical aspect for me is primarily about understanding control, countering it and knowing good timing to do those things.
Speaker: Now, since you're an English speaker, I would assume that you use the term martial arts as well to describe what you do.
Speaker: But there are also Japanese and Chinese terms.
Speaker: I mean, because you mentioned Okinawan tradition before that, I mean, in Chinese, you have Kung Fu, Kung Fu, Wu Shu or Guoshu if it's coming from Taiwan.
Speaker: Are you using any of the Chinese or of the Japanese terms to describe what you do?
Speaker: I will use the term Kung Fu typically just because it's very commonly understood in a very clear way with non-practitioners.
Speaker: However, for instance, the five ancestor Kung Fu that I practice, I typically...
Speaker: translate that as five ancestor boxing.
Speaker: The style name includes the word fist at the end, wuzhou chuan.
Speaker: So having the fist at the end, I like to translate it as five ancestor boxing.
Speaker: It has, you know, if you think about the standard ti da, shuai na,
Speaker: concept of the forms of control that are most commonly preferred in the style.
Speaker: It is heavily involved in the boxing aspect.
Speaker: There are chin na elements.
Speaker: There are definitely shui elements, but the boxing takes the front seat, I believe.
Speaker: So I tend to, rather than using kung fu or those kinds of things, I like to think of it as Chinese boxing a bit more.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: Well, technically it's closer to the original Chinese meaning, which is surprising that nobody else, I think, mentioned this because when people ask me, most people have this idea of like, oh, yeah, you have Kung Fu and then you have other stuff like Taiji or Wing Chun.
Speaker: And it's like, yeah, that doesn't really make sense.
Speaker: And I think the best explanation is to say, hey, it's Taiji Chun and every martial art in China usually ends on Chun, on fist, because it's fist fighting, right?
Speaker: It's like...
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It's either the fist or the lesser known ones are, of course, this would be the eight trigram palm.
Speaker: Some end with like a family name, like this is this family art.
Speaker: But yeah, I think to me, Chinese boxing is a clear way of thinking about the style.
Speaker: And it kind of clarifies that it's not necessarily... Shui Zhao has a very specific focus on a particular aspect of control.
Speaker: So...
Speaker: Yeah, I prefer that term.
Speaker: Although, you know, I think understanding the original Chinese meanings of terms is very helpful, but usually a little later in the practice.
Speaker: So I'm really fond of teaching in English and interspersing terminology to help people understand background and cultural background.
Speaker: traditions and foundations so thinking about what we practice as the acquisition of skill through hard work over time is actually very helpful to think of it's just fairly long-winded yeah it's not self-explanatory yeah right so maybe um so you mentioned that you started with the okinawan traditions and then you got into the chinese stuff maybe you want to elaborate a little bit on this like on your own like your career essentially in in
Speaker: Sure, and I'll try to keep it fairly short.
Speaker: But yes, I started almost 40 years ago in an Okinawan martial art called Goju-ru.
Speaker: Goju is gong-ro.
Speaker: It's hard and soft style.
Speaker: And the...
Speaker: Interesting and fun thing about its oral history is that the Okinawans who formulated the material that eventually became named Gojuru studied at least somewhat in the Fujian province in China.
Speaker: So there were some Japanese, since Okinawa at times had very good relations with China and Japan,
Speaker: shared information and had a lot of respect for China.
Speaker: There was a lot of sharing that went on and some Okinawans went and spent some time in Fujian province.
Speaker: Now, it's not really clear, unfortunately, what specific styles and who the exact teachers were.
Speaker: So it's been a real interesting research problem for Okinawan karate stylists to try to find the source, find the parent art.
Speaker: And it's become a bit of an obsession for some people.
Speaker: And it had been for me as well.
Speaker: There have been some interesting research going on and some potential leads, although it's quite difficult.
Speaker: There are some people who would say we're related to Shouting Crane style, although there's not really a lot of good evidence of that.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: what you can see in the, in that style of through, through my, uh, later research is that there is a connection.
Speaker: We do have a lot of similarities.
Speaker: So yes, I started in Okinawa karate and then, uh, because of that interest in understanding the sources, uh,
Speaker: understanding how the taolu, the kata, as we call them in Japanese, kind of what the purpose and meaning of those esoteric movements might be, it really was not all that clear in Okinawan Gojiru.
Speaker: We were all struggling to make sense of those techniques, and there wasn't a lot of written material handed down.
Speaker: There's one fragmented Chinese book called the Okinawan Bubishi, which
Speaker: that is a Chinese fist manual at Chuanpu.
Speaker: Uh, there's just that one in Okinawa that we know of.
Speaker: So, um,
Speaker: It really led me on this journey to understand the parent arts like white crane, five ancestor boxing, these arts that are really popular in the Fujian province.
Speaker: So at this point, I've been training in those arts for about 20 years.
Speaker: So about half of my training study, I've been on the Chinese side as well.
Speaker: So I still love and enjoy what I did originally, although I spend a lot of time also teaching and training in five ancestor boxing.
Speaker: I find that very interesting when people already have quite a bit of a background in martial arts and then they seek out, you know, tuition or training in Chinese styles.
Speaker: I mean, there must have been something that made you also, you know, I mean, you're probably looking for a teacher or I don't know, maybe the opportunity arose, but there must have been something that you said, oh, you know, this is really interesting.
Speaker: How did you specifically then end up with Mu Zui Quan and the other Chinese styles that you trained?
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Uh, I mean, it all started with me doing a lot of reading and research on the internet and books before the internet was really out.
Speaker: So, uh, the, one of the books, uh, five ancestor fist by who is now my Seagong, who is past Alex Co.
Speaker: I had read that book.
Speaker: I knew five ancestor boxing was one of those styles along with white crane that might have been an influence on, on, on Goju Ru.
Speaker: Um, so I found a local teacher who was teaching the Chi Kim Tong lineage and
Speaker: His name was Nigel Poulton.
Speaker: He's in my local area.
Speaker: And so I started training with him.
Speaker: Now, he had started training, you know, about the year I was born, but then he had taken many years off and was rekindling his practice.
Speaker: He took me to go visit and train under his teacher, John Graham, who is one of the senior people under Qigong Tong in the United States.
Speaker: So I trained with them for a while, but then through various other projects, I met a man by the name of Sifu Mark Wiley.
Speaker: Now, Mark Wiley is well known in Eskrima circles, the Filipino martial arts circles.
Speaker: He's written many books.
Speaker: He's an outstanding grandmaster in the style.
Speaker: But also, he was Alex Ko's probably top long-running student.
Speaker: And so he had...
Speaker: He had taken many, many trips to the Philippines to study Filipino martial arts and write books about the history of those things.
Speaker: But while he was there, his teacher also taught him five ancestor boxing.
Speaker: Now, I'm sure you're probably well aware, there was a time where a lot of people left China due to political situations.
