Sagacious Lu

Those of you who are familiar with me may remember that I practiced Hung Gar Tiger/Crane kung fu for several years. There were a number of things about the style that I like, and I did learn a lot of useful things at that school, but in this thread I will explain why it is a very impractical way to learn to fight.
To start off it is horribly bloated with techniques. There are many low-percentage wrist locks and implausible kicks (among other things) that simply do not work against a resisting opponent. In addition the techniques are presented in dozens of (frequently redundant) combat applications that must be memorized. This requires the student not only to learn how to do the throw, lock strike or whatever, but also to learn the choreography of the application. The result of this is that the student must spend hour after hour of training time learning low-percentage moves and irrelevant choreography in order to practice the portion of the curriculum that could conceivably be applied in an actual confrontation.
Another problem is that the traditional weapons forms are required. No one uses spears, broad swords or chain whips in the modern day. Even if people did there is no actual fencing or sparring done with these weapons; just forms. This aspect of the training is only useful for impressing people who don't practice martial arts in demonstrations yet it accounts for a huge percentage of the curriculum.
In addition the forms are freqeuntly counter-productive For one thing the motions in kung fu forms frequently have so little in common with the technique they are meant to represent as to be of no use in learning the actual technique. Even worse though students are required to memorize stagnant sequences that may last several minutes. This is choreography and while it's of great benefit to dancers to the martial artist it is nothing but a work out at the best of times(if you're lucky, it's not always strenuous enough to count) and frequently is nothing but busy work. These forms were invented to teach students to fight, but now they have become the end goal; students no longer care if they can fight so long as they can perform the sets to their teacher's satisfaction.
Even more than the nuts and bolts of the system I'd like to address the attitude of the people I was training with. When I got to the school there were many serious athletes, but as time went on those of us who were athletic and wanted to learn to fight drifted away from the school due to the problems I listed above. After a while most of my classmates were either very young or out of shaped middle aged people. They were not motivated to push their conditioning and they had no intention of ever getting hit. This meant that I had no one to work with that could give me a challenging sparring match- and my teacher told me as much when I pressed him on why I hadn't gotten a chance to spar in so long. In fact when I would speak up about wanting to spar I was told that I just wanted to show off and that I had a big ego- my current coaches praise my work ethic for wanting to practice. This may be the single biggest reason why I won't be going back.

__________________

Sagacious Lu

Who am I to judge? I'm the guy that has to defend myself using my chosen style. I'm the guy that has to spend his precious free time training. I'm the guy that's paying for lessons. I started wrestling when I was twelve and I've been practicing some form of martial art or contact sport ever since. So yes, I am entitled to express an opinion.

__________________

Thai Bri

This is a great post. It outlines the beginnings of a journey that I started to make decades ago.

There are too many traditionalists who have lost sight of the squirrel. They all started out wanting to learn how to defend themselves. But those that stayed on (dismissing those who had the sense to leave for being somehow weak) put too much of their ego into it.

They lost the ability to rationalise what they were learning, and had spent so much time and energy studying it that they found it hard to cut and run.

I am sure that there are traditional martial artists out there who really can fight. I know there are. But they are few and far between. They have been overtaken by easily impressed morons who wave their arms and legs about, imagining that they and their "Masters" are deadly fighting machines. And all evidence to the contrary is ignored or, as TV seems to have so impressively demonstrated, treated with scorn and aggression.

My personal favourites are those that argue that their art is effective.... when you begin to tear that down they say "Well, we are studying an art, we are not here to fight....". And when the nasty non believer has left the room? Then they tell themselves it is effective again.

Martial Artists of the world. cast off your chains of tradition. Drivers no longer learn how to drive a horse and cart. Cast the old ways aside and embrace the new. Or get the shit kicked out of you when your silly art fails, as these arts so often do.

jubaji

You were a wise lad!

__________________
Optional signature you may use to appear at bottom of your posts.

Troll Virus

Just in case anyone is getting confused, ther's been a bit of creative moderating on defend. net, not explained or notified by it's staff;

Ego Check

GranFire

Well, it looks like you outgrew your school and instructor!
That happens, and it's not a bad thing. I bet there are other Kung Fu school still more in line with the Martial aspect of the Art or just moving on to something else.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe put it this way: Learning is like swimming against the stream: as soon as one stops one drifts back.

