ovine king

In response to the title of the thread. I firmly believe that the original unchanged systems should be taught side by side with any new versions of those. As we train and as we expose ourselves to different styles and methods from different countries, something that practioners of the past were usually unable to, we naturally absorb and add/subtract to what it is that we originally learnt. I'm pretty sure that most of you have experienced this on one level or another. The most basic way you have this is when your teacher teaches you something then also gives you an alternative version which "he finds works better". Sometimes, this is just the teacher taking the move and making it work for him In other cases, it is their experience with something else that changed his way of making it work. In both cases, it is different to the 'original' and yet it is still the same. New and Original at the same time. When I was approached to teach someone, I always taught the original version of how things were taught to me. After I was sure that the original concept was absorbed, I made a move to teach how I tend to use that concept based on my own experiences in using that concept and my exposure to other styles, so in the end I was teaching a new version of that system. There is something that I am not entirely sure I am happy with, which is when people ONLY teach the new/modified version without refence to the original. I always think that you are missing something if you do no have that reference point. I am not biased against the new/modified versions as in most cases, their main concern is to strip away the not entirely necessary formal traditions/rituals and add newer/quicker training methods to get the practioner to use things earlier on in their training, which can only be a good thing in keeping fighting arts fighting. One thing though, is that you can do this to Original training anyway (i.e modernise traditional training methods)? In this case, is there really a need to make a formal change of what you call your system?

a hook hardly is hardly ever used in isolation and as such, to train 'against' as such is never truely going to be an indication of how to deal with one. too many what ifs. what if the hook was to draw a response and he has his faced covered, leaving his free hand ready to duck+weave and shoot an uppercut? what if as you step back he follows and throws a jab/cross or heck, even another hook on the other side? you have boxing listed in your profile so you know better than most about how a hook is used. best way to deal witha hook is to practice against a partner using appropriate gear and see what works best for you. the general things that most people have talked about is that i) you seek to disrupt the power base of the technique (in this case, shoulder, elbow or even hip) ii) you make some kind of move to the opposite side of the hook to attempt to prevent follow up and to aid disrupt the flow/direction of the hook iii) try to get into his actual structural base i.e stance although this is more to prevent follow ups as a proper hook is from a grounded stance anyway. i.e if he is throwing a hook, it is too late to prevent it by disrupting his stance.

and mostly copied from Wong Doc-Fai's book? anyway, on the actual subject on how the differs. the short answer is that it doesn't appear to differ much. if you know hung kuen, then i would say that it is in application very similar to it except it appears to prefer a shorter bridge more akin to wing chun. the footwork is very similar to what i know of hung kuen and other styles of the same period. bear in mind that I have only ever seen demonstrations of the style, hence i can only say that "it appears".

just want to clarify. the way you tend to hold a weapon, especially a heavy weapon is that your base structure is almost solid. The result is that you don't really swing the weapon, instead, it moves as an integral part of your arm structure. What this also means is that when you 'play' with something like this, the movements look almost slow and rigid. Incidentally, a proper kwan dao is quite a heavy weapon; the ones you tend to see being used in displays are just that, for display and are much lighter. It's also quite hard to find a quality one as I have on one occasion broken one because the thing just wasn't made to withstand even my feeble 'shock' power on a sinking stroke. Granted I'm not the most proficient weapons player and I was only really playing with it doing things adapted from other weapons that i do know a bit about but i still figure it should've been able to well, not break.

well, i've kinda given a possible explanation of the discrepancy that you noted between timer and tape as in who-ever recorded it onto digital, recorded it at a incorrect speed, knowingly or otherwise. what i mean is, is that i'm not saying that it is definitely faked or real. as of now, all we know is that the times do not match. Now that might mean that it has been tweeked but that is just a guess unless anyone here knows for definite. one thing i will say (again) though, is that I don't think that the guy was moving that fast considering that it was a low quality video that i was watching. but then again... 20+% faster....

i'm going to give a nice and general way of looking at things. the five animals are different ways to look at how your body can work and move. the five animals form i know is based on tiger, snake, crane, dragon, panther/leopard principles. using animal traits helps you to further understand the hows and whys of the thing you are doing. it also allowed the poetic people to give the movement fancy names back in the day when martial arts were a high class thing.

of course, another explanation is that the tape was old and the player wasn't playing at the right speed. i have old videos on vhs that if i play side by side with a dvd, are faster/slower.

i see nothing wrong with the speed of the video. one thing though, the resolution is off which adds to 'speed-blur' AND the fact that you're watching a video and not the real always makes things look a little bit faster than it really is. to be honest, i wouldn't say that it was that fast considering how tight the movement was AND the fast sections were typically, all hand movements as any wing chun guy knows, moving your hands fast, isn't a problem. incidentally, that was goju, right? i see lots of later shaolin things going on in there as well as hung kuen and some short bridge styles things. i'm beginning to see why people say that goju is more 'chinese' than most other karate styles.

you can but one of the major points of the dummy is that it gives you a physically refence to a centre to face as well as giving you a fixed thig to work around, something test your balance and something to check your footwork.