Speaker: And so many of the people from Southern Chinese martial arts landed, creating the diaspora in the Philippines, in Malaysia, Singapore, and all these outlying areas—
Speaker: And so the Philippines actually took on some five ancestor boxing right after the formulation of the style.
Speaker: So the founder of the style had created the style.
Speaker: One of his 10 tigers had, as they called them, his 10 top students moved to the Philippines to conduct business, but also started a school.
Speaker: He retired back to China and brought his son over to take over the school.
Speaker: And so Filipino martial, uh, in the Philippines, five ancestor boxing has been there for a very long time.
Speaker: And so I learned from my teacher over here in the United States, he lives in the, uh, uh, Philadelphia area.
Speaker: Um, so I go up there and train with him or I bring him down here.
Speaker: And so for about 20 years now, close to 20 years now, I've been training under him in various aspects of the style.
Speaker: Was there something specific about Five Ancestors that also captured your attention or interest?
Speaker: Or was it just the opportunity to train with someone, to say, hey, they have skill and let's do this?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You know, the primary interest for me was explaining what I had already learned that I felt an insufficient answer to.
Speaker: So in the Okinawan karate, I felt like it was, we didn't have a chuanpu that we could say, Oh, here are the formulas for the style.
Speaker: Here are the poems that describe the material, right?
Speaker: I love old Kung Fu movies and the trope in so many of them as, you know, the school's Kung Fu manual gets stolen and somebody learns the secret techniques and challenges the teacher and,
Speaker: And this romantic aspect of the art, I think, is quite fun.
Speaker: But what I always felt like we should always have in a martial art, in a traditional martial art at least, is a clear line of information from the past.
Speaker: So when I had teachers who said, oh, study the kata, but you have to figure it out, to me, that was not the right answer.
Speaker: That was not the answer I was ever expecting.
Speaker: So what I was really seeking, I think, Daniel, I think kind of what you're getting to is what I was really seeking was,
Speaker: a structured, progressive, clear model for understanding a martial tradition.
Speaker: And I felt like that was very disjointed in the karate style, even though I think Gojiru is fantastic and has a lot of great elements.
Speaker: I still think without a clear path to the strategies and tactics of the art, I
Speaker: when people start applying the kata or the taolu, they really go off the reservation.
Speaker: There's no limits or no guidance to what's being done.
Speaker: So I felt like what I was seeing other people and myself do was just grab things from Krav Maga and Silat and Aikido and Judo and just jam it all in the art, and the art can become something very different than I think what it was intended.
Speaker: So
Speaker: I've always really been looking for clear answers to the questions of what does this martial art teach specifically, not only in terms of body structure and power development and those things, but what are the real strategies and tactics that guide the art that help you develop skill in a progressive way?
Speaker: So how did you then start when you did Wuzhou Chuan, when you did Five Answers, like when you started learning it?
Speaker: How would you, I mean, I don't know if there's a typical approach, but I mean you had to approach it at some point.
Speaker: How would you start learning this?
Speaker: Very, very typical.
Speaker: You'd start with footwork, getting the stance right.
Speaker: Every art has a very specific approach.
Speaker: of standing and moving.
Speaker: So that's a very difficult part to really change out the horse underneath your natural practice.
Speaker: It takes a lot of work.
Speaker: Then learning the fundamental hand movements and the combinations.
Speaker: And a lot of styles are very Taolu-based, right?
Speaker: A lot of forms driven.
Speaker: So you learn a lot of the art through the warm-ups, the body development, some of the two-person practices for developing your conditioning, which we'll dive into, I think, a little bit more later.
Speaker: But, um, learning the forms to get the body coordination of the art in your body so that you can move in the way that the art wants you to develop your aspects of psych swallowing energy, absorbing things, expelling power forward, you know, sinking your weight and sinking the opponent floating.
Speaker: So those elements of swallow, spit, sink, and float are very important in Southern Chinese martial arts and really permeates all the practice.
Speaker: Um, um,
Speaker: Ultimately, the method was to work more hands-on.
Speaker: Take every technique and try to understand not only its primary stated purpose, but also the variations that make it something you can use in a more live practice.
Speaker: How do you take every technique and learn what its values and limitations are?
Speaker: That really became the focus of the hands-on skills-based training was,
Speaker: Take the example, work it as described, and then try to break it, play with it, study it.
Speaker: So, you know, being told by my teacher to, you know, practice the material, but then also to study it.
Speaker: There are very different mindsets and different methods of practice.
Speaker: So one is do exactly what I told you and refine it and be really good at it.
Speaker: And the other is figure out how to make it workable under varying circumstances.
Speaker: So being given that as the tool and the rubric to say, you know, this is how you go from taking what I've given you to making it useful.
Speaker: It's very helpful to have that up front as the training methodology, not what I'd been told in some other places, which was do the kata until the kata is just going to work for you when you need it.
Speaker: When you get into a fight, it'll just be there for you.
Speaker: It'll just happen.
Speaker: And that's the...
Speaker: something I just didn't really have the faith to put my trust in.
Speaker: So I wanted a very clear, progressive method, and I found that with my teacher.
Speaker: It's also a bit of a risky faith, because if it doesn't work, then you're in a lot of trouble.
Speaker: Yeah, it might be the only chance you get, right?
Speaker: So it's not something I was willing to do.
Speaker: I also, Daniel, have a background in computer science and analysis work.
Speaker: So I like things to be clearly labeled and frameworks to be coherent and to know what it is.
Speaker: If you say you're going to train this martial art, it's one of those things that –
Speaker: I think those of us who are kind of crazy for martial arts, we don't think like normal people.
Speaker: I think normal people, when they come into a school, they think they're going to receive an education, which has a start, a beginning, and an end.
Speaker: And when you come into a school and you come to find out that, oh, well, you're going to teach yourself how to fight.
Speaker: Because there's no answer.
Speaker: And by the way, you're going to have to do this forever.
Speaker: These are not the things people want to hear, at least not in the West, I believe.
Speaker: Nowadays, I think we were willing to accept that back in the 70s and 80s as like, just do the thing and it'll all magically make sense one day.
Speaker: But I think nowadays people are more skeptical.
Speaker: We have so much more information.
Speaker: So to be able to ask good questions is so important.
Speaker: And so I think now we all want to know, well, what is the style?
Speaker: What are the methods?
Speaker: How do you break down the curriculum?
Speaker: What does good look like in an objective manner rather than purely subjectively?
Speaker: How much do I like to watch your taulu?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So those are the things that really drive me and that were what I was looking for.
Speaker: And I found that structure in five ancestor boxing.
Speaker: Now you mentioned the horse underneath, I think that's a very, in southern Chinese martial arts it seems to be very common because Philipp Le also talked, when he talked about southern praying mantis, he also talked about the horses, which it took me a while to actually understand this because I remember from Cholifat they also talk about seiping ma as a stance, but in northern Chinese martial arts it would always be ma bu, so bu would always be the, like you would train bu like stances or steps.
