Just got back from the Chin Woo tournament. Here’s my writeup. I’ll expound on this a lot over the next few days, hopefully, but I’ve got class both tomorrow and the next day, so it’s going to be a busy week.

It’s 8am on Friday. We got in to Dallas around 2am last night, got checked into the stylish La Quinta, and crashed. Kev went down to look around, and it seems that we’re the *only* ones here so far. Registration starts around 9 and the Wu (Hao) 13 movement Taiji class starts at 10. Right now, though, I’m hungry. It’s time for some breakfast.

Friday, Noon
Just got back from the Wu (Hao) 13 movement Taiji with Milton Lie. It was awesome. My respect for Taiji has skyrocketed. The instructor was very soft spoken and friendly, and really knew what he was doing. If there was any doubt in my mind about the martial applications of the art, that’s gone now. It felt very soft and quiet, but when the instructor demonstrated applicatons for the moves on me, the power in the techniques was unmistakable. I’m having a little trouble remembering the details on the form, but I’m frantically making notes and discussing with the other folks who took the class to try to capture everything we can remember about it.

Mr. Lie made an interesting analogy, comparing the art to a jigsaw puzzle. When you’re starting out, the pieces are large. When you can put the picture together, you take it apart, make the pieces smaller, then put it together again.

Our Sifu’s talked a lot about how to properly shift your weight while moving. When you step out into a riding stance, you drop your weight first before you reach out with the step, and finally you bring your weight out to center it. Mr. Lie emphasised a similar technique that he called “empty stepping.” When you step out, the heel lands first and you don’t commit your weight to the step until the last minute.

1. Opening movement from natural stance. Bend knees, lift wrists to horizontal, uprooting a double wrist grab.
2. Draw in, turning to 10:30, Lazy man.
3. Open and close.
4. Turn to 1:30, lazy man.
5. Open and close.
6. 7:30 Brushed knee
7. 10:30 Brushed knee
8. 7:30 Brushed knee
9. 10:30 Intercepting punch thingie
10. 9:00 square up, step out with left foot into empty stance
11. Roll the left hand outward and upward, clockwise, turning the hand upwards, then fold it over in a half-fist block. Empty step forward with the left foot, punch with the right hand over the block to the chin. The fist is horizontal.
12. Retreating.
13. Open and close.
14. Double cannon punch.
15. Tying the horse.
16. Lazy man.
17. Crossing hands to close.

Friday, 3:00pm
Went to lunch at the Bennigans next to the hotel, then drove around Arlington looking for an ATM. Street layouts in this town are wacky.

Jen’s out at a Choy Li Fut seminar, and in an hour or so Darryl, Kev, and I are going to Pa Kua as a Martial Art, then another break, then Wing Chun Combat Applications at 7. I think I’m gonna go walk around and check stuff out.

Friday, 5:30pm
Holy crap. Master Muhammed’s seminar on Pa Kua Chang was the most incredible thing I’ve done since I started martial arts. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to capture what all I got out of it, but I’ll see what I can do.

Firstly and most importantly, I’m not working hard enough: I should be working all the stuff we cover in our forms and classes with a partner. I don’t know our techniques well enough to really use them in sparring. I’m kickboxing, and I’m not even training to kickbox, so I’m doing it poorly.

It seemed like the original intent was for a more advanced class, but very few of us had any experience in the art at all, so there was a lot of talking about the principles and the strategies. Both before and after we got to work on techniques, there was a great deal of demonstration and lecture.

I’m going to look into Pa Kua. Books, videos, whatever I can get my hands on. I know it won’t approach actual training in the art, but the stuff I saw in that seminar really impressed me. I’d love to really study it one day, but for now I have a new way of looking at what I’m doing in Lung Shou Pai. I have a lot of work to do.

Saturday night, 11pm
We’ve been busy. Last night at 7 Darryl and I took a Wing Chun seminar while Rob and Adam took one on San Shou. Wing Chun was really great. It was a lot more discussion than I expected, but there was some rationale behind it. I’m going to put off talking about this until later, though, because I’ve got a lot to cover tonight and I have to get up early.

