By Walther Chen Walther is an Orange Belt at Wu Dao
I had a great time at the tournament held at Boston Kung-fu and Tai Chi. I was extremely proud to see many Wu Dao students perform well and with confidence.
As for my own experiences, I competed in Push Hands, which I enjoyed quite a bit. The tournament organizers arranged the judging so that a premium was placed on executing tai chi techniques as opposed to brute force. I think that we all had a lot of fun being pushed over, and I definitely learned more about the weaknesses in my own structure. I find that if one arm becomes busy with defending or attacking, the other arm becomes inactive. Somehow, I need to find a way to connect my body more so that everything works at once, instead of as separate parts.
I also performed the form, short Xiao Hong Quan.It was pretty difficult, I felt like my body couldn't settle down. I distinctly remember the feeling of my calves beingextremely tense, lifting me onto my toes, and my hips not feeling a full connection to the ground, so I couldn't express power very well. But, it did go much better than at the last tournament, where I lost balance over three times.
I credit my improvement to:
Showing up to training consistently and receiving good feedback from Shifu Tim
Some additional strength training which really helped my upper-body connection, especially my back strength.
Having the privilege of watching Shifu De Cheng move at the October workshop.
Although the tournament was only a small step in my Kung-Fu and Tai Chi progress, I am still glad that I was able to participate. I believe it was a valuable tool for stress-testing my body and mind in an unfamiliar environment, and I've gotten a little stronger because of it.
There exists a tale of an ancient tournament, taking place in a far away land, where martial artists would meet to determine the supreme champion....
...Actually, this tournament happened in July, in the somewhat-distant land of San Francisco. It has taken me quite a while to blog about the experience- which I will attribute to my own laziness, vaguely distressing memories, and mild dislike of the situation. Despite the feeling of vague dissatisfaction at the tournament, the experience as a whole was very rewarding.
Getting to the tournament turned out to be the first challenge; It was a long, restless flight to San Francisco, followed by a lengthy trip to the hotel. Everyone was arriving at different times, adding further confusion to the day. Having arrived early, I took the opportunity to explore San Fransisco with the help of my kungfu brother Walther, who I would like to thank for knowing all the good places to eat- without you and your iphone I would have made some poor decisions.
The opening day of the tournament was a tense affair. I was very glad for the presence and support of the rest of the Wu Dao team. Everyone’s nervousness (myself included) contributed to the chaotic atmosphere of the tournament. It was loud, there were so many people, the divisions were unclear, the location of events kept changing... in truth, not any different from a typical tournament scene- except that we had trained for months and flown thousands of miles to be here- which certainly added to the pressure.
Eventually, however, everything was sorted out and we found ourselves running from ring to ring in an attempt to either compete, provide support to our teammates, or film them competing. I was very proud of my compatriots; you could tell that the hours and hours of training paid off as it shone through in spite of nervousness, floor traction, what have you. My own form was scored lowest in my entire division, but that was nothing compared to the payoff of hearing Sifu say that was the best he'd ever seen me do the form. Oddly enough, I felt good about the form as well, in spite of the low ratings. I suppose it is possible that the greatest reward was being able to compete and test myself and my training against others, but this is a very high-minded ideal and difficult to focus on when everyone else is getting shiny medals to take home.
Sifu ended up providing us with a lot of support and pointers on our first day, but the single greatest moment was watching him bawl out a referee for his poor judging. I don’t usually take issue with judging at a competition- after all, everyone has different expectations of what they want to see from a martial artist, and I’ve usually resigned myself to this fact before the tournament has started- but this man’s oversight with regards to the Tai-Chi he was officiating was criminal. It did not help that Walther was suffering due to his negligence. I felt robbed. I’m sure Walther felt worse.
When the first day ended and everyone had performed well, we headed off to dinner. The evening’s activities included a show put on by the hosts of the tournament. I’ve found that these things can be hit or miss, and this one was largely miss- based purely on the severity of Sifu’s scowl. On the upside it did feature a man well into his eighties performing kungfu- proof that this is a sustainable hobby. We did not stay for the entire production.