Speaker: But just to clarify, so the basic stance in Wuzuchuan, in Five Ancestors, is it what in Japanese is called sanchin or is it the classical horse stance?
Speaker: Like what would be the traditional position or basic stance that you practice?
Speaker: Yeah, that's a great question.
Speaker: Yeah, so the typical stance goes by a few different names.
Speaker: And like a lot of Southern Chinese martial arts, you'll find some of the old writings call it not ding and not boo.
Speaker: So a very long name for a stance.
Speaker: So in our lineage of five ancestor boxing, we call it chenbei.
Speaker: So the fighting stance, the battle stance.
Speaker: So like you would say samchen,
Speaker: Chen meaning to fight or to have a battle.
Speaker: And so it's that stance.
Speaker: And that stance for us is kind of a slightly rear weighted stance that is fairly upright with the front leg turned in so that the knee can help protect the groin.
Speaker: So the idea being your front facing, your hands are both forward.
Speaker: You're not side bladed typically.
Speaker: And so you, because you're front facing, you need to protect your groin with your lower body.
Speaker: So we talk in that front knee in order to help protect the groin from, from attack.
Speaker: So that's our typical stance.
Speaker: We call it Chen Bay and it's,
Speaker: about 60-40 rear weighted.
Speaker: There's a lot of front leg sweeping and leg kick checking and low kicking available to the art.
Speaker: And so one of our sayings is our kicks in Five Ancestor are both low and cold.
Speaker: Cold meaning no telegraphing.
Speaker: So they just happen very quickly.
Speaker: So the stance is a little bit reserved, which matches the high level strategy of the art, which is to be
Speaker: a little bit of a counter fighter as opposed to being more aggressive, like in something like say five, uh, like a white eyebrow where you might be more aggressive or drag and you might, might be have a more forward leaning stance.
Speaker: So the stance itself actually reflects a little bit, the top level strategy of the style.
Speaker: You also mentioned forms and that you would then do form practice for coordination.
Speaker: What would the typical form look like?
Speaker: I mean, not in detail, but is it like a long form?
Speaker: Is it super complicated?
Speaker: Do you have a lot of them?
Speaker: Do you have just a few?
Speaker: Do these connect to those?
Speaker: Because I think the five ancestors are also part of the structure, this idea of having different traditions meshed into one.
Speaker: Yeah, it's a great question.
Speaker: So yes, we do actually have a lot of forms in the style.
Speaker: And I think you can ascribe that to the fact that it is kind of a conglomeration of potentially five other styles.
Speaker: So it's potentially large.
Speaker: But there's a division in the style that's helpful in terms of the forms.
Speaker: And so like most styles from this part of the country, we start with Samchen, the meaning of the idea of three battles.
Speaker: There are a few other flavors of that name, like three advances or three arrows, potentially homophonic errors in Chinese.
Speaker: But the similarity is typically all the same in these Southern arts that use these forms.
Speaker: They're about your breath, your fundamental body structure, your fundamental stance, and
Speaker: and your ability to deliver power.
Speaker: So another word for that instead of three battles would be three corrects or three straights.
Speaker: So are your legs correct?
Speaker: Is your body correct?
Speaker: Is your head correct?
Speaker: So is your posture all good?
Speaker: So you learn all your posture elements, breathing, power, sometimes iron shirt,
Speaker: elements all in these Chen forms.
Speaker: So we start with Sam Chen, but in our branch of Five Ancestors, we actually have 10 Chen forms that are all more about body development.
Speaker: So they have various aspects of isometric and isotonic training in them.
Speaker: So they typically have the movements of the style, but they're done under different kinds of tensions, typically in a slower way to develop your forearm strength, gripping strength, the stomach tightening for iron shirt, whatever.
Speaker: various elements like that.
Speaker: And then the rest of the forms are done fast and explosively.
Speaker: So you have your Chen forms and the other ones they call the Kun forms, the fist or boxing forms.
Speaker: There's about 40 odd forms and a lot of the fighting forms have a two man element where it's a feeder side so that you can practice as two people.
Speaker: Now, the challenge with those feeder forms is they're not really for skill development in the sense that they're long and purposely have things in them that don't allow either person to finish the fight.
Speaker: So, yeah.
Speaker: Of course, you want to be careful how much of that you practice because it will give you skills that are not going to be quick to advance your cause.
Speaker: So they're great for learning timing and distancing and toughening your arms, but they're not as good at demonstrating the actual skills of the style.
Speaker: How would then partner training feature into this?
Speaker: I mean, this is obviously one aspect.
Speaker: You know, we have these partner forms.
Speaker: I would assume, though, that you also, I don't know, maybe train techniques or have specific drills that you would do.
Speaker: Is this how much of the tradition?
Speaker: Yeah, it's true.
Speaker: So there's...
Speaker: There are a lot of ways to train, and we practice in ways that are very similar to a lot of other styles, where we practice one specific technique against one attack and then very quickly try to move on to multiple punches.
Speaker: So people don't just punch once.
Speaker: They punch at least twice, if not more.
Speaker: So trying to make sure that you attempt to counter control so quickly that the person can't get off the second punch or the second punch is easier.
Speaker: easier to manage.
Speaker: But the classical method for practice is very similar to what you would see Bruce Lee crossing hands with somebody else in an outer gate bridge position.
Speaker: So the founder of the style codified some things they call the six gates, eight methods, hand techniques.
Speaker: So the idea of six gates is that there are directions that you want to practice when you're encountering a bridge.
Speaker: And
Speaker: So you can go into the opponent or you can retreat from the opponent.
Speaker: You can stay on the outside gate or move to the inside gate, or you can jump above the gate, the bridge or attack below the bridge.
Speaker: So those are the six gate directions.
Speaker: And there are specific techniques that we practice to help you practice getting under a bridge, switching gates to the inside, coming above the bridge.
Speaker: So those are the six gates hand methods.
Speaker: So we practice those.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Then from there, we practice the eight attacking methods.
Speaker: And these are all meant to be, these are all passed down as the favorite methods of fighting of the founder of the style.
Speaker: So whether it's true or not, or whether or not we fully understand exactly how he would practice them, you know, we have what's passed down in our group, which is a little different than every other family in the same style.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But those eight attacking methods are things that take into account the tactics of the style, like attack the branches rather than the root, or make a sound to the east to strike to the west, or...
Speaker: various things like this, or find victory and defeat.
Speaker: So there's all these tactics in the poems of the arts strategies that we can utilize, and they marry well with these example techniques.
Speaker: So the idea is start from a bridging position, utilize these methods to try to navigate through or past or around a bridge, and when you do so, then attempt to overwhelm the opponents with one of the strategies of the style.
Speaker: So that's the classical methodology.
