No virus is going to stop the training!

Everyone keep practicing barring injury or illness!  A consistent routine is the right medicine for both your mental and physical health.  I've been doing Qigong during lunch and practice more intensely  after finishing up work.  The key to progress is consistency and effort!

We've got an Instagram page. Check it out!

We started an Instagram page where we'll be posting stuff from our regular practice.

https://www.instagram.com/seattlexinyidao/

Xing Yi Applications: Beng Quan's Stiff Jab and Follow-Through

https://youtu.be/UlV9ExQ0TTo

Tips on Practice

Practice can be frustrating for beginners especially when it comes to fine details in internal martial arts.  Even long time practitioners can become prone to becoming unmotivated or feel stagnated by practicing the same things over and over.  Here are a few ideas that may help both beginners and experienced martial artists alike when it comes to practicing.  These tips not only apply to martial arts but I’ve found they can apply to any skill.

The most important tip I can give when it comes to practicing martial arts is to just do it.  Just practice as often and consistently as possible.  This is the simplest advice but it tends to be the most difficult for people.  Consistency is the most important aspect of this.  Developing a habit of practice is crucial to making regular progress.  Long gaps will stall your progression and eventually discourage you.   Finding time tends to be the biggest obstacle, but I think even short practice sessions done everyday for as little as 15 minutes can be more effective than a 2 hours once a week.  If you’re on a tight schedule simply set a timer and practice until it goes off.  In this way you can concentrate on what you’re doing and not be concerned with the time.  Practicing everyday helps to reinforce the physical patterns by making them a regular part of your daily life.  You constantly “remind” your body how to move until it becomes automatic.  So practice and practice often!

The next tip essentially is an aid for achieving the first one.  Conditions do not need to be perfect to practice.  You don’t need a large space.  You don’t need lots of time.  You don’t need equipment.  You don’t need special clothes.  You don’t need to feel 100%.  There’s almost no requirements for being able to practice.  All you need is yourself and the will to do it.  Many exercises and drills can be done in place requiring only an arm’s length or a single step around.  This would be things like standing practice, five elements, push hands, etc.  You can still practice stepping and footwork in a small space just take one step forward then one step back. Bagua circle walking is excellent for small spaces.   In addition, limited space is even better to practice in as you probably won’t have much room in self defense situations.  Practicing martial arts doesn’t require any equipment.  Though heavy bags, pads and other tools are very useful you don’t need them all of the time there’s still plenty you can work without them.  I’ve done light sparring many times without any equipment.  Use it as an opportunity to work technique instead of going hard.  You don’t always have to be 100%.  If you’re a little sore practice anyway go a bit lighter or simply just warm up more.  If you’re tired just start practicing and see how it goes.  Many times once you get going you’ll feel fine.  It’ll help you sleep afterwards, anyway.  As you see there is very little reason to not get that practice in.

This last tip is mostly for beginners although experienced practitioners may find this helpful as well.  Remember that skill is built over time and you can’t get everything perfect right away.  This is especially true for internal martial arts.  There are a lot of fine details to work and at the beginning it’s too much to try and get everything.   Being a martial artist involves being a constant work in progress.  Making progress is about getting it right once out of a hundred and eventually improving that to two, three, and so on until it’s right almost every time.  Keep in mind that perfection is an ideal to be worked toward but cannot be truly achieved.  Also remember that progress can be non-linear, it doesn’t always follow a straight line.  Sometimes you have a breakthrough and make a lot of progress other times you’ll stagnate this is normal.  The key is to always try and improve on something.  If you feel like you’re stagnating with one aspect shift your focus to another and then come back to what you felt you stalled on before.  If your push hands feels stalled work on footwork for a while and come back to it.  You may make progress simply by revisiting it fresh again.

I think these are some important tips that both beginners and experience martial artists tend to run into.  Doing martial arts like all other skills just requires the will to put in the work and little else.  Most problems practitioners encounter can be solved with simple solutions.  I hope that this can help people in their practice whatever the style or even in developing non-martial arts skills.

