Daqingshan Fulltime Training – Review

Hi everybody,

I’ve been now here on the mountain for about 3 weeks, and all together I will stay for 3 month. Here I want to give a first review about the past time.
During our first week Master Chen Zhonghua was still here, but then he left for about one month, so now is the time were we are without him here on Daqinghshan. This is my second trip to the fulltime training here in China, and I must say that I have really good luck again with the group here: perfect training and learning environment!
This time I did not come alone, I brought some students of mine with me, and that’s why I’m really glad that things are working out very well so far.

The things I did appreciate most so far were:

– We have Steve Chan here, he’s doing a very good job teaching us the forms and pushhands. To me it seems that he has already developed very clear skills and he has guided me through the training process just perfectly. Another very important aspect is that he is staying very close to the teachings of Master Chen Zhonghua – no deviations I would say. And he is able to teach things by actually doing them, he can apply a lot on everybody – real abilities!

– We also have Hong Sen here, the grandson of Grandmaster Hong Junsheng. He actually doesn’t speak English, but he is able to teach lots of details by demonstrating the form. Also, you can learn a lot from him through hands-on. Everytime I go to him with a questionmark on my face the lesson after that is very benefitial. Sometimes I really believe that the “language barrier” is not a disadvantage at all!

– Among the group there are some more skilled people, so for instance Blake, a long-time practitioner of Practical Method. He for instance also gave me some very enlightening corrections and adjustements in pushhands situations.

– And last but not least: everybody here is very collegial, no ego-fights, very friendly working-together athmosphere. Lot’s of good training partners.

Meanwhile two students of mine, Lutz and Suhel from Germany, and myself did finish the sword-form and yesterday Suhel and I started to learn the Erlu from Steve Chan. Steve’s teachings are always very good related to pushhands, and also vice versa. When he is teaching pushhands he is able to relate it to the Yilu.
So for my stage of learning at the moment that all is quite perfect.

Contents in my personal training recently:
– Using the waist more, training the waist also via the sword-form
– kua opening, streaching out the front side (area between thigh and belly) so that it becomes really flat. I think this is one of Steve’s strong points and one of my weak ones. In relation to this there was also a correction for “twisting the towel” by Hong Sen which helped me a lot: fixing the “middle point” in the kua and only moving the waist.
– getting the power to the feet
– aligning the whole body better: watching a Yilu of the group we did recently, I realised a lot of parts were moving when they shouldn’t be and I was losing alignment quite often…

Me and Suhel are working towards finishing the choreography of Erlu within the next days, because Suhel will leave the mountain in one week and Steve and I thought that it is would be a good thing to learn the Erlu choreography by Steve for the first time. Later on, back home in Berlin, we will develope everything more.

I myself was never into “collecting” lots of forms, and actually I’m also kind of lazy to remember new forms, but right now I appreciate training the sword and Erlu a lot. I guess this will be my main curriculum for the next learning periods: Yilu, Erlu, Sword and pushhands.

So thanks to everybody here on the mountain for this really good training-environment, it’s really great to be here and in this way it is also much more easy to “eat bitter” and train more.

Special thanks to Mat for correcting my english!

All best from the mountain,
Michael Winkler, 2012-06-10 on DQS