Day two dawned, and that meant that it was time to spar! Originally I had not planned on sparring, as I had developed bursitis of the left elbow just days prior to the tournament (also know as water on the elbow- a painful condition that swells the elbow to size and consistency of a grapefruit). However, yesterday’s activities had left something to be desired. To be honest, I am guilty of not leaving my ego at the door- I had worked hard these past months and I wanted to take something home! I wasn’t going to let this piddly little elbow problem stop me! Not after so much suffering to get here!
With that thought smoldering in my mind I joined my other team members (Sissi, Melvin) in gearing up. During the gearing up phase Sissi was almost disqualified because she was not wearing sufficient armor- at Wu Dao we do not train wearing chest/ midsection armor. Fortunately, we were able to convince the judges to allow her to compete. I was very gratified to overhear a conversation occurring behind me that went something like this:
Person A: What’s that school? Isn’t that girl going to wear any padding? Person B: (No hesitation, just a hint of awe?) That’s Wu Dao!
Not bad name brand recognition over the course of a single day, eh?
As the fights unfolded, I was disqualified for drawing blood (again) but this also managed to earn me a silver medal, so I was content. Additionally I was not injured, having wrapped my arm up in bandages and ice packs. The real showstoppers were Melvin and Sissi:
Melvin: Fought a much bigger Wing Chun fighter to a win over the course of three rounds. It was like watching a train get up to speed. The first round the judges gave to the WC fighter, though Melvin put up a very respectable fight. The second round found Melvin running the man around the ring, working him from a number of different angles and with different strikes. Round three, even though I know both fighters were exhausted, was a climactic battle wherein Melvin clearly dominated his opponent the entire round. Watching him adapt and employ all the things we see in class was truly satisfying.
Sissi: Faced off against some sort of South American kick-boxing champion. This was the classic battle of sport karate versus martial arts. Sissi’s stance was rooted, her guard was up, and all her strikes were firm and deliberate (but quick). Her opponent, on the other hand, bounced around the ring (in what can only be called the absence of a stance) and constantly dropped her hands, leaving her entire head and body open (good thing she had that armor). The result of this fight is immaterial- you could tell the better martial artist in the opening stances.
With the conclusion of the sparring, we were left to our own devices to celebrate the 4th of July in San Francisco. It was a good reward for all those months of training and days of competition.
In my mind the tournament itself was nothing to get excited over, but the experience of being there with the folks competing was what made the entire ordeal worth it. Not just the tournament, mind you, but the months and months of suffering and training as well.I hope to attend future tournaments and get the same experience (except maybe win some more things) Until that time it is back to the training hall for another hundred thousand repetitions.
My tournament was a little bit of a disappointment , which is probably why it's taken so long to blog about it.
I competed in three events: beginner forms for kung fu, beginner forms for tai chi, and push hands. The first two, I was able to perform decently. For my short xiao hong quan, I tipped over a couple of times (a combination of carpet and nerves), but I felt I did the best I could considering my training up to that point.
Where I surprised myself was in push hands. I became pretty upset after I lost the one round I competed in (there was only one other participant). I think that going against a competitor in a match really brought out my competitive juices, and I also was very frustrated by my inability to cope with his tactics. Literally being pushed around can be quite aggravating.
So, where to go from here? One half of the solution is to simply get better. As Shifu mentioned after the tournament, one of the goals in training is to become good enough that there is no doubt who is the best. The other half is to accept that losing can be good: it exposed my weaknesses, knocked down my ego, and provided a great motivation for training.
By Melvin Geronimo Melvin Blue Belt student at Wu Dao As the count down began for the ICMAC ( International Chinese Martial Arts Championships ) in San Francisco, the training intensified. Training for this competition was a bit difficult and different when compared to the last competition our school attended. It was and sometimes still is more of a motivational and mental challenge for me. Tuesdays and Thursdays of the week, I am assisting on training newer students in the first class and I am training in the second class. Most of the advanced students come to the first class and sometimes do not stay and train in the second class. As a result, I find myself training and pushing myself on my own since Shifu is usually busy training newer students. Don't get me wrong, I love that I was presented with this opportunity to help train newer students. It's just definitely a lot easier to train hard and push yourself when training with a partner or group, but when you are on your own, it's a mentally and motivationally challenging. But as the saying goes, "There is no rest for the wicked" and I had to keep in mind that training is more than just physical, it's also mental.