Speaker: And it starts with very simple methods of navigating pressure, like you would have in the horizontal push hands in Taiji, for instance.
Speaker: So we have swallow spit, which looks very similar to the common...
Speaker: method.
Speaker: We call it coiling bridge.
Speaker: So swallow spit coiling bridge is very similar to sticky hands you'd see elsewhere.
Speaker: And then we have a float and sink coiling bridge, which takes a more vertical aspect.
Speaker: One of the fun things about this is this maps exactly to what Gojiru has in terms of training methodology.
Speaker: So there's a very distinct connection there.
Speaker: So you navigate the bridge, you press, you pull, you express your practice in sink, swallow, spit, and float, and then you start working, disconnecting from the bridge, crossing the bridge, switching gates, and then you work on overwhelming with varying kinds of attacks.
Speaker: Now what I understand from what you described is five ancestors is definitely a form of Duanda, like short range fighting, right?
Speaker: It's not Changchuan in the sense of that you go into like a long distance.
Speaker: I mean, also you mentioned that you don't really have high and long kicks, like you try to keep things short and sweet, right?
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, you're right, Daniel.
Speaker: Generally, that's true.
Speaker: Although one of the fun things about the art is it's quite a large toolbox to work from.
Speaker: So with the aspects of the five ancestors, you get a little bit of training in long, medium, and short.
Speaker: high standard and low elevation training.
Speaker: So standing, kneeling, as well as laying on the ground, dog boxing style elements.
Speaker: So there's a little bit of everything, although the art definitely has some focus.
Speaker: So the things that we would say are long range come from, let's say Song Taizu's influence from the north to the south.
Speaker: So the way that we express our punch in a long way is
Speaker: is attributed to the Taizu ancestor in the art.
Speaker: So maybe similar to Shaolin Five Animals in that we have one art with a strategy of an umbrella and then some...
Speaker: aspected elements that say, well, if you really like to fight this way, then you should think more about looking into the monkey part of the art because that really fits your body style or your prior training or the preferences that you have.
Speaker: So being a broad, very large toolbox, it's nice because it can appeal to different people in different ways.
Speaker: And it used to be told that the art was customized for individuals, although
Speaker: In the goal of standardizing things, you lose that preference.
Speaker: So what I've worked with my teacher to do is develop a way to teach the system where we have a core element that we teach to everyone, and then we allow people to specialize in different ancestors while still achieving the same ability to receive credentials in the art.
Speaker: Although a teacher would need to learn a great amount of information to be able to pass on the art.
Speaker: Would you normally then move through the five ancestors, these basic five systems that are integrated into one, would you move through them or is it like, hey, you probably don't do just whatever is fun, you have probably some kind of progression there?
Speaker: Yeah, what I've been doing is we've been documenting our training lately to help remote students.
Speaker: We have quite a few remote students at this point.
Speaker: So we've taught the core one-year program, and now we're teaching each ancestor as a six-month course.
Speaker: So we're trying to take a very Western style of saying, put a box around this learning element and call it a course.
Speaker: So we have Taizu 1 and Taizu 2 as six-month courses, White Crane 1, White Crane 2.
Speaker: Same for all of the ancestors so that you can decide on your own.
Speaker: Everyone has to take the same core module, but then everyone can choose the course they want.
Speaker: After that, so they can choose their own specialty.
Speaker: So just as if you went to college and said, you know, we get into everyone gets an associate's degree in the US, at least this is the way that it works.
Speaker: You would get an associate's degree, your first two years would be general studies.
Speaker: And then from there, you would pick a specialization for your bachelor's and master's doctorate.
Speaker: So we're trying to use that methodology.
Speaker: Go ahead.
Speaker: Yeah, I just want to make sure because most of the listeners might also not know what the five ancestors systems are.
Speaker: And I think I might also have forgotten because I read up on it.
Speaker: But so you mentioned Songt Haizu, you mentioned White Crane.
Speaker: What are the other...
Speaker: Yes, the next one would be Damo or Dazun, Bodhidharma, as a nod to that ancestor.
Speaker: And then Lohan, and then also Monkey, so Southern Monkey style.
Speaker: So those are the five ancestors.
Speaker: And, you know, they have varying kinds of tactics.
Speaker: So Song Taizu is all about masculine, powerful, hard, crisp strength, and moving right through the center, central palace of the opponent.
Speaker: Lohan is a boxing style, typically using the fists, but includes tremendous amounts of footwork for angulation.
Speaker: So rather than just plowing through the center, you'd use evasive maneuvers to use smart evasive boxing so you don't have to crash, so you don't have to absorb blows or have to block them.
Speaker: You could use evasion as your defense and counter-strike.
Speaker: Da Zun Quan is Da Mo Respecting Boxing.
Speaker: That's the name of a style in the part of the world where the founder created the style.
Speaker: And so it is where we get our Sam Chen, our idea of internal cultivation, Qigong practice, iron body, iron arms, iron palm.
Speaker: These kinds of elements come from the Da Zun aspect.
Speaker: Monkey gives us the low line work that you would see very similar to what is often called dog boxing, but for us it's a monkey aspect.
Speaker: So on the crouching and items where you're laying on the ground doing leg scissors and kicks up and those kinds of elements, those are all attributed to the monkey, as well as a number of slapping maneuvers and chin-naw activities we attribute to the monkey aspect.
Speaker: And then White Crane was incorporated to help soften things like the Taizu element, which was very hard, give us the adaptability that comes from softness.
Speaker: So White Crane helps us give speed and varying kinds of power development that are different, the whipping energy and other kinds of Jing that help us express power in different directions with different techniques.
Speaker: So you mentioned before that, you know, the partner practice that you have these, I mean, it seems to be a very structured approach with this bridging and all these ideas surrounding it.
Speaker: And then you also mentioned that clearly those five ancestor systems each have different ideas that might then be introduced.
Speaker: Do you also build a sparring culture in the sense of, hey, you know, we need to do this now freeform and spontaneous and in a free manner?
Speaker: Yes, we do, but we actually structure that fairly late in the process because we have attempted to build a very progressive skill development bridge between basic and freeform.
Speaker: So I would say there's an element of that bridge.
Speaker: free form nature that we build into every drill.
Speaker: So we typically teach drills in four levels and kind of in three modes.
Speaker: So the four levels have to do with whether the input you're receiving as a practitioner is predefined.
Speaker: So you have a fixed input, a right hand punch, straight punch to the temple or something like that.
Speaker: That's a fixed input.
Speaker: And my fixed response is I use a flicking upward block to deflect it, and then I counter in the second beat.
Speaker: The timing's not good, but at least it's a good way to get the practitioner started.
Speaker: So a fixed input and a fixed response.
Speaker: And then we suggest that the response be variable, so the practitioner
Speaker: can develop their own preferences and explore the other options for defense.
