Some more
 

Mine MA are:
2 years of free-style wrestling. Got my best rewards there. Unfortunately, I quit at the age of 6 years. So remember nothing from it. (I hope my brain/body) does :).
1 month of sambo :)
5 years of karate (shito ryu). Unfortunately my consiousness was basically turned-off at the moment. So to my mind I got virtually NOTHING from it. Shame on me!
6 months of russian hand-to-hand combat (Kadochnikov style).
2 years of boxing. This was interesting at first, with very fast progress within first 2-4 months. And then VERY little progress for the rest 1.5 years.

I'm surprised to hear that. I've read so many positive things about boxing that I considered it to be the gold standard in terms of effective self-defense. The footwork, endurance training and striking skills of boxing are said to be excellent.

What made the first 4 months so good, and the next 1 1/2 years so mediocre?

Peter

Well, maybe it was my case only.

Anyway, within first couple of months of intensive training you get a couple of strikes, a couple of typical ways to protect by either using your hands or moving. And you do get all this within the first months, in my case something like 4 months. Physical/endurance training was also progressing VERY fast initially. So even you are an absolute novice, within a very short period of time you can get some solid skills that can work well in the street, if are trained till the level when they become automatic.

And to get further progress you do have to study many other things like complex combinations, more complex moving, you need to really fine-tune your strikes, etc.
This is definitly important for any martial art. But boxing (at least where I trained) did not posses a very good methodology to give all these things.
Thus, the result was - there were people that peformed really greatly. Them even did some training similar to spinning hands (similar in a way people worked in a very short distance and in such a wait that they did not heart each other and were able to get intensive traning).
But these were talented people.
Others (and it were around 95%) did not perform anywhere close to these results. And the training did not even show a way to that it at end will at all possible. So it took me another 1.5 years to realize that. Of course, I progressed duing this 1.5 years, but not anywere close to the first 4 months.

ILiqChaun is exactly the way to all the things I lacked in boxing - working with the right feelings, having high concousness. So here I feel I'm progressing VERY fast, even much faster than the first 4 month of boxing. And the most interesting thing that I'm surprised after each class. Everytime I find out something SO Big that I missed previously.

However, it even makes me somewhat angry. I'm used that there are typically some learning curves - you get muc progress initially and little later. In IliqChuan so for the curve is upside down - it's an exponentional growth of feellings, understanding, etc.
So this somewhat scares me and I get angry. Because the more I train, the more I see that chances are I will not be able to master all this because of the amount to do ahead of me, it is not getting less each time, it's growing all the time.

Thus, I guess I did not find my limit in ILiqChuan so far. And I hope I will not find it soon.

i feel EXACTLY the same way! when i met alex (chief instructor of russia) he showed me a few refinements that made feel like i had been doing everything so wrong that i was infact a complete beginner, even though i was already instructor level 2!

I have the impression that learning I Liq Chuan relies heavily on the process of refinement: you are initially exposed to a certain movement, you practice the movement without actually feeling what is happening inside you (e.g., at first you just feel your arms waving back and forth), then as the movement becomes more natural you start to develop a feeling (e.g., sensing the absorb & project through your body to and from the ground as you wave), and once the feeling is there, the movement is further refined to become more accurate and effective.

Peter

Yes, it really seems to be a quite repetitive process.

And it looks like there are some tricks to make it somewhat faster.

E.g. if one manages to concentrate in such a way that he/she is very perceptive to feelings in the body, it takes much less time for the neurons to build the long-term connections between them, the connections that represent the feelings from some movements.

And in fact it seems to me that it is not exactly concentration. It is rather de-concentration in such a way that mind stops the internal thinking and is rather in such a mode that brain is feeling what is going on in the whole body, in many parts of it (e.g. in 13 points). It is more like meditation.

And concintration is put to keep oneself in this de-concentrate state, so that the objects of attention are not changed, they are just seen/felt as they are.