Gaining Freedom from Form

Forms are great and fun to practice, but in order to really learn and understand a martial art one should progress from the solo and two person forms into application and free form.  While it is tempting to just proceed directly into free form sparring, this approach many times results in sloppy and/or poor usage of techniques.  Much of the problem is due to not knowing when to use a technique or being unfamiliar with using it a various angles and/or situations. However, this can be addressed by making incremental progressions towards free form using simple application and progressing to complex ones.  For example, a common way to practice applications is to use a technique in response to a simple straight punch, but this is typically not enough to learn how to use in free form.  Using a technique in response to a straight punch can be progressed in a few ways.  One method is to increase the speed of an attack until full speed is reached.  This becomes limited relatively quick because the defender knows what attack is coming and the attacker is very restricted.  Another method is to make the attack more complex by adjusting other variables such as the level of the attack (high, mid, low), the angle of the attack (right, left, up, down) or multiple techniques in combination.  Yet another progression is to allow the attacker to move as opposed to the typical step in and punch that is commonly practiced.  The attacker can punch and then retreat or step to the side.  There's almost an infinite number of ways to vary the attack by also including kicks and grabs.  The goal is not to practice every variation imaginable but is to learn how to use techniques in a number of different situations and to experiment with performing them at any angle or distance.  By incrementally increasing complexity and speed, these drills will become closer to free form sparring.  In addition to a great transition into sparring, this progression aids in understanding the essence of a technique and when and how to best use them.  The understanding gained from the drills and free form then also improves forms practice as now there is more intent and focus behind the movements.  This method can also be applied to any style or physical practice to make achieve instinctive reactions.

Spring/Summer Practice

Starting next month we'll be practicing outdoors again.  It is Seattle so make sure to check the weather before you head out!  There's plenty of room outside so we'll be focusing on forms and applications during this period.  If you're interested in internal martial arts RSVP on our meetup page and come join us!

Old video of Master Wang Yinghai

Here's an old video that includes Master Wang Yinghai (Master Li's Dai Xinyi teacher) demonstrating.  Xinyi Dao incorporates Dai family Xinyi body methods specifically noticeable is the power generation through compression and expansion of the dantien.

http://my.tv.sohu.com/us/1341621/53690559.shtml

Xingyi striking practice today

We broke out the pad today for some striking practice.  It's good to hit something to check alignment and verify power every so often.

Master Li Tai Liang (Xinyi Dao Founder) demo

Master Li demonstrating Xinyi Dao.

戴氏心意拳子路枪Dai Xinyi Zi Qiang

戴氏心意拳合集Dai Xinyi Collection

Here are some demonstrations of Dai Xinyi.  Master Li inherited Dai Xinyi from Wang Ying Hai and it is part of the foundation of Xinyi Dao.

Feature on Xinyi Dao on Push Pause TV

Push Pause TV did a short feature on Xinyi Dao and Master Li's school in West Babylon, NY.  It features a number of students from the school as well.

http://www.fios1news.com/longisland/push-pause-Our-Community-Xinyi-Dao#.Vy_0zPkrI2w

Master Li Tailiang Seminar in LA

Master Li the founder of Xinyi Dao is having a seminar May 21st and 22nd which will cover Xinyi and Bagua fundamentals.  This is great opportunity for anyone interested in the style and experienced practitioners to meet and learn from Master Li!

Visit the link below for details
https://www.wfmaf.org/en/xinyi-dao-seminar-taught-grandmaster-li-tai-liang/

Spring/Summer Practice Schedule

We will be returning to practicing outside at Meridian Park for the Spring and Summer months.  There will be no meetup the weekend of April 28rd.  We will be traveling to New York for training with Xin-yi dao founder, Master Li Tai Liang!