Speaker: So you have a fixed input, the punch is still the same, but now I'm going to think about all the other things I practiced and come up with a different way of responding.
Speaker: And so you give the student some freedom at that point to do some exploration.
Speaker: Then you take varying responses.
Speaker: Third level is varying attacks, right punch, left punch, hook versus straight, include a kick, and then have the student practice responding with the appropriate response in that selection process.
Speaker: So they're trying to go through the mental selection as quickly as possible to
Speaker: to get the right response for the right scenario.
Speaker: And that's a stage of training.
Speaker: And then lastly, you have random inputs and random responses.
Speaker: So that's essentially fully free form.
Speaker: So we attack that in four levels.
Speaker: And then, you know, as a teacher, it can be really frustrating when students come up to you and they're like, yeah, but what if this and what if that and what if this other thing?
Speaker: And when I was an early teacher and I didn't have a lot of experience, it frustrated me because it pulled us off what I thought was the correct lesson plan.
Speaker: And the reality is every student's different.
Speaker: And it's really not good if you can't help address the students' questions in a real-time manner.
Speaker: And so having three levels of...
Speaker: And success for every drill is another thing we really strive for.
Speaker: So the idea of every drill, as I presented to the student is, hey, here's what happens in the best case scenario.
Speaker: Here's the happy path solution.
Speaker: Your timing was excellent.
Speaker: So when he punched, you blocked and you hit him at the same time and you're, you're
Speaker: strike was sufficient to stop his advances and it's all done.
Speaker: It all happened in one beat.
Speaker: That's the best case scenario.
Speaker: Second scenario is we attempted to do that, but our timing was bad.
Speaker: So he was able to counter our counter.
Speaker: So we were obstructed.
Speaker: So the lesson there is to continue to manage the obstructions.
Speaker: So when you defend, you now have been obstructed in your response.
Speaker: Now clear the arm out of the way or move or flow around the obstruction.
Speaker: So that level of training gives you a lot of practice in dealing with bridging obstructions.
Speaker: And then the third level being, well, you know, uh,
Speaker: I don't have the initiative anymore.
Speaker: And level one, happy path.
Speaker: I've got the initiative.
Speaker: I'm running through the person level two.
Speaker: I'm trying, but I've been delayed, but I'm still, I still have the opportunity to lead the engagement level three is I was completely countered and now I'm on my heels and I'm defending again.
Speaker: So I attempted to attack.
Speaker: Not only was I blocked from my success, but now I'm defending and I've lost the initiative.
Speaker: So these are the three stages of success we try to work through for every drill to give people that counter counter flow.
Speaker: One, I've got the advantage.
Speaker: I've got the initiative.
Speaker: I'm leading the engagement.
Speaker: Everything's working.
Speaker: I'm really working on my flow and my power and my targeting versus, oh, now I've got to deal with the fact that nothing I'm doing is working.
Speaker: but I've got to keep trying and I can't fall backwards.
Speaker: I can't retreat.
Speaker: I just need to keep being assertive and flow around these problems.
Speaker: And lastly, you know, what happens when everything goes bad, right?
Speaker: I tried my thing.
Speaker: It didn't work.
Speaker: Now I'm on the defense.
Speaker: What can I do to re-earn the initiative?
Speaker: So these are all things that we take into account when we practice partner practice so that we can build successive skills,
Speaker: Because what I found in karate was you practiced your basics, you practiced your memorized sparring, and you practiced your forms, and they didn't all overlap very well.
Speaker: And so what I found in the kung fu is we've been taught great ways that...
Speaker: Let us build a good bridge between memorization and freeform in a structured way so that when you get to freeform, you actually have specific skills that come from the arts, strategies, and techniques so that you don't just immediately devolve to some kind of a MMA kickboxing style approach.
Speaker: So that's a primary goal for us.
Speaker: We, you know, we love MMA.
Speaker: We love Krav Maga.
Speaker: We love all kinds of practice methods, but what we don't want to do is throw out the tradition because we don't believe the tradition is something that we can use for an altercation.
Speaker: We just don't believe that that's, we don't want to throw that out.
Speaker: We just know that you need good scaffolding to make it usable.
Speaker: Yeah, and my impression is from also training a bit of boxing on the side is that it's not the techniques that makes boxing work because there's nothing special in the techniques.
Speaker: It's the way they train.
Speaker: It's just a smart training where everything, like you said, is integrated and...
Speaker: And what you also described, I really like it because it reinforces an idea that I sometimes try to transmit to the people I teach here, is that you can approach this a little bit like a chess match, like conceptually, just that in reality, it's very fast and you can try to do two moves at the same time or you can kind of
Speaker: for example, unbalance the opponent so that his move will be just to regain balance and stuff like that.
Speaker: But I think that's a very interesting way to think about this in terms of moving, counter moving and so on and so forth, so that people learn that some things are kind of smart and some things are maybe pretty dumb and maybe you should try to avoid them.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Yeah, that's a great point because, um, you know, the fight can be nearly infinite and is absolutely infinite when you're both on the ground.
Speaker: So the ground fight is much more infinite in terms of things to practice.
Speaker: So we have a tremendous amount of things we should practice.
Speaker: And so being clear about what your arts preferences and goals are and what your personal capabilities are, I think is really important in helping reduce the infinite to the trainable.
Speaker: You've only got so much training time.
Speaker: So we've got to try to really make sure the arts, what the art is teaching us is well focused on the things that we're likely to encounter in the situations where, be it either competition, if that's your goal or self-defense or, or other aspects, security.
Speaker: You mentioned this in the beginning and this also aligns very much with my perspective on physical confrontation.
Speaker: You mentioned different scenarios, you mentioned combat sports.
Speaker: In my mind this is kind of the dueling situation, right?
Speaker: Like two people agree on fighting with whatever ruleset, which I guess also historically existed, but I mean combat sports hadn't really been invented back then, but this idea of dueling obviously was always there.
Speaker: You have the kind of security work for professional police officers, soldiers and so on.
Speaker: And you have this civil and self-defense.
Speaker: Do you have a specific frame of reference, like out of maybe not out of those three, but do you have something specific where you say, hey, this is where we train?
Speaker: Or is it more like depending on what students envision for themselves that, hey, you can take this in this direction or in that?
Speaker: Or how do you approach this?
Speaker: Yeah, that's a great question.
Speaker: I would say first off, we like to define our most fundamental principle as or concept as that we're talking about self-defense.
Speaker: And that means we're starting in a situation in a bad situation.
Speaker: So we're not starting in a...
Speaker: What would you call it?
Speaker: Like, I'm not a bandit out to steal somebody's money and I'm attacking first, right?
Speaker: The idea is I would be the victim.
Speaker: And so we start from a position where we expect that we need to first defend ourselves and then apply counter control.
Speaker: It helps us understand the problem of timing because we assume we start without the initiative and we have to earn the initiative in order to be successful in counter control.
