mantis.style

First question, what wing chun?

Wudang is the name of a school. As a school, it has fist sets as well as weapons, most notably being the chinese straight sword and other basic training tools/techniques. According to popular myth and story telling, The originator of Wudang school was an ex-shaolin disciple who was kicked out unfairly. In the same popular stories, this guy maintains a view that the shaolin guys are all old, stuffy, rule following, unbending and unforgiving farts.

Firstly, what kung fu? Secondly, training in more than one martial art style is not the same cross training.

Your knowledge of dragonball z scares me.

Did you say that Wing Chun has a rear leg bias? What school are you taling about as my Wing Chun has alwys been 50/50; otherwise the rotating around motherline doesn't work. Also, the stance in wing chun shouldnt be a forced thing that needs to be consciously thought about when you fight. When done properly, it is surprisingly similar to normal posture. In fact, I would say that 70% of the wing chun body structure can be done all of the time without affecting how you appear to the rest of the world. I mean, I can stand at a bus stop in a forward/side stance and no one would know. The other 30% only comes into play when you are moving/stepping/turning.

Please don't get me wrong as I am not saying that the more elaborate ways don't/won't work. It's just that sometimes, if you don't even have that basic hit back type reaction to being grabbed during a threatening situation, then you aren't likely to be able to fumble one of those grab escapes. It doesn't help that too often, classes that deal with such things tend to only practice in a nice and calm evironment where you are grabbed nice and gently with both parties smiling and then you have plenty of time to wrap/cover fingers, rotate wrist to apply pressure to their wrist and then extrend elbow to lock them down. The next time you're doing wrist grab escapes try this; after you've grabbed them and they're about to do their escape, shout at them and see if they can still do it.

Combat Tai Chi SHOULD NOT be different to "regular" Tai Chi. Apart from the different schools and their sligthly different methodolgies, ALL Tai Chi is about fighting and if where-ever you go to doesn't reflect this, then I say walk away politely. Tai Chi is Tai Chi. The style itself consists of very exact and rigorous movements that have to obey a very strict set of, let's just call them rules. Because of this adherance to a set of rules that deal with everything from breathing to body structure to dealing with force, you can't really properly train in Tai Chi if your practice doesn't deal with all aspects, especially the last part i.e dealing with force. If you don't practice Tai Chi in it's entirety then, because you aren't following all of the rules, you aren't really doing Tai Chi. What you are doing instead, is practicing a routine of movements that mean next to nothing. Now going back to the original post. I don't often see schools that teach actual Wudang Tai Chi and if it is legitimate, then it is going to be a good place to start. By that little bit of stating the obvious, I mean that Wudang is one of the earliest forms of Tai Chi out there and it is much closer to the older long fist styles compared to the others. This often means that they teach it in a more classical fighting way as well and would offer a good parallel study to something more modern and more upright like Sun style Tai Chi. Not sure about the arthritis tag in that school you talk about though.

I find it quite annoying that the person/people chosen to represent the Chinese martial arts were from Modern Wushu. The same is said for their blanket Karate grouping. In general, it was a bad program to actually learn anything about the styles. I'm not even sure if it was that entertaining, especially with too much commentary of the obvious and too much emphasis on flash and fluff. As well the odd (mis)use of Obata Sensei I also find it strange that they didn't get more out of Guro Inosanto. Then again, considering that in his short segment he managed to explain that simply being strongest doesn't mean much when you add skill into the mix regarding the supposed "weakness" of kali and their use of sticks, I can see that he can very easily undermine what the program makers wanted out of the show.

From what I can tell, the two main people involved in this (student and visitor - not the assistant) are both kids under 16. I'm not sure where all of the guns/knives/high on drugs thing came from. What else is bothering me now is that this kid has been around before and it doesn't seem as though the Sifu has done much to welcome him into the class.

Fighting in prison is not the smartest thing to do. Best bet is to learn how to keep your head down.

It's not about whether not he was being evasive or not. It's more like how the answers would seem to an agressive visitor. The last thing you want to do to a kid who wants "to have a go" is give psuedo philosophical answers that don't answer his questions. Great, no fight took place but I still think it wasn't the best way to deal with things. End of the day, the vistitor didn't get any information and to him, he probably felt as if he was being ignored, not taken seriously and treated with a little bit of disprespect, hence the display after getting those answers to his questions. It was a simple question: do you spar? why wasn't a simple yes/no answer available?

Well, I'm not talking about WHY people want to learn but rather what learning should teach you. It's like this, you want to eat nice food so along the process, you learn to cook. You want to get healthy and go to a MA class, part of the process would end up that you know how to fight, ignoring questions of tai chi's effectiveness. That is what I meant. This is also why so many Tai Chi classes annoy me because in my opinion, if you cant fight with it afterwards, you are not learning it properly so why go to a tai chi class in the first place? If you aren't learning it properly, how much benefit are you really getting out it? DON'T talk about tae-bo... And thank you for the response. I've been reading the discussions here and your responses are things that stand out as being worth more than some others.

Sounds like the symptoms of over complicating things. You get your wrist grabbed, hit them in the face. 90% of the time, that would get you free, depending on how you hit them of course.

Boring and is unfortunately what 90% of people want from martial arts classes.

