day 163: sparring & jian shu

forms:

• tournament prep-sparring
• tournament prep-jian shu
  

we warmed up with some of the partner drills from last week, and then went straight into tournament prep.

tournament prep-sparring

i had 2 sparring rounds today, the 1st against Richard and the 2nd against Jonathan. my round against Richard went better, with me able to hold a slight edge, even though it was mostly a draw. even though Richard had more experience, i was able to use my height and reach advantage against him to hold him at range.

in contrast, my round against Jonathan was pretty much a disaster. he's taller and has greater reach, and as much as i tried, i still wasn't able to figure out how to close in and engage him. every time i thought i had it figured out, i found myself getting hit. granted, he has more experience, but this is proving to be quite a puzzle for me--the prescription against a bigger opponent always seems to follow the same formulas (i.e., close the gap, move, engage), just as much as it does for smaller opponents (i.e., keep them at distance, control movement, engage), but i'm finding it's hard to actually do the things necessary to achieve these formulas.

from what i'm seeing, there's an issue in knowing what to do with your body and skills to exercise these formulas. basically, it's like having a set of objectives, but then struggling to figure out how to achieve them given a limited set of tools defined by the parameters of your body, your mind, and your skills. you have to know how to use what you have to meet your goals in order to be effective in a fight.

i spoke with Jay about this the next day, and he nodded and confirmed my suspicions. he said that's why experience is so important--because it's one thing to know what you want to do, but another thing entirely to know how to do it given your personal capabilities. and the only way to know how is to learn from personal experience, because only you can know your own capabilities. whatever someone else knows is based on their own body, own mind, and own skills, and so may not be appropriate for you. you have to know yourself, meaning you have to go through the process of exploring yourself, and learning what you can do and what you prefer to do.

this of course, relates back to the constant admonition in martial arts that a true practitioner has to "master the self" in order to master others--you have to know yourself before you can hope to be effective in fighting others. that's not the whole truth to the admonition (there's many other levels i know of), but it's one level i'm learning now.

i asked Sifu about this over lunch, and he nodded, saying that is why you have know your identity as a martial artist--you have to know how you want to do certain things given the assets composed of your body, your mind, and skills. and you can improve those assets through training and experience. and if you're good enough, you can change your identity...but apparently this is a topic for another time, preferably when i've achieved a certain level of development.

tournament prep-jian shu

we finished the day with mock rounds of jian shu, so that judges and referees could get practice and competitors could also get training. Alex and Sifu seem to have decided to try to formalize the calls, with specific terms and hand signals to be used by judges and referees. this threw an additional layer of difficulty in, and required more time to get comfortable with. from what i could tell, we didn't really get entirely used to the terms and hand signals, and definitely need to get more practice.

by the time we finished, it was approaching 2, and we decided to wrap things up since people had other commitments to get to.