Speaker: Now, that said, Daniel, I believe there's a very small distinction between all of those methods you're talking about, and that's because I think of this in terms of control.
Speaker: If your control is tying somebody up and walking him out the door so that he leaves the bar or breaking somebody's neck because you're on a battlefield and your gun is jammed,
Speaker: They're both forms of control.
Speaker: However, one is much more lethal than the other.
Speaker: And so I think that the elements that lead you to be able to do something lethal are the same elements that lead you to successfully be able to do something non-lethal.
Speaker: Whether it's an arm bar, punching somebody in the face...
Speaker: can be distracting.
Speaker: Punching somebody in the temple can be distracting, or it could kill somebody because people are both fragile and strong, and you can't always prejudge that.
Speaker: So I guess the important thing from my perspective is that all of these things are talking about control, defensive control, and counter control.
Speaker: And those methods of control are many, and they could just be as little as me
Speaker: pushing you and unbalancing you a little so you have to take a step, but your ye, your mind is drawn to having to take the step so you don't swing against me again, or disarming somebody with a knife as dangerous and challenging as that is.
Speaker: So from my perspective, we talk about self-defense, but I do believe that what we teach is viable in a lot of ways, and it's the preference and the context and the exact methods of control that really differ.
Speaker: Makes sense.
Speaker: Now you mentioned that one of the five systems, the one Da-mo system has a lot of qigong or ne-gong and a lot of also conditioning, like iron body.
Speaker: Does it mean that this idea of conditioning, I mean a lot of southern styles have a lot of hardening of the body and this is very typical.
Speaker: Is it kind of relegated to that family, to that part of the five ancestors?
Speaker: Or do you have a general approach on how you would do conditioning and strength training as part of the training method?
Speaker: It's a good question.
Speaker: Five ancestor boxing takes it as a basis that you have to practice this conditioning effort.
Speaker: It's very important for all practitioners.
Speaker: So we...
Speaker: We would say there's really four pillars of practice.
Speaker: One is the stuff we can talk about like we're talking about today.
Speaker: Theory, history, morality, theory of teaching, theory of application, those principles and concepts.
Speaker: The next is body development, and that's what a lot of people call conditioning, although conditioning can be a big umbrella.
Speaker: So we dive into that in a few ways.
Speaker: And then body coordination and skill development.
Speaker: So...
Speaker: For body development, we talk about specifically things like strength, speed, toughness, flexibility, and agility and power, those kind of being the sub-elements of what we're talking about.
Speaker: So for strength, we do things like strength.
Speaker: swinging and throwing stone locks, uh, throwing a medicine, you know, using both old and new approaches, right?
Speaker: So the old approaches are stone locks, lifting stones, gripping stones with handles on the side.
Speaker: I mean, all those kinds of things are medicine or, um, roller bars that you toss and catch.
Speaker: Um, but we also practice using modern techniques and highly recommend modern efforts.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So, um,
Speaker: It's nice when you have young, strong people come in who are already athletic or at least can be athletic easily, but a lot of people who want to train are older or aren't natural athletes, so they need this stuff because you can teach everybody skills and ideas and theories, but if they don't have the engine to deliver the art –
Speaker: The art's ineffective, right?
Speaker: So you have to have those elements.
Speaker: For toughness, we do, you know, we call it kong no ki.
Speaker: It means to hammer the five limbs or hammering with five parts power.
Speaker: And so we say one of our concepts about power is it comes from famous Chinese general's writings, Yu Da You.
Speaker: who wrote about the five parts of tactical engagements.
Speaker: So we say the trunk, the arms, and the legs constitute those five parts, right?
Speaker: The power is manifested through contact with the ground, from the legs, through the torso, and expressed in the arms.
Speaker: So we try to develop whole body unified power, and we call it five parts power that way.
Speaker: So roller bars, iron arms, arm banging, iron shirt.
Speaker: We do self hitting to the torso.
Speaker: We hit each other's body parts to practice those things.
Speaker: We practice iron palm.
Speaker: You know, there's a saying in the art that comes from Taizu.
Speaker: It's that you want the stomach to be like an iron wall.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: So part of the Damo-based training is practicing relaxing parts of the body while tightening the Dantian area, right?
Speaker: The bladder area and the stomach to make sure that you're strong.
Speaker: A lot of exercises that are about developing speed and explosive movement.
Speaker: So we have arm clearing drills that are all about speed development and two-person drills and then stretching techniques.
Speaker: And then the idea being you culminate all that in just having greater agility, right?
Speaker: You want...
Speaker: Good mind-body connection so the body moves well and easily and with good flow and power.
Speaker: So those are the kinds of things that we do.
Speaker: It's very, very important to us to spend time to develop the body.
Speaker: Of course, once you teach those to students, you want them to practice that stuff outside of class so they don't take up class time.
Speaker: Yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker: Now, what I find really interesting about this is that it always immediately leads to the next question, at least in my mind, that is how health is handled within the training.
Speaker: Because on the one hand, I mean, some of the conditioning, if done at the extremes, I would say, it can be quite tricky because it is always like essentially damaging the body in small doses, right?
Speaker: So that it builds up certain resilience, which makes sense, but it can be a bit tricky.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And on the other hand, there's a lot of postural training, but also, I mean, strength is also a function of health in the sense that when you're not healthy, it's one of the first things you lose or when you get older.
Speaker: But I remember Philipp Le, when I talked to him about Southern Praying Mantis, I mean, also a lot of postural training in there, which is interesting for me as a Taiji guy, because this is, I mean,
Speaker: For us, it's like postural training and frame building is a key element.
Speaker: But he mentioned that some of the training is so much focused on martial arts that it's actually not that healthy.
Speaker: And I thought it was quite interesting.
Speaker: So my question would be, how is health integrated into your training?
Speaker: Is it a key feature?
Speaker: Is it a side effect?
Speaker: Is it something that you have to consider with some of the training methods maybe being not that healthy?
Speaker: It's a great question because those of us who came up years ago in an era where there wasn't a lot of cross-training and there wasn't a lot of visibility on other methods, we used only the old training methods and we trained them.
Speaker: in a, often in a damaging way, not really paying attention to a good slow progressive that helps invoke things like Wolf's law that you were just referencing, right?
Speaker: You want slow, gradual conditioning with rest periods in between so that your body can adapt.
Speaker: We didn't always do that.
Speaker: We did things that were damaging.
Speaker: So, um, nowadays we really try to just make sure that our training is
Speaker: Good for each individual because we don't want to duplicate the errors of the past.
Speaker: So one of the most important things for me as a teacher is to understand that everybody is in a different state of fitness.
Speaker: So there is no getting down and everyone does 50 pushups.
Speaker: 50 pushups are going to be damaging for some people who are not there.
Speaker: But likewise, we also can't say, we don't really care about your health.
Speaker: It's your own problem.