I'm going to go against the grain here and say that the assistant didn't do the correct thing. First of all, he should have given straight forward answers instead of giving what could've been things that would get particular bad reaction from the visitor. It sounds too much like he was doing this on purpose. The correct thing to do would've been to ask the visitor to come back when the instructor is there so that he can answer any questions he might have.

But these things, whatever you call it, at the end of the day should produce a fighter yes/no? Traditional arts, whatever the reasons you practice them should make you a better fighter, so isn't whether or not you call them a martial art or a sport art irrelevant because both are essentially about fighting and so both are fighting arts?

I don't think the instructor should be teaching anything other than the art he was taught i.e he should teach it as a dead thing for the student to interpret as they want to. The way I see it, if you teach an interpretation of something, you won't really teach the thing in it's entirety. I also don't believe that sport, combat or health aspects can really be removed from the traditional. Those aspects are things that you get from the original/traditional style and are just ways of performing or applying that traditional style. If you train in a traditional style, you should be able to take what you get out of it and apply in a sport environment, or real fight environment. Health is a side effect of practicing the style and shouldn't really be a reason for the training. If you are going into a martial art purely for health benefits, you are better off going to a specialised aerobics or similar class.

In one of my semi contact classes, there is a guy who just shoots in a taps you for the hit. They do nothing and the guy has very bad form in general in that he looks the part but there is no grounding, no hip, no stance, no body structure, especially when we spar. His ability to find holes and tag people had lead him to develope a largr than normal. That's when a few of the senior students decided to show him some basics. We baited with some open targets to draw him into a highish hit then we would simply sink and put out a straight punch for him to run into or step into his stance and make him fall without even making a strike. After a few times he got the message and stopped being so mouthy about how he could easily "beat any of the seniors".

Please don't bring "monks" into this because what they do does not relate to the majority of traditional martial arts and their authenticity is questionable. Also, I don't agree that Chi Sao is close combat; it is a training tool. It is a game where can experiment and test. It isn't fighting because it assumes your partner will move in a wing chun way. In fact, depending on how good you are, you can deliberately do things in a non-wing chun way just to mess up the flow. You can tell how good the other person is by how they react to non-wing chun in chi sau. When you do fight, it is much closer to simple one step drills in that it is from a neutral position with a gap between you. You end up using things from chi sao drills but you don't fight with chi sao. There is a problem I see in some classes in that they concerntrate too much on the game of chi sao to the point where fighting has been forgotten. Then there is the problem where people aren't taught how to close gaps properly and end up being too reactive which stems from too much chi sao because you anticipate getting into that range and forget basic side step, parry, pin hit drills; the bread and butter of wing chun.

The kicks of the styles that I practice I can do easily at full force without the need to stretch as the range of motion of the kicks is based on "normal" flexibilty.

But to practice drills you need to derive them from the katas in the first place and if you are going to do this, then why not just teach the derived drills instead of focussing on the prefection of form?

OK then, let me rephrase and add some back story. One of my earliest classes involved me getting peppered with punches by a senior member of the class to see how I naturally deal with things. Before my sifu was officially taught, his teacher paid some kids to beat him up. Hard training is done after basics, that is true BUT my basics was simple sparring. Everytime I was taught a move, I was then shown it in application as well as in singular drill and it's place in the form and how it differs in the form and why it is different. Does my more "dynamic" class mean it is not authentic? Is the inverse true? Are all non-dynamic and non-heavy sparring classes authentic? No offence but three months of ONLY stance training smells like either proper classical styles like traditional longfist styles or one of the breathe/hard schools of shaolin, the origins of which in terms of fighting are dubious anyway. No school I know of has students ONLY doing stance training for the first three months. On the other hand, I did spend months learning how to short bridge punch but that's not really the same and it wasn't like I never did anything else as well as that at the same time, especially seeing as part of the short bridge punching training involves sand-bag work and blood-sand. Traditional styles do take a long time to learn all of it that can be taught but does that mean it takes ten or more years to even just learn basics because that is what is being said by some. Would you consider Wing Chun to be a traditional style? Historically, the style was designed to create fighters in less than five years with even the basics being applicable from day one. I mean, put it this way, the moment you are taught to punch, you are by the nature of what is to punch, taught to intercept and to step and basics of timing; at least you should be. In my first class of wing chun, that was what and how I was taught. In my first class of mantis, I was taught in the same way. How does my "dynamic" way of being taught in a non "practice this for months young grasshopper" way indicative of its authenticity or suspicion?

Please excuse me for an error in my last post. What I meant to post was: So are you saying that if your first two classes of a Chinese martial art does involve and sparring or dynamic drills, you are not in a proper authentic Chinese martial arts class?

Nunchaku do not relate to the three section staff at all. The three sectioned staff, as the name implies, is a staff. There are drills that can be sort of taught by using a normal staff as substitute but to learn to use the three section staff, the only thing you can practice with, is a three section staff. With that said, all schools of chinese martial arts that I know that has the three section staff as part of their curriculum, would teach the staff first anyway.

I think the point being made is that blindly practising kata is useless if you don't practice the things derived from the kata. In turn, this brings about the question of the relevance of the kata themselves if you can just record and teach the applications instead.