...just don't treat it as the be all and all of stance training. If you don't have a way to train stances and transitions to anf from each of them, all of the holding stance in the world is meaningless.

first things first. i don't teach. the people i train with tend to be people with prior experience in martial arts and are usually not looking for me to teach them my wing chun. when we train together, we exchange ideas and methods. the simple slap and feed thing teaches the most basic of wing chun movements added to the most simple of wing chun strikes added to the most simple of wing chun footwork steps added to the most simple concept of wing chun facing. in short slap-punch-step if you need-turn to face if you need the 'hidden' concepts in this drill is the timing of the initial interception and where you choose to slap. bear in mind that way before i did 'official' chi sau, i was taught the very first part of this i.e the slap/hit. in other words, this IS the most basic chi sau drill, except i've moved it on a few steps but it still is the most basic drill. It is, in my mind, the easiest way of showing them how fundemental wing chun works. Sure i could teach them the form but that won't teach them the core principles. I could teach them the drills from step one going from facing and punching into partner's punching but that won't show them how the style works. I could show them chi sau proper but again, that doesn't really show how wing chun fights. this is how what i said earlier relates to this thread. I have in the past trained with people who do other styles and I know from personal experience that tring to teach them chi sau as wing chun does it is virtually pointless. To teach chi sau, you have to teach them correct wing chun movments which would mean teaching them at least the three seeds. If i'm teaching the three seeds then I might as well teach them the complete first form. only problem is, I don't need to teach all this to get them to understand what wing chun is about. Instead, I show them a general way of how wing chun works and how it trains and how it relates to our forms. The idea being that if I show how chi sau relates to wing chun forms, they can work their own exercises from their own forms and drills. push hands is different to sticky hands. (at least how i was shown). and I know my wing chun ways have always hindered my ability to learn other styles properly. in the push hands game, I was taught that I aim to be still centre so I almost work my opponent around me. On the other hand, in sticky hands, the idea is that during the game, you work to find a hole. If there is no hole, you make one. Once you have a hole, you go through it. That is where I fail the most. Every time my partner yields, I automatically go to make him yield more than he wants to, thus making my way into his gates. Unfortunately, what happens next is what i can only call a class of styles' training methods. in Tai Chi push hands, if you feel yielding, you usually go with it retaining your own 'balance'. If you are one yielding, you expect this and proceed to redirect in order to find a new direction to take balance again. i.e you work without having to step. In wing chun, if you yield my instinct would be to step into you, thus mantaining my balance but putting you out of the centre of the game. This is where the conflict comes in. Push hands doesn't really deal with your partner stepping directly into you, at least not without disrupting the game. On the other hand, the wing chun stepping in would equate to you losing the push hands hame, even though your step means you now have the centre, an off balance opponent who is now playing catch-up and you can make a hit on your way in. Who wins? the yielder takes the push hands game but the wing chun guy makes his entry and hit. incidentally, push hands has always been about how to play the balance game, the idea being that if you control the balance, you control the situation. Problem is when you only do one way of push hands and only in one type of environment. Just like wing chun doesn't really deal with what to do with an opponent who has fallen, tai chi doesn't really deal with what happens in push hands when you do have taken their balance. This is a flaw found in many chinese styles in that it assumes that once you have won that part of the game, the fight is over. (there are exceptions of course and different schools have their own ways...) these drills have never been, for me, about building back arm and shoulder strength.

what is it that you want? do you want to open a school that is successful and has the capability to be sold out as a franchise? or buy a franchise and run it? generally, in both cases, my advice is to educate yourself first.

wow... get a job? isn't that absolutely the most basic and honest answer ever? how come so many people never seem to understand? job=money.

so in general, the answer is that there is, you just weren't looking hard enough.

i've never been sure that these types of questions have any validity or bear any relevance to how one should train. in a street fight, there are too many variables as to the result of the fight. in a ring fight, you have no control over how good the other guy is in what they do, not to mention the luck factor. on the other hand, if you're purely talking hypotheticals, then the seemingly logical answer would be that absolute mastery in one means you won't need the other. However, we all know that absolute mastery does not exist so this is just another unstoppable object versus immovable object.

fights hardly ever start without some of provocation, intentional or not. why not think about why the situation is the way it is and go about making sure it doesn't happen again?

first of all, no need for you to reply to this post goju boi, just read it and take it in. read that quote carefully and see where you went wrong.

my advice. most places that sell dummies also sell arms and legs for them. if i were you, i'd look into buying decent set of arms and leg cos these take a bit more effort to turn and not everyone has a lathe in their garage. for the body, ask around your local parks/council about what they do with their felled trees or replaced telephone poles etc etc. ask at garden centres for similar things (nine inch poles/logs) or, finally, places that sell logs can sometimes rescue and keep a trunk whole for you is you ask. these three options will be much cheaper than a properly kiln dried and treated dummy body. spend a little time to make up the frame and just use the 'cheap' log bodies. When the body cracks beyond all possible use, just get another one. to maintain the body for as long as possible, use some of them metal 'cable ties' that they use on large shipping boxes. use a few where you don't normally strike, then wrap a good few layers of duct tape over it just in case. you can find plans for dummies on the net (or i have one stashed somewhere on a disk somewhere) all you need then is a drill, the correct bit, and a chisel. and maybe two hours of your life. getting a carpenter to make one up for you isn't always the cheapest option nor is it always the best option. the most important thing is to use the best possible wood which never comes cheap, especially when you are asking for a properly dried and treated 4-5 foot long nine inch pole. the alternative is to use not so good wood but to join up sections around a hexagonal core to maintain uniform strength and to further prevent cracking. unfortunately, this way doesn't work out cheaper because it is a lot more work for the carpenter.