Speaker: You know, just do what you can do.
Speaker: We, we want people to push themselves to, to have goals and help support those goals.
Speaker: So, yeah,
Speaker: we try to work with people to develop a program inside of the confines of what we teach, but also recommend they do things outside of what we teach because, you know, we don't have time to spend only being, uh, personal trainers or fitness experts.
Speaker: We have some expertise in the family that, you know, so I have several students who are fitness experts.
Speaker: And so I actually ask them to help each other and ask some students to go to them, you know, um, uh,
Speaker: and get more advice.
Speaker: But I guess what I could say is most important to me is just that people push themselves and they do so in a smart, intelligent way, and that your health is incredibly important.
Speaker: And part of the reason we would do something
Speaker: I live in the United States.
Speaker: There are more guns here than there are people.
Speaker: If you really are talking about self-defense, it's very easy to get a license to get a gun, and you probably would never have to train one of these martial arts for self-defense.
Speaker: That said...
Speaker: I and many people find that the social aspects, the body development aspects, and just the general health and wellness and socialization are all very helpful.
Speaker: things in my life.
Speaker: So I not only want to have self-defense skills, but I want to have friends and people I like to hang out with.
Speaker: And I want to have a good, healthy body that lasts me into old age.
Speaker: And I think a lot of people who come here want the same.
Speaker: So we just try to support that as best we can.
Speaker: Some elements of the art help with that.
Speaker: But the art, for instance, I would say, is not equally holistic in that everything we do on the right side, we do the same number on the left.
Speaker: something, there is a right-handed bias in the art.
Speaker: We tend to clear with the left and hit with the right, uh, you know, and do things like that.
Speaker: So, uh, I remind people of that periodically.
Speaker: And I say, you're not, if all you do is train what we do, you may develop some imbalances in your posture or your power or your muscle musculature development.
Speaker: So be aware of that and offset that in ways that, that work for you.
Speaker: If you want to do all your forms, uh,
Speaker: mirrored to help offset that then do that or do do other things but we just remind people that that's the way things are at the moment now one thing that that hasn't been brought up yet um is the well maybe a little bit but um this idea of mindfulness or meditation as an element in martial arts training and i'm just bringing it up because so many people i think mostly people who actually don't train martial arts are not like not not you know in any depth
Speaker: seem to be fascinated by this connection and, you know, it's just meditation and motion and whatever, which I personally wouldn't actually agree with.
Speaker: But how do these elements, these kind of, for lack of a better word, like elements of mindfulness, do they feature into the training?
Speaker: Is it an integral part?
Speaker: Is it something you do on the side?
Speaker: Or is it just like, I don't know, something like in a specific set that you would also train in addition to everything else you do?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We, in our family of five ancestor boxing, I would say we aren't into teaching elements of esoterica.
Speaker: So our concept of Qigong is activities that you do with specific breathing patterns is Qigong.
Speaker: So for us, that starts day one when you start learning the Sam Chen form.
Speaker: So you had Will of Monkey Still's Peach on your podcast.
Speaker: In our discussions, it actually helped me remember, because I don't have a lot of exposure to Northern arts, that Southern arts typically blend the Qigong into the basic training instead of having a separate Nei Gong, Wei Gong, or Hei Gong or Qigong sets.
Speaker: So for us, Samchen is the introduction into Qigong methodology.
Speaker: And so, yes, it does come with visualization.
Speaker: You do develop through the use of that activity and the partner training that goes along with it.
Speaker: the structure training and those elements, the ability to focus better, to focus on your breathing, to coordinate your breathing with your activities so that your activities are powered with the breath work and it seems to enhance.
Speaker: So for instance, you wouldn't normally hold your breath or inhale while you're bench pressing, right?
Speaker: Typically the methodology is to exhale.
Speaker: And so it's very similar to what we do in Southern style training and five ancestors.
Speaker: So I would say,
Speaker: you know, the Qigong aspect is an element of the Chen forms, the body tension, and there's mindfulness and visualization, uh, in all aspects of solo training, because we want everyone to have that, you know, what some people call sense of enemy, that visualization that you are accomplishing something that you have an opponent in mind and activity in mind so that there's an aliveness to what you do.
Speaker: Um, you know, there's,
Speaker: There's other things that we do to enhance that the further you get into the Dhammo-based training and the other Chen forms, but it's quite hard to describe, and that comes typically when you get further into the other Chen forms.
Speaker: It's interesting that you're mentioning that the Southern styles seem to blend these aspects.
Speaker: It's quite fascinating because I think so far in the discussions, Will was the most explicit because it was also the first episode that I did.
Speaker: And he said, yeah, we have a separate system for this.
Speaker: Now, I'm also kind of biased in the sense I have way more experience with Northern styles, but specifically also with so-called internal styles, which also blend both of them.
Speaker: So for like...
Speaker: Sometimes people come to us and say, what's your negung form in thaijin?
Speaker: What are you talking about?
Speaker: There's no separate negung.
Speaker: It's part of the practice.
Speaker: If you don't practice it, you're not doing it.
Speaker: Great point.
Speaker: I hadn't even thought through that clearly, but yeah, it's a great point.
Speaker: It's easy to paint too broad a brush when we make these statements.
Speaker: when we say internal styles, even I, I have my own perspective on this and it's, it may not be that popular, but the idea that when I think of internal, uh,
Speaker: training versus external training, rather than thinking of it from an esoteric perspective, I think of internal stylists as being people that move well from the core of their body to the extremities and external stylists as being the kinds of people who lock their legs, lock their torso and strike with the power of their arms.
Speaker: as a broad brush.
Speaker: Um, so I find that, uh, it's not so much as a style, but as a, um, as a stage of people's training, I find that people's bodies are not well coordinated when they're early in their training.
Speaker: And then as they become more and more expert in what they're doing, I find real commonalities between a high level Taiji practitioner and a high level five ancestor practitioner or a high level white eyebrow practitioner in that category.
Speaker: everything comes from the movement of the whole body unified for an expressed purpose to deliver power in a direction.
Speaker: So it's just a way of, you know, why labels sometimes help and hurt.
Speaker: You know, these are the way I use the labels to make sense to me.
Speaker: Yeah, and I mean, even also through these discussions and what I've seen, you know, also in videos, it's quite interesting that some of the Southern styles do have very similar ideas because, like I said, there's a lot of postural training, a lot of frame building, right?
Speaker: and a lot of focus on breathing and connecting into power generation, which is a staple of Taiji and Xingyi and these other styles as well.
Speaker: It's just that it seems that Southern styles often take a more, like maybe a harder approach or more, I mean, from the point of view of Taiji would be more rigid, but it's like, I guess, you can come at it from both extremes and then try to find the point in the middle.
Speaker: I find it really interesting.
Speaker: And it seems to me that this idea of internal and external styles
Speaker: is heavily biased in the sense that the people who came up with almost exclusively trained northern martial arts.
