WTA #1: Learning Chen Style Taiji Quan from Hao Zhi Hua

Before I get in to the meat of this post, I just wanted to say that I’m really excited to have this new platform for sharing my experiences with martial arts and travel experience — Wushu Adventures!  A lot of you probably came here from wushuzilla and since all of the blogs that were on that website are now here I’m hoping this website will also continue to be a helpful resource for those who are interested in martial arts training or exploring this amazing planet.

Okay, so what is a WTA?

WTA stands for “Wushu Training Adventure”.  Basically, I give myself these mini “missions” with wushu training where I throw myself in to a challenge to learn a specific style, or train for a specific goal, and then see how far I get. Having these small goals to motivate ourselves is really helpful in keeping on track, and when you do something silly like publish it on a public webiste?  Well, then you actually feel some pressure to follow through. So, during the month I was in the Bay Area of California I decided I would challenge myself to learn the entire 36 Chen style Taiji Quan form and commit it to memory.

Why study Chen Style Taiji Quan?

Now, full disclosure, I once knew this form. Fifteen years ago I trained in Chen Taiji for 6 months with my teacher, Hao Zhi Hua (a.k.a. Patti Li).  I learned the whole form, but then stopped training Taiji and focused more energy on external styles. And pretty much since I stopped the class I haven’t done a lick of Chen style Taiji since that time.  So, even though I’ve practiced it before, I would hardly say that I am proficient in the style.  It is sort of like the language you studied in high school 15 years ago.  (Just pretend high school was 15 years ago, okay?)  How much of it do you remember if you never practiced it after that? The other reason I wanted to practice Chen Taiji was the fact that I wasn’t really in any shape to train in external wushu.  I had been so bogged down with work and getting settled in Hawaii since I moved there at the beginning of October I hadn’t trained any wushu at all since that time. Not good. So, I thought that focusing on internal martial arts would be a good transition. Also, Chen style is pretty awesome.  Who doesn’t want to study Chen Taiji? And if you’re not sure if you want to do Chen style, then check out this video of my teacher performing some Bagua Zhang and Taiji Quan.  Just watching this makes me want to train! 🙂

So, since I knew I’d be in the Bay Area for a whole month I gave myself the challenge of learning the whole form again and having it committed to memory by the time I headed back to Hawaii.

My Approach

I don’t know if you could really say I had any specific method to my madness.  Really, I was just going to try and attend as many classes as I could.  At Wushu West, where I usually train when I’m in the Bay Area, they have 3 Taiji classes each week. But I knew that it wouldn’t be enough to learn the whole form since I would be at the mercy of whatever everyone was tasked to learn. So, I decided that I would enlist the help of my old friend Laura.  Laura and I trained together 15 years ago at Cal Wushu and Wushu West, and I knew that she was still training Taiji at Wushu West.  I was going to see if she was available for some off-hours get-togethers at a park to help me review the form. Fortunately for me Laura was down with some practicing outside of class, and this turned out to be a really lucky thing since classes were actually going to be on hiatus during the holidays!

Challenges with the Holidays

I figured something like this would happen.  Usually Wushu West takes a week or two off during the X-mas and New Years weeks. But again Laura came to my rescue and was able to meet up several times, both in Oakland and Berkeley, to help me review and learn the form.  Without her help it wouldn’t have been possible to get in as much practice as I did. Here are a couple vine videos from our training sessions:

(These training videos are no longer available. They were posted on Vine, which shut down in 2017.)

And on those days when I couldn’t meet up with her, I walked to the park down the street and walked through the form at least once or twice. That probably doesn’t seem like a lot, but I was really trying to focus on memorizing the moves, so any chance to review was good.  I was so busy with work that once or twice was sometimes all the time I could spare. I had also taken video of Laura while she was practicing, and this would help me since I could watch it on my computer during breaks or while I was waiting for some file to upload to the server.

Finishing the Form

By the time the holidays ended, I was just about to leave back to Hawaii.  But I had one more class at Wushu West before I left and fortunately Patti was able to help me go through the form one last time to answer a few questions I had about some tricky spots. So, did I meet my wushu training goal?  Yes!  I re-learned and re-memorized the form. Can I do it like a pro?  Well, no.  Of course not.  But that wasn’t really my goal.  My goal was to learn it well enough so that I can bring it back to Hawaii and practice it on my own. Now, when I go for a walk in the morning, I can also stop by the local school and practice my form.  And each time I do that my skill will slowly improve.

Future Training Plans

When I first returned to Hawaii I came down with a rather nasty flu.  I guess it was the one everyone in Hawaii had while I was gone. But here we are in the last week of January and I’m pretty much healed up.  That means I can start back up with my daily practice of the form. What are my plans?  I’m going to commit to practicing the form at least once each day.  I will go through the whole form at least once from start to finish without stopping. Then my goal will be to maintain that frequency for the rest of the year. A lot of folks might not think that is very much, but for me the challenges have always been about consistency in my training, rather than doing enough training.  If I can be consistent, then that is, at least for me, a huge win. If I can do more than 1?  Then, that is great.  If I just do one?  Then at least I have completed my personal commitment to the practice.  But this will be my promise to myself: One form per day.  More if I can. And of course this isn’t to say I won’t be doing other things too.  I plan to regain my wushu basics and also keep teaching Yang Taiji (which I did for a month here in Hawaii before I left for California).  So, this is just one piece of the next training sequence.

The Next WTA?

And speaking of the next sequence, that gets me thinking about the next Wushu Training Adventure I will go on. There is a chance in April that I will head to China for a period of time.  If that ends up happening, then I will make my goal to improve my fitness so that I can train while I’m there. I need to make the decision in the next week or two whether or not I will go to China in April.  If the answer is yes, then February and March will be all about getting in shape for that trip. It is actually reminiscent of my attempts to get in shape last year when I went to train with the  Shanghai Wushu Team.  I had 35 days to go from zero fitness to training with the professional wushu athletes, and I was able to make it (albeit with a lot of huffing and puffing), so I think I can do it again this time around. I’ll post up my plan for the next WTA whatever it might be, once I know for sure.  But either way you can expect to see that coming up pretty soon. I also have a HUGE backlog of blogs that I’ve been meaning to write about.  Literally dozens of topics on all different aspects of wushu, traveling, languages and more. But for now, I’m just happy that I’m back in the blogging groove and I hope you all enjoy the new website. Stick a comment below if you’d like to say “hi”.  I’d love to hear from you!