I'm back learning judo again after spending many years in CIMAs like taichichuan and baguazhang. Has anyone here spent some time with these styles?

It's weird for me because i'm learning judo in Taiwan and sometimes my teachers use the same concepts and vocab to teach me judo as they would with taiji. I even got a lecture on pushing people last night that seemed very taiji-ish.

Some of the leg seizing throws that I learned in CIMA look to be potentially useful in randori. I'm thinking of variations on brush knee where one leg is seized behind the knee and the upper body is pushed at an angle, etc. But I'm finding that many of those push hands techniques work very differently when laple grabs are added.

So any taijiquan people here? Any influence on your judo style?

I train Sanda at a school that teaches mostly T'ai Chi. I dabbled in Xing Yi for a little but couldn't afford to keep it up longer than a month. I tend to hang out and watch the Internal classes while i warm for my Sanda stuff. Judo and Ba Gua seem to share a lot of the same concepts and philosophies. Moving around the opponent and not really attacking straight forward, stuff like that.

that leg seizure move is a good counter to lots of judo throws that involve the leg like uchimata

yes, Tai Chi in college

no, it didn't influence anything

explanation: my tai chi teacher was not very good. It was a semester of tai chi on amphetamines.... So, her style contrasted too drastically from what tai chi was supposed to be about, or something. Anyway, it was totally missed on me, but I passed the damned class, and got the damned credit.

That's funny -- my first taste of judo was a university course and I loved it. We got taught a ton of material in an organized fashion and graded on it. The organized manner of the class contrasts with the lose organization of my current club. I miss it.

Sorry to hear your experience with taiji wasn't a good one. A bad teacher can wreck anything.

very true

I have learned a bit of Taijichuan. I found that it greatly helps my Judo. They share a lot of principles, concepts and training methods.

i trained in Ba Ji and BGZ and TCC a little in China, but mostly San Da.

I like BGZ a lot. I just don't see any credible teachers except Tim Cartmell, who is on the other side of the country. And doesn't really teach it as such any more.

Been doing Tai Chi Chuan for a while now, started shortly after starting Judo and I find it helps. Like some other posters mentioned, has many of the same concepts and principles, i.e. flexibility, yielding to force, softness, etc.
I find the stepping is the most useful for me.

I do some Tai Chi and its is a great warm up before Judo or a cool down afterwards.

Not sure if this helps but my teacher Jonathan Weizhang Wang is a great teacher and is still in his prime. He just made it onto the US national TCC team and Inside Kung Fu named him competitor of the year last year.

You're in the Richmond area right? A couple guys at my gym used to train Sanda in DC, you should check it out although it isnt too close.

Yangshi Taijiquan has certainly helped my body awareness and leg strength. Also flexibility and calmness when grappling. I was blessed to have a really great teacher and I also trained a lot the first year (quit my job to practice more).

i just left DC were I wasn't aware of any good San Da training. Why not just train Muay Thai, of which there is plenty of high quality training?

Ahh, didn't think of that.

I'm getting lots of lectures now in class about how judo is supposed to be more like taiji than I'm seeing in our randori group. All of our 7th dans have taken me aside and told me that I need to use a lot less muscle than I've been using since starting randori. Their approach to judo is vastly different from the younger randori crowd that I now train with. The guys that mainly do randori are all telling me they rely on strength and speed to pull off their moves. The higher dans are all about the kuzushi.

I'm sort of caught in the middle on this.

I would love to go softer and have my judo be more like my taiji. But I'm not sure how that's going to work when I'm being (for example) strong-armed in randori.

Thoughts?

ah, the strong arm defense! why didn't I think of that! oppose strong arms with strong arms... oh, wait, I'm no where near as strong as the young bucks. I've gotta come up with something else. Maybe Kano knew something about it, after all, judo is supposed to translate to "the gentle way".

Seriously, just because they are using strong arms doesn't mean you have to. The harder they strong arm you, the easier they fall. Flow like water - it's much harder to be thrown that way.

The 7th dans have it right, and they have proven it both by still doing randori at their age and getting to 7th dan. The young bucks? they are just doing what works at the moment for them. Develop your style based on what will work for you in the long run, not based on whether or not you can out muscle your opponent.

I took a short course in Wing Chun before starting Judo. It was essentially three months lecture on proper posture and body mechanics, or "structure" as they would call it. It made me keep in mind all this from the start in Judo. To this day I have a very upright posture.