Don't leave out the "martial" of internal martial arts

Many practice martial arts simply for health and fitness, however it is important not to leave out the fighting aspects.  Regardless of whether you're interested in competitive fighting or not, including some sparring and non-cooperative drills will add many benefits that are otherwise omitted by just practicing forms and cooperative drills.

There are a number of different sparring drills that you can incorporate into your training that will improve movement, reflexes and sensitivity.  Light contact sparring is an excellent way to improve reflexes and movement by forcing you to react in real time against an uncooperative opponent.  This practice can be easily scaled from beginner to more advanced practitioners by increasing speed, force and complexity.  For example, beginners would spar slowly and use a limited set of techniques then once that becomes less challenging the speed would be increased and the range of techniques expanded. This would progress to complete freestyle sparring for advanced levels. There are many other benefits to sparring practice such as improving observational and reaction skills by watching your opponents movements and anticipating openings and developing the mental and physical acuity essential to taking decisive action in a fight.
While light contact sparring mainly improves reflexes and movement, uncooperative/competitive grappling, throwing and push hands practice provides a great training method to improve balance and tactile sensitivity.  These skills can be scaled using the same progression as mentioned with light contact sparring.  The dynamic nature of constantly adjusting to take your opponents center develops your sensitivity while simultaneously defending improves your own balance beyond what is possible through solo practice. At advanced levels, these techniques can be included with light contact sparring for an even greater challenge.  

Sparring is another way to judge progress in martial arts beyond just forms and fundamentals. Being able to use the skills practiced while under pressure is key to making progress in any martial art and adding progressive sparring practice is an excellent way to test it out. It also helps to provide some purpose to training as the results translate to your performance in sparring.  Even if you're not interested in competing, it's still a good experience to go to a tournament every once in a while to try out your skills against people you normally don't train with.  In a competitive event, the intensity is higher and actions more unpredictable as result increasing the pressure and putting your skills to the test even more.
Though martial arts have many benefits outside of fighting, the original intent of martial arts was for fighting.  It is also what separates martial arts from other physical skills that have similar benefits like yoga or gymnastics.  If you don't practice the fighting aspects, can you still say that you're practicing martial arts?  

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!  I hope everyone enjoyed their holiday.  For 2015 we're going to continue using Grass Lawn Park as the location for our practice on Saturday morning.  Please check the blog for any cancellations or changes.  For January we'll review the two-person forms we've been working on and then move on to practicing fundamentals and body training for the next three months.

Current Practice Focus

For the next few months we will be focusing on footwork and distance.  This will include two person forms, moving push hands and controlled sparring drills.

Cooperative and Competitive Practice

Most people do not associate internal martial arts with competition, however both cooperative and competitive practice can be useful for developing skill when it is used appropriately.

Cooperative partner practice is vital for developing skill in internal martial arts throughout all skill levels.  Two person forms and push hands are good examples of cooperative partner practice. Two person forms are just like other forms except they are done with a partner.  Both practitioners must not only execute their movement properly but must also match the other person's timing and distance in order to properly execute the form.  Though both partners are going through set movements this practice can be made more challenging by varying the speed and space in which the form is performed. 

Tai Chi Silk Reeling and Push Hands @ Grasslawn Park in Redmond

This Saturday we'll be practicing at Grasslawn Park in Redmond from 10am - 11am.  We'll be goingover basic silk reeling exercises and then some cooperative push hands.  Those interested can stick around from 11am to noon for an introduction to Xin Yi Dao!  Please RSVP using the meetup http://www.meetup.com/Redmond-Tai-Chi-Push-Hands-Meetup/

Should you sweat when practicing internal martial arts?

Many think that internal martial arts such as Tai Chi should only be practiced very gently and working up a sweat or physically exerting yourself is discouraged.  While practicing very gently may provide some benefit, you can never gain a complete progress in any of the internal martial arts (or any martial art for that matter) by practicing this way.  "Internal" does not mean without effort or work.  Just like anything in life you must put in quality time and effort to get good at it.  Here are some reasons why you need to put some physical effort into practice and also why some may make this mistake.