Why I don't practice kung fu anymore

[Hardball]

Learning is like swimming against the stream: as soon as one stops one drifts back.

Lady, does this strike up memories in me. Swimming in the Pool or Lake does not prepare you to swim in the ocean. I wonder if this can be applied to Martial Arts?

[Tom Yum]

[QUOTE=Sagacious Lu;263385]

Why is that? Is it because you're offended that I actually expect to be able to use a martial art in a fight, or is it because I'm supposed to pretend that the time I spent practicing those jumping spinning kicks was as helpful for self-defense as the time I spend sparring now? The reason you're not going to respond is because you won't admit that I'm right but you don't have a counter-argument either.

Do they teach jump spinning kicks in Hung gar? I did not know this.

[Sagacious Lu]

If u want to learn to fight, take up boxing you probably wont be able to do those stuff when your older.

That's exactly what I did. FYI some of the coaches in my gym are in their 60s and they still work out and train just like the rest of us so what that tells me is that what you can do when you get older depends on the individual.

[Sagacious Lu]

To say one doesn't do Kung Fu any more arguably shows a lack of understanding in the first place.

Kung Fu/Gung Fu is not a style!

Kung Fu/Gung Fu means work done/hard work/work in progress etc.

So when you say you don't do Kung Fu any more...........
I believe what SL means, is that he doesn't do CMA any more.

LOL at you trying to attack me with semantics.

[Sagacious Lu]

[QUOTE]

Who said they were to teach you how to fight?
You need a bit of historical background here.

When I want to study history (and I do enjoy reading about history) I look for historians, not martial artists. When I signed up the school billed itself as "The Ultimate in Self-Defense". I took it for granted that the claim was hyperbolic but it was clear that on of the school's main goals was to prepare you to fight.

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

Not at that school it wasn't; they did everything but there.

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

Why is that? Is it because you're offended that I actually expect to be able to use a martial art in a fight, or is it because I'm supposed to pretend that the time I spent practicing those jumping spinning kicks was as helpful for self-defense as the time I spend sparring now? The reason you're not going to respond is because you won't admit that I'm right but you don't have a counter-argument either.

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.

Bullshit I can evaluate my skills, my fundamental skills have grown by leaps and bounds. There are a number of people that I can now dominate in sparring that used to be able to embarass me at will. You can willfully disbelieve what I'm telling you but the fact is that I have seen far more tangible growth in my ability with my current training methods than I ever did at my previous school.

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

This is a fancy way of trying to get out of making a counter-argument.

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

Exactly, I gave up CMA because I was told it was "the ultimate in self-defense" but there was very little actual self-defense in the curriculum. I was fine with getting a little history mixed into the lesson but that was not what I went there for and the system did not perform as advertised. If I wanted history lessons I'd enroll in some college courses, I went there to learn self-defense like it promised in the school brochure.

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.

The rest of the world can make of it what they want, I for one will continue to speak my mind. The forum is here to discuss the CMAs, which is what I'm doing by providing legitimate criticism of one prominent CMA. Go ahead and report my post if you want, I'm pretty sure I haven't said anything that will upset the mods.

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

This line of shit again? Damn, and you think MY ego is out of control? Look, I'm just stating my point of view and I haven't attacked anyone personally. You on the other hand have consistantly tried to belittle me personally without providing any real response to the points that I've made. You are certainly in no position to pass judgement on me.

[Troll Virus]

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.

Well yes.

To say one doesn't do Kung Fu any more arguably shows a lack of understanding in the first place.

Kung Fu/Gung Fu is not a style!

Kung Fu/Gung Fu means work done/hard work/work in progress etc.

So when you say you don't do Kung Fu any more...........
I believe what SL means, is that he doesn't do CMA any more.

[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.