Things that I am working on

So I am working my way through a large Tai Chi  DVD set and I needed something else that is a little mindless comparatively. This does not mean that I think that stick fighting is mindless but that the effort I have to put into it is much less than trying to change super small inner body angles to help get more still and develop energy channels.

Secrets of Sinawali

It is a straight forward approach to add weapons practice without the need for dropping what I am really focusing on. There is an added bonus that my brother is really digging it and I am able to help teach him how to objectively look at martial arts videos and learn from them.

It is a real skill to develop watching and a critical eye. This allows any student to see what a master might be doing at an ever more subtle level and a master to try and correct what a student is doing. My own experience came from working with the late Bill Soza as a teenager. The first time he worked with me as a novice I was so confused how he moved and I was hitting the ground tapping (internally begging for mercy) so quickly. We lived in Kansas and he would come about every six months from Dallas Texas.

We would see the basics of what we had been learning from him but then he would show us the new stuff he had been working on. My Sensi would video tape the seminar and then we would pick apart what he showed for the next six months between seminars. By the next time Soza would come he would show a new aspect of what he had already taught and the loop would start again.

This training instilled in me an need for critically watching and later feeling of how to learn from other. As an example I trained with a guy who only did I-Chuan (Yi-Chuan)and had studied under Gregory Fong. This guy was issuing power into a heavy pad in this really strong way with his hands. I watched him as my brother took hit after hit on the pad and I noticed both the feeling and the motion he was doing. I then had my turn hitting the pad trying to emulate what the I-Chuan guy was doing with some success. Then I figured a way to do it with my kicking practice. It did not make it into my normal training routine but I like to use it as example of how to use a critical eye to learn things.

Now I am teaching my brother how to learn a set from a video so he starts to develop that critical eye so he can adjust what I am doing and how I am practicing. The other advantage of adding a short stick training makes me more able to partner practice while my brother gets strong enough to start throwing me. There is something I miss about repetitions with a partner because I have predominantly been doing solo forms for the last 6 months.