These days, when you come to Bei Qiao Park about four o’clock in the afternoon, you can hear whips slashes from the entrance of the Park. But these are not players of gyros, as the ones I met in a ballad, a year and a half earlier. Today, my friends Dede and Riton, my early gyro masters, have gradually abandoned the Chinese spinning top to devote themself to the practice of the whip, and the weekend, they are a half dozen to make cracking their whip in the shade of Banyan trees. It’s the moment to revisit this fitness practice that I had mentioned in an old post but I had not much spoken, for lack of trying.
To say things as they are, at the time I began to play spining top, with my small 1 kg gyro, I didn’t understand what was interesting in cracking a 3 meters long whip and then after a 20 mn pause cracking it again. Moreover, as I was playing gyro I got a bad whip shot on my left eye that had left me half-blind for a week! But after I met players in Zhengzhou, Kaifeng and Wuhan, I understood that the whip practice was indistinguishable from the gyro one. By dint of seeing Dede and Riton wield the whip, I also understood the basic movements. I just had to take the plunge and I took advantage of my training in Wuhan to ask my gyro teacher to show me the basics.
A Zhanjiang Daily News article
I must also say, that the article published by journalist Chen Guang Quan in the Zhanjiang Daily News and shared online by the press agency Yinsha (http://zjphoto.yinsha.com/file/201606/2016060320431434.htm), encouraged me to explore deeper this discipline. Indeed, after translation by my wife, I discovered not only that since one year I was dating, without knowing it, Master Zhou Ting Chen, a martial arts teacher, whip specialist, but also that the Bei Qiao Park players, that I had nicknamed Dede and Riton, were two brothers called Wang De and Wang Ze. Nothing better to deepen relationship with my professors who found themselves a bit outdated when after my first trip to Wuhan, I brought back a 1,5 meters stick and started to play with a 4 kgs gyro.
Anyway, back from my last training in Wuhan, I asked Wang De to show me again the basic movements, what he did with an evident pleasure, and I finally got me started. Unlike what I believed, the whip practice is very physical, especially when you play with a 1,5 kg whip and give more than two lashes before going to smoke your cigarette.
But the real catch, I got it by observing You Yong, another whip player who comes only on weekends, with his wife Xie Yin, and which I discovered the name in the Zhanjiang Daily News article. He showed me the perfect gesture and I knew then that I had to accompany the movement with the whole body, and especially to follow the whip with the eyes. A rule that I implemented overnight but which did not prevent me to take a bad shot by trying to imitate Wang who executed a figure I didn’t know.
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You Yong in full exercise in the Beiqiao Park
Fitness Whip
No doubt that those who have never seen someone play the whip wonder what I’m talking about and this requires some explanations. Indeed, in France, except the tamers and the trainers of horses circus, whisk players are not very common.
In China, one practices the whip mainly in provinces where peoples play gyro. This means, everywhere, except in the Guangdong province. Zhanjiang being an exception that confirms the rule. It is, roughly, to crack a whip in different ways: right arm, left arm, forward, backward… But it is not all about it, there are sequences of codified movements approaching Tai chi and Kung Fu practices (each master has his own combos) but also different types of whips. Nylon whips and chain whips whose length varies between 3 and 6 meters and the weight between 1 kg and 4 kg. In addition, according to Chinese doctors (which my mother-in-law is a part), whip practice is beneficial to treat problems of circulation, joints and for general health.
It was enough to convince me: since my first lesson with Wang De, I continue my daily gyro training with my new 6 kg spining top, but I also spend half an hour to the whip practice, under the watchful eyes of my chinese friend.