De-concentrate.....I like that VEB. And I agree with you that training can be like a meditation. For me that is the attraction of ILC. I've trained hard and soft styles and in the end it seemed that I was accumulating an enourmous number of techniques but I couldn't find a style that just cut to the basics. And I got very tired of different styles thinking that they have the inside running on MA. Generally there is very little flexibility between styles, most are fixed and can't accomodate difference. Changing styles is viewed as a lack of commitement and even if you have a higher belt in one style, if you change, you go back to the beginning because they can't accomodate your background. ILC simply absorbs you and off you go refining your practice from day one.
After 25 years training other styles, the first few classes in ILC were spent pointing out what was wrong with my structure! Ouch. This of course led to the question "what value was the teaching I got from these experts I've been training with?" Six years later I'm still working on a deeper understanding and feeling of those early lessons. Having said that I am able to see how all the punches, strikes, kicks, grabs, locks, throws etc. I have learned up are beneficial......once I make contact and bridge and take control using ILC.
One of the things I admire about Master Sam is his linking the mind/body via the concepts of mindfullness/structure. I think this is a very insightfull and brings the Zen priciples to a dynamic physical practice. And in Zen meditation the so called simplicity of watching the mind belies a lifetime of hard work for most practitioners.
I think it would be very interesting to analyse a bit further how people come to develop a practice of ILC and there must be some key differences between those people with and without a MA background. In fact there may be some benefit to develop seperate streams for these two backgrounds. I guess that just happens naturally based on each persons' ability.
Cheers

Chris, in fact it's not that I "invented" this term - de-concentration. The first time I've heard it from some Russian psycologist who specializes on extreme situations and mind states similar to meditation.
After that I noticed that the term is quite widely spread between good yoga teachers in Russia. These teachers typically have some medical background and tend to explain things in yoga not only in traditional ways, but also from the point of view of contemporary science. And they are using this term "de-concentration" to describe high-level meditative states in yoga - dhyana and samadhi.
Zen and Yoga have VERY many things in common and basically come from one and the same thing.
And I have to admit that I've been somewhat lucky to find a good and thinkful teacher of yoga and managed to get some small experience not only in physical exercises of yoga, but some phsyco-techniques of yoga.
That is why when I started to study ILiqChuan I was really impressed that the Merge concept of being in the flow, observing, reflecting and high level of Awareness are very similar to higher states in yoga (or de-concentration as this Russian psycologists says).
Simply in yoga you do some other things in such states of your mind. While in ILiqChuan you work on the basic exerices and with the partner to better understand your body, it's abilites and limits, point of contact, changes that come from the partner, etc.

Thus for me I would say that my yoga experience is more beneficial to IliqChuan than the MAs I used to practice before. It looks like I can use yoga's states of minds to do the IliqChuan training, but using something from other MAs would not do any good.

Anyway, maybe it's just my illusion and after some time I will realize that I will have to get rid of this yoga things later to get progress in IliqChuan.

And in fact this is someting Alex told me about in the Russian part of the forum where we tried to discuss this thing. Basically I was recommended to free up my cup from everything else before getting it filled in again this time with ILiqChuan.

Just wanted to add a few things here
 

In fact it was my yoga teacher who introduced me to ILiqChuan. He belives that ILiqChuan is one of the most powerful ways to practice higher states of yoga.

He did some ILiq himself simply by viewing videos. Unfortunately he is not interested in the martial part of ILiqChuan. So he neglected the partner training and all the benefits that come from it. Thus, finally he replaced ILiqChuan with some other practices.

And I for me found ILiqChuan to be one of the best things, maybe because I had around 10 years of MA experience before that? Who knows.

Anyway, now I do both yoga (both physical and mental exercies) and ILiqChuan. And I do not see any confilct between them, one comlements another. At least I see it this way now, being a novice in ILiqChuan.

Hi there,

I agree that the repetition is a good way of training. But not for its own sake. Sifu has often explained in course of his seminars that the attention is concentration on all our senses. So during the training we are supposed to pay attention to the process and to strive to understand how our movement relates to the principles. He also says that the attention is a universal tool.

Thus, the concept of "de-concentration" looks to me pretty like what is called in I Liq Chuan the attention. Or am I wrong?