By Tu-Ky Lam
Are there really conditions for learning Yiquan, Taijiquan or other internal martial arts? Yes, if you are serious about it and want to improve all the time. No, if you do not care about your progress.
The first important condition for learning an internal art is a good learning environment. This is important not only for martial arts but also other sports. For example, New Zealand is a rugby-mad country. Its national team, the All Blacks, has been ranked the world’s top team three years in a row since 2004 by the International Rugby Board. New Zealand has many talented rugby players and top coaches. In New Zealand, kids only need to go out to a rugby field and they can easily pick up the skill from their mates. They just learn it in a good New Zealand rugby environment.
Ironically, there are more soccer players in New Zealand than rugby players. Potentially, the New Zealand soccer team could have a high ranking in the world, but in reality, its soccer team is ranked pretty lowly in the world. Why? It is because there is no good learning environment—very few top soccer players and coaches—and so the young kids cannot learn much from their mates or coaches.
We can say if you want to learn how to play rugby, you will have to come to New Zealand. If you want to learn to play soccer, you will need to go to Brazil or Europe. For Yiquan or Taijiquan, you will need to go to China.
People naturally go to Chen Jia-gou village to learn or improve their Taiji skill. If you want to learn Yiquan, Beijing is the place to go to because there are many top practitioners/teachers there such as Yao Cheng-guang, Yao Cheng-rong, Cui Rui-bin, and Bo Jia-cong. It pays to go to the top teachers such as the Yao brothers. I have an unforgettable experience with Yao Cheng-rong. I have never seen another person with better push-hands and fighting skills than he. His many senior students also have incredible martial arts skills. They are strong, skilful and fast. Many practitioners who have learned Yiquan or other internal arts elsewhere come to see Master Yao to improve their skill. They learn not only from the master, but also from his senior students. Master Yao’s school provides such a good learning environment. That is the reason why his students can make so much progress in a short time.
Many students and practitioners spend a lot of time searching for the secrets to learning Taijiquan, Xingyi quan and other internal martial arts without success because there are none. The only secret is to find a good teacher and train hard every day.
All masters have to train hard to develop their skill and there is no shortcut. For example, the Yao brothers and their fellow students trained under the tutelage of their father Yao Zong-xun eight hours every day for several years during the 1980s. Yao Yue, Yao Cheng-rong’s only son has trained eight hours every day for four or five years and has attained incredible marital arts skills. When I asked Xue Nai-Yin, who taught me the Xing-yi Five Element Fist, how he could be so good in martial arts, instead of answering my question, he asked me, “Do you believe that I trained eight hours every day for many years?” Of course, I do. A recipe for success in learning a martial art is a good learning environment plus hard work and some talent.
What do you do if you cannot afford to train full time? Try to spend at least an hour every day on standing practice and another hour on shi-li and stepping. Complement these with push-hands and sparring. You will improve steadily.
Many people who learn Taijiquan, Yiquan or other martial arts drop out because of a lack of motivation. Motivation has become an important issue as it can determine whether we will learn or not. Without motivation, we will lack interest. If we are not interested in learning, no one, including Wang Xiang-zhai, can make us learn.
With proper motivation, we will have a strong desire to learn and can absorb what is taught to us easily. Our progress can be assured. Motivation can come from our teachers, fellow students, books, video tapes, etc. A good teacher and classmates can inspire us and keep us motivated. Good books and DVDs can supplement our teacher’s teaching and help us learn. A reader wrote to me to say my articles on my website are a great motivation for him learning Taijiquan. Those students who learn Yiquan for self defense can motivate themselves more easily because the love of martial arts, and the desire to win or do better is a great motivation by themselves.
How can people who learn Yiquan for health motivate themselves? They need to be patient and disciplined (not easy to achieve) enough to train at least thirty minutes every day to bring out a good result. Then success breeds success, and the result will motivate them to train harder. If they understand the only difference between learning Yiquan for health and for self-defense is in the time we spend in training and try to learn as those who learn Yiquan for self defense do (except sparring and spending one hour in training instead of several hours), the result will be very promising.
Is talent a condition for learning martial arts? Yes, but it is the one of least important. People with great talent learn very quickly. Great masters are usually very talented people who trained very hard under a good teacher.
People with ordinary talent will have normal progress, and will have to train several times harder in order to catch up with the talented fellow students.
Most of us are of ordinary talent, but this should not stop us from, enjoying and benefiting from learning a martial. A lot of teachers are not very talented. They work hard to make up for it.
In short, the conditions for learning an internal martial art are a good learning environment, hard work, good motivation and great talent, of which the first two are the most important and so indispensable.