7/4-7/11 Tai-chi
I haven’t written for a couple of weeks, so I’ll have to play a bit of catch-up here.
Yang Qing-feng has been giving me a lot of tips lately. I’ve always found him one of the most difficult to push, and I would rather emulate his style than the tree-root group. Qing-feng is all about flexibility and rotation, not giving your opponent anything to push. He pushes me into a compromising position and then waits for me to figure out how to get out of it. I feel like a real rank beginner pushing with him, but I do feel like I’m making a little progress. Earlier, as I pushed with Mr. Hu, who has been hanging out with the tree-root group, the other members stood around until he won a bout. They made some appreciative noises and, apparently satisfied with their approach, went back to their discussion on tree-root tactics.
Last Wednesday Teacher Xu told me to concentrate on my lower backbone and torso rather than on my feet. It seemed to work. Apparently you can adjust your focus on your opponent, be it their feet, backbone, etc., but you shouldn’t concentrate on your own feet. He also said that too much swiveling of the hips can betray you, as it’s a move easily taken advantage of.
I’ve been going to practice on Saturday mornings at CKS Hall as well recently in order to further my study of the form I’ve been learning very slowly over the past few months. I figure that I will stop after that and just concentrate on one empty-handed form and the one sword form; that should be plenty to occupy me. Every time I learn a new one the old ones just go out the window, it seems. Another area I need to work on it stretching out my leg muscles, particularly the back of my thighs. They’ve always been too tight; even when I was a kid I had a hard time touching my toes.
Last Saturday when I was finished going through the form, the other students were doing Tuishou, so I joined in. I usually find Mr. Hu pretty easy to push; everyone else pushes me onto my backstance very quickly, which is training it pretty fiercely. I’m able to move further back now than I used to be, and my backstance is also stronger and more stable than before as well. One time a foreigner came up and talked with Teacher Xu for a while; it turned out that he was a yoga student from England. He seemed very interested in the art, but he was only going to be here for a short time.
There was a new guy I’d never seen before at practice at CKS Hall last time, baguaquan. He seemed to really want to push with me, and not long after we started he asked me if I was a student of the Zheng Man-qing school, as he felt I pushed in that style. For his part, he had five or six set moves that he cycled through, most of them meant to catch his opponent off balance. He became increasingly frustrated as we pushed. One time he managed to get me just about pushed over. I was bent over and unstable, and he’d basically beaten me. He made a quick, violent move and shoved me onto the concrete floor, right onto my bad knee.
I was pissed, but I restricted myself to telling him that I had no interest in studying the ba-gua moves he seemed to want to practice. This was tuishou practice, not pro wrestling. I sat for a bit nursing my sore knee before hobbling off across the square. My knee still bears a bruise, but it doesn’t hurt any more. It wasn’t that big a deal, but it’s a little frustrating to encounter such situations.