For the about three months we spent most of the time focusing on the Shaolin Hand Form. At the beginning, when we first learned this form I felt as if I was behind. The more advanced students had the opportunity to train and practice the form in both classes while I only had one class to focus and train. My Kung Fu brothers and sisters were far ahead on the form than I was, I felt as if I was being rushed to learn the whole form and started getting mentally dishearten that I wasn't going to learn it completely before the tournament. But once I have finished learning the form from beginning to end we broke it down into a series count and each week we focused on a different part of the form, drilling it down and smoothing it out. This type of training was intense and exhausting, my body felt as if I was hit by a car after every class, but also felt incredibly rewarding at the same time. I felt better and better about the form as the weeks drew on. We also maintained this type of training with the Shaolin Staff Form, breaking it down and focusing on each series count and putting it all together as the tournament date became closer and closer.
A few weeks before our trip to San Francisco, I decided that I needed more training. I asked Shifu if I would be able to train in the first class instead of assisting and he said that was a good idea. Although thinking that an increase my training would help, I hit a speed bump. I started having lower back pains that was excruciating. I noticed that it was very painful to even bend over and try to touch my toes. I tried to mentally block the pain and push onward and even started to take muscle relaxants to see if that would help ease my pain. It was less than a week before the tournament and it felt as if my back wasn't getting any better. I was fearing that I wasn't going to be able to compete. Feeling discourage about it, I decided to take two days off to rest. Just with those two days of rest my back felt better, almost like new. When you're instincts and your body is telling you that you need rest, you need to listen to it no matter what. Pushing yourself and training hard is one thing, but you also need to let the body rest and heal itself.
By Julius Anastasio Julius Anastasio is a green belt at Wu Dao
More than enough time has passed since the tournament, so here is a little retrospective analysis of how the two-day event transpired:
Saturday:
After getting an unexpectedly good night's sleep and eating a whopping $50 worth of breakfast ($30 for my FIRST breakfast, then $20 for TWO EGGS at the insanely overpriced hotel), I was rearing to go. My back felt stiff while I was warming up, but other than that my body felt good to go.
Before I give a brief recap about how my forms went, let me take a minute to complain about the tournament venue's carpeting. This carpet was soft. We're talking "The Princess and the Pea" soft. There may have been some sort of adhesive sprayed on as well, which did not make turning or spinning a pleasant endeavor. We all were a bit apprehensive about this, primarily because both Xiao Hong Chuan and Zhen Shan Gun both involve frequent 360 and 180 degree turns. Being stopped by friction halfway through a turn is not a very pleasant experience. Yes, I know, being a martial artist means you need to be able to adapt to any environment, but c'mon, let me complain just this once.
On to the Hand Form!
I was the fifth person in my division to compete. Despite the sticky floor, everything transpired relatively smoothly. Just like last year's competition, I didn't feel like my form had as much power to it as usual, and I probably rushed through it a bit. Overall, I was fairly satisfied with how it went. I even had some people (including an old Chinese man with a long white beard, cane, and a HOOK for a hand) come up to me afterwards and compliment me on my form.
The majority of my competition utilized the expected plethora of wispy kicks, theatrical hand gestures and terrible stance work that one finds all too often polluting traditional forms divisions. This sort of flowery performance is so prevalent in Kung Fu that it's starting to become expected. A conversation my Shi-Fu had during my form:
Random Kid: I don't like this form. He looks too stiff. Shi-Fu: He's just doing the movements cleanly. Random Kid: ...Well I don't like it.
Thanks, random kid. Although looking back at the video as an armchair quarterback, I did look pretty stiff:
...Shortly after I finished with my first division, the muscles in my left upper back really started to tense up on me. No matter how many times my wife walked on my back or massaged the afflicted area, the pain just wouldn't go away.
