wujimon taiji blog

Not the stuff that I’ve seen on DVD but how about another approach? This all came up after I started noticing that doing wushu is bringing back those old knee pains of mine. Back in the days I used to do a lot of TKD and wushu until I started getting really bad knee pains around 18 yrs old. I attribute it to a lot of the jumping as well as TKD air snapping kicks.. but the doctors said it could also be due to myself growing faster than my knees could support me.. who knows.

Anyhoo, this was one of the main reasons why I stopped wushu and decided to take a year break in martial arts. Soon, I just couldn’t stand it anymore and felt that I wanted to do something related to martial arts so I picked up taiji. This was around when I was 19 or so. In this time, I feel that taiji has helped my knees a lot. The closer attention paid to knee alignment and structural integrity has made the pain go away. Also, I think practicing zhanzhuang postures has really made a difference.

Fast forward to present day. I’ve been doing taiji for about 6 years and recently decided to start up wushu again. Been going for a little over a month now and I’m starting to feel the pain in my knees again. I think in the long run, wushu may be detrimental to all the progress I had made before on my knees. I figured it’d be cool just doing some line drills, but the wushu front slap kicks add a bit too much stress on my knees. Also, most of the forms being taught now have A LOT of jumps in them, another thing not so good for my knees.

After a recent class, I brought up that I was doing wushu to my chen teacher to get more of a cardio workout and he mentioned why not do some of the more vigorous chen forms if I’m interested in cardio. I’ve already learned the basis curriculum (zhanzhuang, silk reeling, 19 form, 38 form, laojia yilu) so why not just move on in the curriculum. This sounded like a pretty good idea to me as a lot of the stuff that we work on in privates are related to principles that can be applied to any form and any movement in taiji (zhong ding, song kua, differentiating energies, etc). He then asked me if I’d rather jog or do Pao Chui? Definitely Pao Chui (laojia er lu, cannon fist form)! Hmm.. I had briefly learned part of the choreography for this form before I relocated so it’d be interesting to pick it up again.

It’s kind of nice to go back and do some old forms. The 24 form was the first taiji form that I had learned back in college. I remember it to be a pretty nice form, tho not as interesting as the 48 due to a lot of repetition within the form. I remember doing this form a year or so ago and my wife commented how it didn’t look like the 24 anymore, it had my chen flavor added to it. I attribute this to “chen creep“, a little term I picked up on discussion boards a while back.

I’ve still been doing chen style, but things are a bit different now. My current instructor follows the material from Chen Xiao Wang, so he’s advised as such. Therefore, my form has changed a bit as previously I was doing the form closer to what Ren Guangyi does. It’s amazing how different both of these fellas do the form, but I guess that’s to be expected as we all have different backgrounds and body types that would affect the way we do things.

Anyhoo, I had run thru the 38 form about three times. My first time through a form is usually just a warm-up kind of thing to get my mind and body acclimated to it. Then on the second time, I slow things down a bit and work more on the details of the form (posture zhanzhuang, rootedness, scanning for tension, etc) and then on the third time, I will either do the form really slow, or do it fast, depending on how I’m feeling that day. On this particular day, I spent a lot of time on the second round and was feeling the burn so decided to kick it up a notch on the third run.

I then decided to come inside to cool down a bit with some zhanzhuang and silk reeling. Then went thru the form one more time in a high frame (as I was inside). After doing so, I thought about doing the 24 form again and did that in the living room. It was actually pretty nice doing the form, I felt very connected and smooth and quickly got that whole “tingling” feeling. I guess forms are like bikes, once you learn them, you never really forget. It was interesting going thru the details of the 24 and playing them against what I learned in chen. Instead of focusing on stylistic differences, I tried to focus on the principles ( head up, imagining spheres under armpits, shoulder-hip alignment, rootedness, etc) and it was good. I think I may incorporate this form into my training regime.