Internal Wushu...external...everything else?

[wingedMonkey]

So someone brought this up in the topic I made about the History of Tiger Kung Fu but we can discuss it here further.

I mentioned how I practiced TKD for most of my life and called it a hard or external style. So when I started doing Wushu about a year or two ago, tiger style easily came to me because it is considered the most external style according to Shaolin Canon.

What do you'all think? Is there another style of Wushu(kungfu) that you think would be an easy transition for someone from a hard style let's say karate, muay thai, or boxing?

One last note: I have noticed there are probably other internal styles out there that aren't kung fu, for instance Yoga, so if you know some please mention this too.

[Mistassailant5]

Another good style for you to try may be the Leopard style or Hung Gar if you want to learn good external styles. If you want to learn a style that has both external and internal properties, Baguazhang would be a good choice.

[wingedMonkey]

Thank you so much, you are correct. I had started Wushu recently again and learned Leopard as well as some Hung Gar Tiger. They really are awesome forms, especially how leopard is for smaller people yet powerful like tiger.

[Toptomcat]

A great many knowledgeable and experienced kung fu practitioners consider the split between 'internal' and 'external' systems to be a myth at worst and highly misleading at best: the first documented incidence of it being mentioned was by a non-martial artist, a Communist official attempting to classify the various kung fu systems in the standardization that became contemporary wushu. The consensus among many is that all systems of martial arts have 'internal' and 'external' components, for any reasonable and complete definition of 'internal' and 'external'.

[wingedMonkey]

That is why most Kung Fu has become or is becoming extinct due to communists, and I'm not trying to argue politics here, but when they came into power they changed most of the forms to take out completely the mystical side and made things more systematic and scientific...so lots was lost and even shaolin stuff is no longer the original stuff.

[Toptomcat]

I don't think you'll find enough pro-Communists here to make it a problem, really