First international Yiquan tournament

[Rivington]

Of course you can find a lot of elder people playing tui shou, but..... how many of them started doing this while being around 70 y.o. and without training any MA before?

In the US at least, it is not unusual for a previously sedentary person to pick up taiji later in life.

[Permalost]

In the US at least, it is not unusual for a previously sedentary person to pick up taiji later in life.

I've noticed this as well. A good deal of the tai chi people I've met have been older folks without a previous martial arts background.

[dacheng]

Don't know about US. Do you really mean those folks do taijiquan martially oriented? Competitive push hands?

[Permalost]

Don't know about US. Do you really mean those folks do taijiquan martially oriented? Competitive push hands?

Martially oriented as far as playing push hands goes, yes. My old school had tai chi players who did well in open competitions and were taught the applications for the moves in the forms, but were a bit older and did not participate in sparring with punches and kicks and whatnot.

[dacheng]

That's good. Haven't seen much such situations. People starting it (push hands in competitive way) in their 40s, 50s, yes, quite common, but in 60s, 70s is a surprise to me.

As for mentioned earlier tui duan shou, previously we did tournament tests with smaller group of practitioners, who do this regularly, and it worked quite well. However this time, with some more guests who normally don't do this, it was not exactly what we intended. Will need to think about either accepting only more advanced practitioners, with more experience for this kind of competition, or some change in the rules.

[Rivington]

Don't know about US. Do you really mean those folks do taijiquan martially oriented? Competitive push hands?

Competitive insofar as the format presented on your video is, sure.

I do look forward to other vids of the competition!

[Rivington]

Will need to think about either accepting only more advanced practitioners, with more experience for this kind of competition, or some change in the rules.

If you build a rule set, people will come. Sooner rather than later people will start training for the rules, so constantly changing them will just lead to confusion, or dilution.

Indeed, I'd suggest that this is already why most push-hands competitions are silly.

[dacheng]

Of course changing rules constantly is not good idea. But in the first period, when something just starts, it is not possible to create good working rules immediately. Anything needs some period of tests and improvement, at least at the starting point.

Also our idea is not people preparing for the rules, but making the competition part of the whole training process, with the goal of developing skills progressively according to our teaching system methodology. Which means that push hands should not be "push hands for sake of push hands", which you often see, where people start developing techniques and tricks which work because of limitations of tui shou, but would be quite absurd in more free fighting. This is kind of problem with push hands - there are rules and people start training for those rules, and it starts going into direction much different than toward developing skills for free fighting. What we are trying to do is make those more basic formats kind of steps which would logically lead toward more advanced formats and toward free fighting. And the image of free fighting we have in mind is related mainly to the bar/street experience of yiquan practitioners in Beijing in 1940s.

O.K. I have some clips from our smaller tests. Haven't posted them before, as when just starting posting here, you are not allowed to post clips or links. But now, I can, so before I will be able to post material from last saturday competitions, some samples from our local meetings:

Unfortunately I cannot post the clip from free step tui shou from January, as some of our guest participants asked me not to publish it.

This is Easy Tui Shou (December 2012):


Tui Duan Shou (January 2013):


Easy San Shou (March 2013):

[Rivington]

Thanks for the vids! Looks like a good start to what can be a fun and challenging tournament.

[dacheng]

Easy tui shou clip from May 5th tournament is ready