Speaker: So the southern martial arts usually weren't mentioned either on the internal or external side, so they just basically ignored that coming up with this description.
Speaker: And then actually when you look at the southern side, it doesn't really fit because they have a different idea of how to train it.
Speaker: Yeah, you bring up a good point in that some of these things clearly come from marketing activities.
Speaker: And it's weird to use the word marketing when I think about these old things, but the psychology behind it feels very similar to marketing because you're trying to say, well, we have the refined thing, right?
Speaker: And we teach the refined thing from the beginning, right?
Speaker: Yin and Yang tells us that you need both aspects, and it's difficult to identify anything purely in isolation, or to even describe something without describing it in juxtaposition with something else.
Speaker: So when somebody says, well, my teacher was the last student of that teacher, and so they got the most refined, but there can be problems with
Speaker: The overly hard or the overly soft.
Speaker: So the reality is we're all seeking ultimately, I think, to have the right balance of hard and soft in our practice.
Speaker: One of my teachers says hard, but not brittle, soft, but not weak.
Speaker: So we want to have a good way of navigating that.
Speaker: And so for 5 Ancestor, the methodology is starting with the strong Taizu-influenced things that probably work well when you're young and full of testosterone and highly aggressive.
Speaker: And then over time, you develop an understanding of your breath and managing your adrenaline and developing relaxation that allows you to be more explosive and faster.
Speaker: And then exploring those soft elements and then finding your place back in the center where you know how to go from, I think often about this, Daniel, as a number line where I have a number line and in the center is zero and hard is one and soft is minus one.
Speaker: And if I stay hard, but I need to be soft, I have to move two steps.
Speaker: And if I stay soft and I need to be hard, I have to move two steps, but I really want to live in the middle of,
Speaker: Because then it's only one step in either direction to be in the method that I need to be in the moment that the context tells me.
Speaker: I mean, I think that that's why these discussions and hopefully also the podcast episodes can help a little bit with this, because I find it really fascinating to see both the differences, but also the commonalities between different styles, different methods.
Speaker: Obviously, northern and southern martial arts have their own kind of traditional, let's say, repertoire of ideas and training methods.
Speaker: But even there are also commonalities, and I find it really interesting,
Speaker: And maybe that kind of leads to the last question that I always ask at the end of an episode regarding the community of martial arts, specifically Chinese martial arts.
Speaker: I mean, you probably don't want to include, I don't know, Greco-Roman wrestling because that's not really our forte.
Speaker: But what are you hoping for?
Speaker: How should the community of Chinese martial arts develop?
Speaker: Or what are the maybe interesting directions to take?
Speaker: What are you hoping for personally?
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: I guess I'll just speak to my community because I don't really have any influence outside of my students and the people who enjoy coming to visit.
Speaker: Not yet.
Speaker: After this podcast episode, I mean... Okay, okay.
Speaker: Thanks.
Speaker: So, yeah, my perspective is...
Speaker: I hope to help people maintain the goals of the past, develop into the future, and be able to adapt into the future in a way that doesn't cause people to overcorrect.
Speaker: As people, we often overcorrect.
Speaker: So, you know, there's a...
Speaker: There's a wave of people who say, oh, traditional martial arts are garbage.
Speaker: There's nothing useful there.
Speaker: Throw it away.
Speaker: Go do boxing.
Speaker: I don't like the idea of throwing things away.
Speaker: I like to try to understand and adjust in a small way to help solve the specific problems.
Speaker: So for me...
Speaker: And there are a lot of things I don't enjoy about the way people have taught traditional martial arts, like keeping things very secret.
Speaker: So for me, writing books to help explain things that were previously very secret is important.
Speaker: So for my students, for the people that train with me, I try to make everything very transparent because my goal is to be a better teacher than my teachers.
Speaker: My goal is to train hard, to be a good, a good enough practitioner that I can enjoy the art, but also be a good example of,
Speaker: And I want my students to be able to solve their own problems without me.
Speaker: So having the fallacy of, you know, all the answers come from the authority, I don't want to have that be the answer to go forward.
Speaker: I want my students to be able to train, but also study.
Speaker: And when they study, I want them to be able to self-correct.
Speaker: So for me, I want my community to develop, my students to develop education.
Speaker: To know that teaching is difficult and it requires a new set of skills on top of what you learn as a practitioner.
Speaker: I want them to know the specific principles and formulas and structures and frameworks that help the art develop progressive skills so that we don't just devolve to kickboxing and they actually learn how to use the art.
Speaker: Um, I, and I really am trying to develop a sense of community where my students help each other.
Speaker: Uh, I don't want everybody to come to me specifically.
Speaker: It means people don't come to me for as many private lessons, but I'm good with that because the longterm it's not about me.
Speaker: It's about the art.
Speaker: So what I want is for them to, uh, set up a Facebook group and I just remind them gently right on a regular basis that they're
Speaker: They should post their progress.
Speaker: They should ask each other questions, ask each other for help, and I'll stay out of it and try to let them solve their own problems, knowing they already have the guidance.
Speaker: They have the formulas.
Speaker: They have a student manual.
Speaker: They know the poems.
Speaker: And so if they're still keeping to the strictures and the principles of the art, they're still on the path, even though they might have some individuality there.
Speaker: And then, you know, for the community, I want us all to continue to
Speaker: attract good people so we can enjoy our time together because there's a fun social aspect to what we do.
Speaker: So when we get together, let's not have any jerks.
Speaker: Let's be good training partners for each other.
Speaker: Let's give each other good advice and ask each other to speed up or slow down or try that a little different and have a good dialogue so that the training is very, very productive.
Speaker: So those are the things that make me happy and I hope to see continue to grow.
Speaker: That's very nice.
Speaker: Yeah, I can relate to that because it's also a way of, you know, you train with physical contact, so it can actually be very wholesome, can be very nice if it's done in a cooperative and productive manner.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Excellent.
Speaker: So, yeah, who knows?
Speaker: I hope that the podcast in general can also help with that, especially with, like you said, maybe also correcting some things or maybe not correcting, but improving things, you know, and like small things while keeping those traditions alive.
Speaker: I think that would be fantastic.
Speaker: And maybe, you know, maybe, maybe there's another opportunity for us to talk again about some of the more specific aspects, because we obviously we touched upon a lot of things.
Speaker: So limited time in one episode, right?
Speaker: We can't dive into everything.
Speaker: But I think it was already very, very rich in details and insights.
Speaker: And thank you for that.
Speaker: Thank you for sharing.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: I appreciate the opportunity.
Speaker: It's been a real pleasure.
Speaker: I've enjoyed it.
Speaker: Excellent.
Speaker: And then, yeah, hopefully see you in another episode.
Speaker: Sounds great.
Speaker: Take care.
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.
Speaker: Take care and hope to meet again.
