day 230: preparing for tournament and chen pao quan

concepts:

• judging

lessons:

• trial jian shu rounds
• chen pao quan
  

the plan today was to start training judges for the jian shu competition at the Las Vegas tournament. sifu decided to also provide some additional teaching, with bagua basics for some of the new students and the very start of the chen pao quan form for me and Jo-san.

trial jian shu rounds

this was an imperative, since it is possible we are going to have a shortage of judges at the tournament. sifu wanted Shen, a new student and a current post-doc at UCLA, to get trained as a judge. we reviewed the rules with her, and then staged a mock jian shu match using actual tournament rules so she could see how the competition is run. i acted as the center judge, and everyone else was either competing or serving as line judges.

chen pao quan

sifu asked phunsak to start teaching the chen pao quan form to me and Jo-san. he's talked about chen tai chi and the position of the pao quan form in the curriculum before, so i won't go into here. he's also discussed the distinction between the chang quan pao quan and chen tai chi pao quan, which i've presented in prior posts, so i won't go into detail about it here either.

phunsak showed us the initial movements in the form, and we spent the remainder of class trying to get it down. it's a bit challenging, since there's some timing issues that are important to the techniques.

sifu also noted that the applications in pao quan have some slightly different approaches than the other tai chi forms. in the other chen forms, the movements tend to relate to throws and a good portion of the principles deal with proper structure. in pao quan, however, the movements tend to relate to strikes, with more principles dealing with power projection (i should note here that sifu has said pao quan exhibits a number of different forms of power projection: 1) spiralling/silk reeling energy, 2) explosive energy, 3) energy like a bow-and-arrow, and 4) energy like a catapult). in addition, the engagement distances are different, with the other chen forms involving closer ranges with the opponent (to deploy the throws), while pao quan uses greater ranges (to deploy strikes). furthermore, the pacing is different, with pao quan involving much greater use of broken rhythm. as a result, sifu said his opinion is that pao quan is an aspect of chen tai chi far more revelant to real fighting than the rest.

we finished with that, and took a long lunch.