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TLDR. post is 9 paragraphs in length. I enjoyed my time with it a lot and learned a great deal about life from it [§1, 3]; I found the structure of the practice to be fairly flawed and a bit nebulous, and progression in it to be often frustrated [§2, 3, 4, 5, 6]; competition is very valuable, but competitive martial-arts will injure you thus causing you all sorts of trouble [reoccurs throughout]; fighting video-games are a great alternative [§7] §1. I practised ‘Chinese traditional martial-arts’ for several years, finishing with it about ten years ago (the usual suspects, taichi, bagua, mantis, etc.). I learned a great deal about life from it; I enjoyed it hugely at the time and was more-or-less a-romantically besotted with my marvellous teacher; I admired his ability, strength and personality, and I wanted to emulate him. I greatly enjoyed training with and hanging out with my good friend and training partner too, whose generosity and hospitality were seemingly boundless, it must be said! I surely would not be the person I am today (for better or worse), and would not have gone through the personal transformation I had in my early twenties, nor had any cool Kundalini astral-body experiences, without it. §2. But I don’t have any desire to return to it. Although I enjoyed it greatly at the time, I never looked at it, at the time, with an objective eye, as I think I now am able to. I don’t think the odds are high that the things I learned in those arts would overcome the real experience of an hypothetical soldier, boxer, or MMA fighter. I never had any real-life fighting experience; whereas those fighters mentioned do have such experience. What we practised was only ever a simulation of a real encounter, and a fairly incomplete simulation at best. Furthermore, as it wasn’t competitive, the structure of the training was weak: the focus of training would change throughout the years, and there were no goals beyond comparing my own ability with my friend’s and teacher’s; by goals I mean achievements in combat ability, I guess—there was an optional syllabus which I have to say I did enjoy a lot working my way up, but a huge part of that was solo-work. Also my progress was greatly influenced by the changing training preferences of my teacher, as his own focus would shift between taichi, mantis and bagua; this not necessarily hindering my development per se, as surely each of those arts informed the other; but it did hinder a strong focus being targeted on any particular aspect of the martial-arts. I think my experience as described above was probably fairly typical. §3. Today, I can appreciate that one reason for training this stuff is the wider learning one gains through the practice about the body and mind, about relationships with people, about the flow and mechanics of life, and about human nature, to name but a few things. But a scruple I have with it is that the system that was practised to facilitate that learning—the classical martial-arts—seems to me now to be somewhat contrived and artificial, even in its more ‘authentic’ and ‘efficient’ varieties. As I said above, I would doubt the reliability of the skills learned in those arts when applied to the real-world; and yet those skills are necessarily studied in those arts with great attention to detail and with much diligence, as if they were to be applied to a real situation. To compound this unease of mine with the whole thing, there is the fact that it was not competitive, so there was not even a way to properly test those skills, even in a controlled environment; it not being competitive, the ‘rules’ of engagement in sparring-practice were never cut very clearly and could be a little ambiguous; a lack of clear rules-of-engagement meant that one never really had assurance and confidence to be free in experimenting with one’s techniques, for fear of hurting the other person or even yourself. §4. Furthermore, I began to hit a wall towards the end of my time with those arts. I was beginning to realise that in order to learn how to manipulate a person’s weight one needed to practise with the tension both on and off: there needed to be a switch that could put both persons into either a resistive active fighting-state, in which the centre-of-gravity is difficult to find, or a passive docile state in which it was easy to find. The centre-of-gravity of a person simulating an attack-position in the docile mode would be easy to find; but difficult to find in the opposite extreme mode of tension and resistance. Once the position of the centre-of-gravity and the easiest route to it had been found in a particular posture, utilising a person’s ‘docile’ mode, then it could also be found in their ‘resistive’ mode. But pretty much all of the time people were completely unwilling to enter that docile mode to facilitate the practice; push-hands just was always the other guy being very tense in every direction that I would try to push or pull him in, and then just me swimming around him and shooting in the dark trying to guess where his centre could possibly be. I would overcompensate for them then: I’d go into rag-doll mode, in the hopes that at least this way I might be able to learn something about the way they used their weight; to be pushed around by them while not distracting my focus with trying not to be pushed, but rather staying relaxed enough to observe them properly while I was being pushed. Also I hoped that doing so might get the message across that two rams butting heads wasn’t getting anyone anywhere, and to say so verbally, to the effect of ‘you’re supposed to relax, like he says so, you great meat-head!’ never seemed appropriate for some reason. One of the reasons why I learned most when practising with my teacher is because he was incomparably more willing to take turns in being pushed around than everyone else, thence I could learn about his centre. It was so weird in class: the teacher was telling me to relax and feel out their centre and not worry about being pushed, but whenever I did that, of course everyone acted like I was killing the manly rah rah vibe, and ceased to be willing to engage properly. So while on the one hand push-hands was blocked by that, progress in contact-sparring was also blocked—though not quite as much as push-hands was, I think—by not ever being able to really pull the stops out, by having to drive with the brakes on all the time, due to people either not wanting to bother with sparring-gear, just plain not wanting to be that aggressive, or else for fear of injury. §5. Thinking further on the difficulty in progressing in push-hands, as described above in §4, I was wondering how it could be then that