__________________

Banner by www.fiveancestors.com

http://itatigerforum.proboards103.com/


*It's not the size of the dog in the fight - it's the size of the fight in the dog*

Sagacious Lu

If you look hard enough I'm sure you can still find some effective, hard-nosed kung fu schools, but if you took out a lot of the inefficient drills and traditional weapons it wouldn't really be kung fu anymore. Too much of the art is caught up in tradition and history for it to be competitive with other styles that have been constantly adapting and evolving to reflect modern training methods. Even at it's best I think a lot of kung fu's training methods will never quite measure up because they are antiquated. After all there have been a lot of advances in sports science and medicine in the last several centuries. That having been said I think there are still a lot of very valid ideas in those systems that the martial community at large is unaware of; Hung Gar still has something to offer, it's just that you have to slog through a lot of busy work in the name of tradition in order to get at it.



I don't think the mods. did anything. I wanted to respond to you but I didn't want to hijack EF's thread about being civil to each other so I decided to make my point in my own thread.

__________________

Troll Virus

OK, you want to have a serious discussion, no silliness or sniping?

See what I really want to know from you, are the things about the style that you like, that you feel have been beneficial to you.
If I want to read what's wrong about it all, then that's been done to death.

So give us all a short cut.
Share the benefits of your training and spare us all the bleatiing about 'time wasted' etc.

See the internet is/can be a resource.
It's incredibly frustrating to go looking for information and find the least knowledgeable people are the ones making the majority of the posts.

So far this is just like another 'Got my ass kicked despite my TKD Black Belt, now I'm born again MMA, teenage angst' kind of thread.

I'm looking for quality of information, consideration of thought and people who know their subject matter.
If every discussion is deliberately broken down the way they have previously been on the CMA section here, then defend.net would be as well not having one at all.
Maybe just replace it with a section called "Thai Bri says it's shit, so it must be!"

Sagacious Lu

I think it's pretty clear from the way I made my argument that I'm not just mindlessly bashing kung fu; I have identified why the style is inadequate clearly and concisely without making any jokes about it. If these ideas have been "done to death" than the reason is that my experience is very common among kung fu practitioners. Sure, people should respect the opinions of others but there's a point where the facts are facts whether you like it or not. I'm not going to bend over backwards to put a positive face on something just because it's someone's sacred cow. The cold hard fact is that if your goal is to learn how to fight this style is inherently inferior.

That's the thing, TB isn't saying "this is shit because I said so" he's saying it's shit and then provides very strong, logical reasons why it is in fact shit. I hope someone who's wants to learn to fight comes and reads this thread, and hopefully they'll choose something more effective as a result. We'd be better off not having a CMA forum than to pretend that there isn't a lot of nonsense in them. It isn't trolling to point out a bad idea when you see one.
You asked me what the positive aspects are; well, I learned the basics of kicking and punching and how to hit a heavy bag, and to some degree I was able to start setting up take downs with strikes. I could have learned these things much more quickly in another school, but I did walk away with some real knowledge. Most of the esoteric techniques (in other words that can't be found in most other popular systems) that I think are still useful in kung fu are what I would consider diry tricks, or gimmicks. You might just be able to get an advantage by hitting your opponent with the back of your wrist (this is a crane technique) and it's worth while to be aware the you can do it, but that's the sort of thing that's only good in very specific situations. It's a low percentage move but it might just come in handy some day. There are also some locks and take downs in chin na that are valid even if they are mixed in with a lot of things that only work in demonstrations. However, these little nuggets of usefulness are not valuable enough to justify the amount of time you have to waste on poor training practices to learn them.

__________________

Troll Virus

Ya ya, we know dis already.


It's neither my Holy Cow nor Grail.

That's a mistake though. Styles themselves do nothing, it's what you do with them, that is important.
How do these styles come about in the first place?
Are they written on the back of napkins between courses in a Chinese restaurant?



Logical to you maybe.
When I see people comparing styles rather than people, styles rather than methodology or styles rather than philosophy, what I see is a pile of shit so large it makes pye look like a small number.

K'Ching.
What if they don't think MA help you learn to fight at all?
Not any of them?
What if all they are looking for is good information?
What if they are looking for histories and philosophy?
What if they think fighting is for really, really stupid people, who can't control their own ego?
Maybe they just won't bother with the forum and go elsewhere, as it doesn't matter how hard you pull, you can't make a horse drink if it doesn't want to.

Who's pretending?