After seminars, we went to dinner, then came back to the room. There’s a big grassy area on the other side of the parking lot outside here with a couple of picnic tables and a lot of room to move. There’s a running track around it and a tennis court on the other side, and after dark last night there were dozens of people out there practicing empty hand forms and weapon forms, doing chi sao and push hands, light sparring, standing around and talking, basically just chilling out. We went down there so that Darryl and Rob could do some sparring, and ended up watching folks doing really cool stuff. There were some great staff and spear forms, and a guy doing an incredible rope dart form. We met a guy who did some Xing Yi, too. We ended up going to bed much later than we should have, since we had to get up pretty early Saturday morning for the actual tournament stuff.

This morning, we got to the convention center around 9am, bright and early, because the Masters Demo was at 9:30. That was incredible. There was a lion dance with three lions and an eighteen foot dragon for the dragon dance, which was nothing like I expected. I thought it’d be like a really long lion, but it wasn’t at all. I’ll try to explain it later, when I have time. The masters were all cool, but some were way better than others. I didn’t really enjoy the slow, gentle Taiji demonstrations very much, not nearly as much as I enjoyed doing the Wu (Hao) form. Everything else was great, especially the weapons demonstrations, the push-hands demos, and best of all was the Shuai Chiao (Chinese standing wrestling, specializing in throws and takedowns) demo. That started with three guys who went back and forth throwing each other. Unlike a lot of the other demos, it wasn’t a prearranged set, like a two-man form. They were just realistically practicing the art, and it was fantastic. I’m getting a book.

Oh, I bought a pair of Feiyue shoes and a VCD on Bagua Straight Sword. So far, these shoes are great.

I spent most of the day videotaping various things at the tournament. I got about an hour and ten minutes of footage, and ran down the battery in the camera twice. I got lots of different forms, some sticky hands, some weapons, and bunches of Bagua. By that point, the battery needed a real charge badly enough that we couldn’t record the San Shou tournament, which was a real shame. We also didn’t get much in the way of external weapons forms. Argh. I’ll go back and cover this in more detail when I have the video to reference.

It’s been a looooong day. I’m crashing, because we have to be in a Tradional Shaolin and Internal Boxing seminar at 7am tomorrow.

Sunday, 2pm.

I’m in the car heading home, so I dunno how much time I’ll have to write. We got up early to pack before the morning seminars, scarfed down some breakfast, then headed for our class with Shirfu Christophe Clarke while Kev went for his Hsing-I and Xingyiquan workshops.

Shirfu Clarke’s seminar had some of the elements that I was looking for, didn’t have some of the things I was hoping for, and had a lot of intense work that I didn’t expect. We learned a really interesting stance, very similar to our sitting stance, but it’s a strong fighting stance rather than a transitional position. From there, we covered simultaneous blocking and striking while reversing that stance, low kicks, and sweeps. Darryl, Rob, and I were the only students, so he started by asking us about our backgrounds and had us show him a little of our style so that he could know where to start and what to work with us on. When he found out what sort of tournaments we usually go to, he really worked us hard against the types of techniques we tend to see there. I’ll probably talk more about that later too.

We headed over to the convention center around 9:15 to get there plenty early for Adam’s continuous sparring event. I didn’t get to see any of the Shuai Chiao event, which is what I wanted to see most of all, after Adam’s fight, but I did get to watch some great continuous sparring and I got to see what push hands really looks like. It was pretty cool. I think I’d like to learn some of that.

Adam’s first match was against a guy who was really skilled. Adam did well, but the other guy was just great. He went on to take first place in the event, so it’s not like Adam should feel badly. Everybody else went the same way he did.

We got lots of video again today, so hopefully we’ll get copies of it soon. I’m gonna chill out for a while, though, because trying to read this laptop screen with blistering Tejas sunlight beating down on it is making my face melt.