teachers become so adept at push-hands, how do they overcome this difficulty of only having stubborn inflexible training-partners and thence progress to higher levels of skill. One supposition is that a student with talent is picked-out by their teacher and given access to private training with the teacher, in which the teacher themselves acts as a docile dummy for the student to manipulate in order to become familiar with the mechanics of the practice. Another guess is that with some luck and talent a student is able to struggle upwards to a point where they have students of their own, and at which point they are able to use those students to practice on: namely during demonstrations in classes where no student would ever dare be stubborn and would always yield like a spaniel, thus providing the teacher with the invaluable insight into the mechanics of the centre-of-mass of the body—the same experience I described myself searching for in §4. A cynical thought would be that some people find gullible training partners who always are willing to do as they ask (to be docile and allow the other to learn through their softness) in return for something which the sly person baits them with, and either entirely never delivers on that promise or else only partially delivers on—just enough to keep the gullible person on the hook—; but I admit that does seem a bit farfetched. And who knows, maybe the way around this obstacle is to just keep hammering away at it until it gives [shrug]. §6. I guess the premise of what I was practising was “let’s make a simulation of fighting and use it learn about life”—cool! great idea in theory—except, the simulation was often very buggy and broken, it seemed, and ill-defined. Also, I only ever got to train with people a few times a week at best; which is a bizarrely low practice-rate considering that really the meat of the practice is in partner-work—I mean, you kinda need a partner in order to fight!—and solo form-work etc. I found to be helpful (to a degree) though really supplementary; and when also considering that you can practice with a partner 24/7 in a fighting video-game by virtue of the internet. I guess one of the chief frustrations was always ‘who won?’: of course the question was never actually asked after a bout of push-hands or sparring, but really, it is two people ‘fighting’, at the end of the day, for dominance of the space, and I think there should be rules clear enough to enable a points-system to determine outcomes of those ‘fights’; basically just because it’s so valuable in gauging your progress. Also, if we accept that without real-life fighting experience, as soldiers and competitive fighters have, probably most of what we learn in these arts is not applicable to the real world, beyond scaring off a disrespectful drunkard, or committing criminal acts against the frail and the elderly; and so then isn’t pretty much the whole discussion of ‘what would work in real-life’ kind-of just redundant? and doesn’t the redundancy of that discussion hugely undermine much of the practice, when so much focus is placed on trying get techniques and movements to simulate real-life combat as closely as possible? It just seems like a large suspension-of-disbelief is required at some point to stick with it. §7. I’m going to use a fighting video-game now as a comparison. I hope you’re not sickened by the notion of video-games, as many in alternative circles seem to be (and not just alternative circles, society generally stigmatises them unfortunately). Super Smash Bros. is a competitive fighting-game in which two players try to knock each other off the screen. The action takes place on a floating stage in the air and defeat comes from being sent off of either side of the screen, being sent up to the screen’s upper edge, or being knocked off the stage’s perimeter to the screen’s lower edge; the more damage a player has received the further they can be flung. There are no set combos in this game, unlike a traditional fighting-game like Street Fighter; rather the player must make use of every opportunity and opening they can to outwit and pressure their opponent using various play-strategies and intricate button-inputs, and are always at risk at every moment of being interrupted by their opponent’s counter-play and having the tide turned on them. The skill-ceiling is limitless; the rules are crystal-clear; cheating impossible; all the attack-moves, blocks, dodges, and movement-options you could use are already all present, programmed into the character’s move-set, which the player must then spend thousands of hours mastering through using them in battles (with a little supplementary solo-practice, where the pressure and heat of battle is absent, too). The competition is fierce and ruthless, and the glory, wealth and fame of being the world-champion only goes to someone prepared to commit an amount of practice equating to ten to twenty thousand hours or more to the game—ten years of playing pretty much all day every day, and that’s probably a very conservative estimate. It’s a near-perfect simulation of combat; a wonderful and incredible feat of both game-design and computer-engineering; and being entirely virtual carries no physical risk whatsoever (beyond postural issues and the general health-traps of working with computers). In comparison with classical martial-arts, the outcome of a game of Smash Bros. is always unequivocal—you win or you lose!—and so also it’s easy to judge how your skill compares to the next person’s and so read on how you need to improve and progress. [Smash Bros. is a Nintendo game designed to be accessible to children, nothing like the infamous violence and gore of Mortal Combat is present; ironically, while being the least violent of the competitive fighting-games, and despite the supernatural abilities of the characters, it surely is the game that best simulates real-life combat, due to the flow and mechanics of its play. Its music absolutely rocks, too]. §8. Super Smash Bros. is the best way to experience the excitement and fun of combat, in my opinion. In classical martial-arts the pool of people to practise with was limited to less than five; the rules of the game were never clear; and being able to practise fully and freely depended hugely on the other person’s grace and patience. In competitive martial-arts, the road to success is clear for you to progress along, but you will probably not reach the end of that road without sustaining life-long injuries. §9. So here are my questions for you? Why do you practice it and do you have any goals with it? Are you tempted by competitive martial-arts? Do you relate to the problems I’ve described in this post, and if so, how do you manage them?