It depends how you do it.
If you do it offensively, then it's not going to be productive.
Case in point, why is it that Thai Bri can be polite on say Burton Richardsons forum re questions on WC, yet he can't be civil on the main forum?

You're right, that doesn't seem like a lot to take away?
Is it the school to blame though, or do you think you maybe had your own blinkers on for a while?


See to me, these are just things you tuck away in the back of your mind labelled, examine more closely on a rainy day.

Blue Wave Gym

This post could easily be called why I stoped practicing tma lol becauase it exist in them all to some degree with the exception of judo imho.
Can you say a-l-i-v-e-n-e-s-s I think you can
btw what about san shou it's kung fu and those monks put on boxing gloves and chest protrector and go at it. So isn't that a good style of kung fu?
btw what is Kung Lee up any more mma fights for him?

__________________
Tiens, voila du boudin,
voila du boudin,
voila du boudin
Pour les Alsaciens, les Suisses, et les Lorrains
Pour les Belges, il n'y en a plus,
pour les Belges, il n'y en a plus
Ce sont des tireurs au cul. Tireurs au cul

Sagacious Lu

This is a cop out, it's just a way to glibly side step the fact that a lot of styles teach things that are irrelevant. Kung fu forms don't do anything to teach you how to fight, yet they are a required part of the curriculum. It was like being in a math class that required the students to spend half the class verbally counting to 1,000 every day before they ever worked an actual math problem; it's just not a productive way to spend your time. During the time that kung fu guys practice forms and choreography boxers practice punching. As a result the kung fu guy gets good at choreographed moves and boxers get good at punching. One of these skill sets can be used in a fight while the other cannot, thus if one is trying to learn to fight one is undeniably superior and the other is inferior.

The blame lies with the curriculum in Hung Gar. I have the same work ethic and physical abilities as ever but I've progressed much much more in the year that I've been boxing than I did in three years of kung fu. I practiced forms hour after hour and because I worked hard I was able to make them look good but they DID NOTHING to make be a better fighter. There's no getting around the fact if I'd been hitting the bags, training on focus mits and sparring instead of spending a lot of time learning the choreography of the forms I'd be a lot better at fighting than I am.

There's lots of good information in this thread; it may not be complimentary and it may not be what people want to hear but that doesn't make it any less true.

If someone made a thread about the history of Hung Gar I would post about the Shaolin temples being burned and how the monks fled and hid on opera boats to plot their revenge but this thread is about fighting so that isn't relevant.

Than obviously they have no use for martial arts what so ever and should find some other way to spend their time.


If my posts in this thread have that effect than hopefully those people will have enough sense not to let the door hit them in the ass on their way out; one way or the other they won't be missed.

__________________

Sagacious Lu

San shou is cool stuff!

__________________

Troll Virus

It's not a cop out, it's a fact (if you have only one goal).
It's a fact (if you have only one goal) not contained to CMA



Who said they were to teach you how to fight?
You need a bit of historical background here.
What's the earliest footage of CMA forms you can find on youtube?
1930's if you're lucky?
What historical data, or explanation of those forms can you find online, anywhere?




To teach you 'how to fight?'
'Fighting' is all too easy to get experience of


I'm not going to respond to that, as I think/hope that you can do better.



Here, to make a comparison, you really need to have actual statistics, about the fights you had while training Hung Gar, and the fights you had while training boxing.



How do you know?
When was the last fight you had and what happened?



Truth, is a very personal thing.
What's true for me, can be false for you.
The difference may be actual experience.



Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I thought this thread was about how YOU decided to give up CMA???



That'd be a great idea.
Try it.




Ego check yet again mister.
What you want/expect from a CMA forum may not be what everyone else wants/expects.

There's plenty other self-congratulatory/self-righteous forums out there to choose from hence;

Nobody appointed you, and you've done very little.

westway50

well have u noticed that a lot of the masters arent very strong in fighting. but they can still do a lot of stuff, even when they are like forty, fifty, and some even older. Kung Fu is not suppose necessarily for fighting. its for improving yourself. If u want to learn to fight, take up boxing or tai quan do. you probably wont be able to do those stuff when your older, but if u just wanna learn to fight now, u should learn something mainly for street use. But kung fu is suppose to be art like and for your health. also ur arguments about weapons is true, but if u learn the weapons, u can use those techniques with other items as weapons. Your sifu is probably right about ur ego.