day 227: preconditions for chen

concepts:

• stomping
• whipping
• footwork
  

lessons:

• chen tai chi
• jian shu
  

this Sunday covered both tai chi and jian shu, with the bulk of time on chen tai chi.

chen tai chi

Sifu continued with the lesson plan he mentioned last time, having us work on some basic movements he considered preconditions before learning chen pao quan. today, he has us work on stomping, except that we were stomping while moving our hands and progressing along a line.

the movements we did today utilized the random circle movements we've learned before for the upper body, moving forward and backwards along a line. however, Sifu had us add the following:

1. while moving the arms and hands, we were to stomp with the forward foot. in terms of timing, this meant that the front foot would stomp down as the front hand reached its furthest point forward. if we were moving forward while we were stomping, this meant that the whipping motion involved the front hand whipping forward and down. if we were moving backwards, this meant the whipping hand motion going forward and up (Sifu said we'd be making a beckoning motion towards ourselves).
2. the arms and hands--not just the hands alone--were to be moving with a whipping motion, so that the greatest speed would be when they were moving forward, and the lowest speed when they were moving back.
   

Sifu said we could do these drills with variations, so that we could be stomping forwards as the whipping arm moved forward and up and stomping backwards as the whipping arm moved forward and down. for today, however, he wanted us to just concentrate as whipping forward and down as we stomped forward, and vice versa.

we did this for a while. it took a little time to get the timing right and the power apparent in the movements.

jian shu

jian shu dealt with more footwork elements. last time we'd covered 3 different footwork elements to add to sword techniques. today we added 2 more:

• triangle step (forward and back)
• angle step (forward and back)
  

i recognized these (as well as 2 of the 3 from before) to be the same footwork that we've learned before from the summer training sessions for sparring. this makes sense, since i remember we've had conversations before saying that many hand-to-hand combat methods in TCMA actually come from weapons methods.

Sifu had us do drills with the above footwork, holding the sword steady in right or left hands.

after we worked on this for awhile, he then discussed the general outline of sword movements, saying that they could be interpreted as 4 categories (note: my memory is a little rusty here, so it's entirely possible i'm referencing the wrong terms): jo (thrusting), suei (slashing), bai (parrying), guen (circular). he noted that all the 15 sword techniques (5 offensive, 10 defensive) could be viewed as belonging to any of these 4 categories.

we ended up talking about this classification system for awhile, and then reviewed the footwork drills a few more times before going home.