one thing though. when it comes to modern day stance training, how sure are you that you are training all aspects of stance/footwork that they did in the proverbial old days? training a stance isn't just about standing in one for hours on end y'know. this is where i think most of the issues come from. too often, schools are teaching people to stand in a dead stance with no frame of reference as to what it is in reality. As a result, people end up not knowing how to move properly from stance to stance or as i seem to find more and more these days, few people actually think that a stance is a fighting position and spend too much stationary in one, which ends up being not quite right because they haven't adjusted it to be able to move because of them not knowing of the movement aspect, with the end result being that they are now placing stress/strain on joints that would otherwise be fine.

i'm not a big fan of point sparring but i think if done properly, it still has a place in overall training.

it's not that they feared people learning how to fight. it's that they feared individuals might be able to stand out as a hero for the people. historically, "characters" such as wong fei hung (and his student lam sai wing) and fok yuen kap have shown themselves to have had more power and influence over the common person than the govt. did. chinese history has a long record of individuals, often with a martial arts background, having lead revolts, fought enemies and generally, band together with the kind of enthusiasm that no govt. ever did.

ive never been any good at tui sau. every time i feel the retraction i get the urge to close in and hit which, in tai chi terms means i have lost the 'game' whereas i'm used to just hitting the other guy if they yield too much. By far the most useful non chi-sau chi-sau I tend to show people is very similar to tapi tapi where you just slap and feed, slap and feed.... Almost every style has this type of movement in it and this is a basci exercise that you can use with facing drills and stepping/closing drills and mix-up however you like. It also means I don't have to explain how wing chun works to get them doing something which, when it's not a serious class, makes things happen much quicker.

No. I am writing things that I know. One thing that HAS to be made clear: WUSHU is the term now used to describe a very specific art which is the one set up and organised by the chinese govt. as an attempt to re-instill some sort of national pride into its people by reference to its past glory. Wushu is no longer the generic term for martial art that it used to be. As a result, certain routines were developed, referencing the older more famous fighting forms with virtually all application removed. During the teaching of these new forms, application isn't taught as the emphasis is on perfermance. Even today, wushu competitions is all about the performance. Later, to quell the ever increasing discord between practioners of REAL chinese martial arts about the all show no go of the national art being taught in schools in china, a fighting format was adopted that could then be used for every one who so wished to participate in. It has to be said that this fighting format bears very little resemblance to how a more traditional chinese martial arts practicioner would fight due to the limitations of the rules and environment i.e sport. This is the san shou rule set. Admittedly, in recent years, the chinese govt. has been desparately trying to get the descendents of the styles that were kicked out to return to china so to speak and join the wushu board. How this has affected the way wushu is taught I do not know but judging from the amount of performance schools there are compared to old school fighting schools there are, my guess is that it has done very little. Even the famous Jing Woo, once noted for its revolutionary methods of teaching chinese martial arts and fighting is now not much more than just another chinese wushu school. Wushu is not characteristically northern and wing chun is not the most southern. That old differentiation is something that came about during the late 1800s early 1900s in canton to mark out a difference between the local people of the canton region and the growing migration of northerners. think of it as an earlier version of "white men can't jump". if you look at how the styles work, you'll see that differences come about more to do with the time period from which they were developed and the popular theories of the time. geography has little to do with it. so, going back to what you say. i don't doubt that the wushu guys your sifu trains with are pretty hard-core because those who participate in the san shou fights tend to be. In my class, there's a rather big eastern european chap who doesn't actually train in the club's style but comes along for the, what is essentially, kick-boxing (with different rules) training. This would also account for why he would say that they fight in pretty much the same that any other northern martial arts school does; because they train to fight in the same format. Incidentally, you're in the UK so I'm going to guess that your club is part of the BCMAA. I'm also going to guess that the wushu school your sifu goes to is also part of the BCMAA which again points to the San Shou competitions being the common ground between the schools, hence, several northern styles fighting the same.

i am very disappointed that people have actually been responding to this thread.

single sticky hands is not the same as double sticky hands and trains and teaches different things. not to mention that any time you have contact is technically sticky hands, it's just not called it officially in the way the chi sau and poon sau is called it. the basic mun sau/wu sau/tan sau rotation is a basic sticky hand drill. anyway. you learning wing chun trapping methods for sticky hands will not help your karate. you are better off reading about why they use a sticky hands type of training and applying your own karate movements to a similar (not the same) type of exercise.