Which partially explains...
My Staff Form!
While my experience last year in this tournament circuit had taught me to expect that advanced hand forms divisions start almost immediately after the opening ceremony, it also taught me that the advanced weapons forms divisions would start... sometime. After lunch. Probably. If they found enough judges. While this infinitely mysterious time schedule isn't necessarily the worst thing in the world (such is the way of track meets, martial arts tournaments, and all events involving more than 20 people), I was getting a little anxious as the hours ticked by and I found it harder and harder to move my torso to the left.
Our ring assignment finally was announced at about a quarter past infinity. The officials apparently couldn't decide which ring they wanted to hold the weapons division, so we shuffled from ring to ring a little while longer, warming up and cooling down. They finally settled on a ring, possibly because the head judge finally deemed his chair cushion to be comfortable enough and the stars to be in alignment or something. We then all sat down to bide our time as about 10,000 Choy Lay Fut competitors with spears went through the same form, over and over again.
My execution of Zhen Shan Gun was OK, barring the tremendous screw-up at the very beginning. I suppose it may have been the carpet, or my back’s mutiny against me, but my very first move landed me in a stutter-step. I spent the rest of the form on what must have been autopilot, stewing with that first misstep burned into my mind. I didn’t score well, which I expected. The head judge later approached me and said “you would have scored so much higher if you hadn’t made such an obvious error,” confirming my prediction. The winner was the one Choy Lay Fut competitor who competed with a staff. His form really stood out; crisp, clean, and powerful. Melvin (from my school) also performed his staff form very well, but was robbed by the sea of identical spear competitors.
(Taken the instant before I lost footing. Thanks for making me look good! You can also note the judge in the right hand corner staring down at his doodles. Well done.)
Sunday
While I didn’t spar in this tournament, I think it’s definitely worth a quick mention about how well all the students at my school did. It was rather validating to see that our training allowed us to move and fight martially in the ring, instead of in the hands-down kick-boxing style that everyone else seemed to fight with.
Closing Thoughts (OR: Lessons Learned for Future Tournaments)
Competing in a tournament is EXHAUSTING, and not for the reasons you'd expect. Warming up, cooling down, standing around while the AC is blasting, running back and forth from ring to ring, keeping hydrated, eating enough throughout the day; these all stack up against you very quickly.
Unless you leave no doubt in anyone's mind, the judging for any competition will be almost at random. There are too many inexperienced judges, too much observer fatigue, and too many competitors out there to expect the judging to be an unbiased, logical, repeatable activity. While this occurred universally throughout the tournament, it was made particularly obvious while watching the fixed step push-hands competition. Walther, our lone push-hands competitor went against an opponent whose sole concept of fixed step was to barrel into his opponent and fall over. The judges apparently did not consider this blatant foot movement against the rules (for anyone unfamiliar with push-hands terminology, “fixed-step” means you can’t move your feet), and awarded him the win. Even he seemed confused as to why he had won, and kept shrugging to people as they handed him the gold medal.
While an important part of martial arts training, forms should not be overemphasized. There needs to be a clear link from form to function, or martial arts forms quickly regress into gymnastics and meaningless flailing. It may look pretty, but it is NOT martial. Take the current level of my staff form. My movements, while technically correct, do not have all that much true understanding behind them. Sure, I understood what the majority of the movements were designed to do, but they hadn’t been internalized in a way that I would be able to instinctively use them in a confrontation. Focusing on truly understanding the movements that make up a form or technique will vastly improve your martial skill.
Making an error (in a form, life, whatever) is not necessarily the end of the world. Everyone makes mistakes. How you react, compensate, and utilize to those mistakes determines how you are seen.
Thank you!
I’d like to thank everyone for the tremendous level of support over the past several months. I really can’t say enough about how much it means to have such generous and caring people in my life. So thank you, once again. Your help made this tournament experience possible.
OK, I think I’ve been typing for long enough. Until next time, and keep training!