I was thinking along those same lines, too. But I've been reading Mind over Muscle to try to understand Kano's take on how judo should be performed and how that might differ from my taiji -- if it does -- and I'm a bit confused.

The concept of ju yoku go o seisu that he talks about on pg. 41 seems to be the "soft overcoming the hard" that I would expect of the something called the "gentle way." That seems more like taiji to me.

But then Kano also explicitly says that's not sufficient. Seiryoku zenyo seems to be more inclusive of a broader range of forces in stressing maximum efficiency. So if I'm reading this correctly (a big if), then using muscle in judo would be okay if it was efficient. Or do we always want to rely on technique?

Again, my natural preference is to not use a lot of muscle. But I also want to not just fit judo into my preconceived ideas (or at least try not to).

So is there a little tension between the ideas of ju yoku go o seisu and seiryoku zenyo?

I'm reading the same book. Look at the part where he talks about the sumo wrestler squeezing the judoka. rather than fight the wrestler strength via strength, and because he can't jsut get out of the way, what does he do? He makes the sumo wrestler adjust his grip - gaining a moment where he has room. That's when he uses, not strength, but technique to throw the sumo wrestler. Maximum efficiency. For the young bucks, maximum efficiency seems to be using a lot of strength over technique. It's expedient. For the rest of us? No, technique, technique, technique. Nage technique, tsukuri technique, kozushi technique. It's more efficient because we'll last longer that way.

Maximum efficiency is just a different way of looking at things. Gentleness is not just one thing - it's not just getting out of the way of an attacker - it's using that attack against the attacker. Make sense? Don't worry, somebody will come along and explain it.

BTW - martial arts aren't born in vacuums, no matter what the Gracies say. Kano took from a lot of different sources, looked for underlying principles. If something from your life helps you in judo, great - use it. If that's TCC, great, use it. If it's efficient, it will work.

You seem to have assumed that ju means not using any muscle. From what I understand, that is not true.

Say Uke, having gripped you, pushes you back. Instead of pushing Uke back, you go with his momentum, turn your body around and execute o-goshi, while maintaining good balance and body control throughout the process (tai-sabaki). This is an example of ju yoku go o seisu. You may feel that you have not used any force or any muscle, which is good, because it means you have applied kuzushi on Uke so efficiently. In reality, you must have used some of your muscles to turn your body and enter into the throw (kake). The feeling of not having used any muscle was due to you having used the right muscle groups and not applying excessive force, not because you actually used no muscle.

In Taijichuan too, one must use muscles to move, even if with proper ju. Even at a higher level of skill in Taijichuan, where you would not rely on contracting the muscles of the limbs but instead uses hydraulics (air pressure and fluid pressure) to move the body, you still have to 1) use your diaphragm, which is a muscle; and 2) use certain muscles of your torso and limbs to maintain your frame.

From what I understand, ju yoku go o seisu is one kind of seiryoku zenyo, the first core principle of Judo.

It might be interesting to note that Judo's second core principle jita kyoei is usually not explicitly taught in Taijichuan, at least from my observation and related books. However, a good Taijichuan teacher would talk to you about similar concepts nevertheless, even if it's when for example drinking tea together after a class.

Something else that might be of interest too - the principle ju yoku go o seisu in Taijichuan is only part of the story. There is also the idea of 積柔成剛 (my rough translation: "integrate ju into go"), which is an explicitly taught Taijichuan principle. In Taijichuan 剛 go is essential, just as 柔 ju is. One cannot function without the other - 剛柔相濟 (again my rough translation: "go and ju each supports the other"). I think this is also true in Judo, though the common understanding is not necessarily expressed in the same way.

I saw that part as talking a bit more about timing than technique. Notice how the judoka wasn't able to do the escape without the opening he created by suggesting the change of grip (remember he did the "jedi mind trick" on the sumo). Only when the timing was right could he do the technique.So it seems that technique may need to take a back seat to sensitivity training for a while. In taiji, we use push hands to find correct timing for techniques to have maximum efficiency. I'm thinking that emphasizing kuzushi in uchikomi practice should be similar.But a version of "soft randori" might work even better.Good points. I'm in general agreement with what you say.A possible counterpart in CMA to jita kyoei might be "wude" -- martial ethics. My judo school here in Taipei has that written on the wall in large characters. They really seem to believe in it, too. Perhaps more than some CMA schools since randori is a large part of the training and we do get into situations where it's tested.