By Julius Anastasio Julius Anastasio is a Green Belt at Wu Dao
<-I had a bit too much time on my hands this morning, can you tell?
So. There are only 3 days left until the tournament. I wish I could say that I’ve been feeling excited and fearless and rearing to go, but for the past week I’ve been feeling more restless and nervous than anything else.
Last Saturday Shi-Fu video-taped us doing our forms so we could see how we’ve progressed. Good GRIEF everything looked off. Video-taping yourself can certainly be a cruel, abrupt wake-up call for your ego. I made the mistake of watching myself on video a few too many times, mercilessly pausing the video and cringing at every mis-step, bad stance and flimsy arm position along the way.
For about 18 hours I went into crisis mode, stressed and worried about how my form would look at the competition. I picked apart every little mistake I was making, how high I was in my stances, how little intent and power I looked like I had, etc, etc. It didn’t help knowing that there was no real way that my form or technique could improve with less than a week before the tournament. As the expression goes, the hay’s in the barn.
Then I thought back about why I decided to start competing in the first place. The worry and self-conscious critique melted away. I had forgotten that the tournament was simply a useful goal to help inspire me into train harder and bring my training to a different level. The overall outcome, while hopefully good, wasn’t the reason I got started doing this. I didn’t go into training for this tournament thinking I would turn out to be a legendary Shaolin warrior in three months’ time. I went into it thinking that I would give it the best I had, train as hard as I could, and see what the result would be on me as a martial artist. The fact that I can so effectively critique faults and errors in my movements during and after I do them says something very positive about my current level of training.
I’m going into this Saturday with a clear and tranquil mind, with the knowledge that I will come out with a whole plethora of things to focus on in my training.
Scarcely a week remains before the big competition, and in any feel-good-overcome-all-odds-to-discover-yourself-and-get-the-girl kungfu movie it would be about time for a training montage. The montage is often the best part of the film; for some reason we enjoy watching people toil and suffer as the execute tasks only barely connected to their end goal of martial arts mastery (sanding floors, waxing cars, painting houses, etc). Maybe we enjoy the weird things they do, or the moment all those weird things suddenly make sense and are revealed to be kungfu moves. At the end of the montage though, our 98-lb weakling with a glass jaw has become an unstoppable kungfu machine.
We all know (or should know) that this scenario is so far fetched as to border on the ridiculous. However, I had an unexpectedly "montage-y" moment last night in kungfu- and I was absolutely as excited about it as I would have been watching a movie. Let me explain-
Preparing for the tournament has narrowed the focus of our martial arts training. We have spent a great deal of time doing forms, refining our movements and correcting flaws in our techniques. What we have not been doing with similar regularity is pound away at the heavy bags. Bag work is great- great fun, great exercise, and a great way to gauge how powerful your technique is without actually hitting someone. Hitting a heavy bag also tends to shift your focus towards generating power, rather than refining your technique.
Imagine my surprise when I stepped up to the heavy bag for the first time in months and unleashed a devastating kick that sent the bag flying! Where had this come from? I hadn't worked on kicking things as hard as I could for months. What's more, I was exhausted and struggling to make it through the second class. Out of practice and with out of gas, I almost wondered if maybe Sifu had dumped some sand out of the bags.
In the warm glow of (confused) accomplishment the past month spent correcting techniques, kicking air, repeating excruciatingly fine detail work played through my head- and I'll be damned if it didn't feel as though I were at the tail end of a montage! I am certain that the additional training we were doing contributed to my improved kicks, and yet we never actually focused on being able to kick the bags hard.
So aside from swelling with pride* at my new kicks, my experience made me reflect upon how we can always be training kungfu, even if it does not particularly feel like it. While it is true that you cannot get good at something you do not work hard at, sometimes you don’t even know you are doing the hard work. Doing "downward dog" or 10-elements fist does not feel like it would or should help my kicks- but maybe it does. Every time you practice, you extend your capabilities by a small degree and further refine your control, power, and precision. Naturally this will extend to the rest of the body as well- which can have some surprising results.
*(Pride which lasted maybe half an hour before being ground down under further merciless kungfu training)
