TST History question

[chud]

...we should make Taipei a place for an annual RSF blowout training, bbq, meetup, fight club, thing. Yes, I can see it now...

That would SOOOO rock!

+1. Going to Taiwan has been on my bucket list for a long time.
I've always wanted to visit there.

[jonathan.bluestein]

I saw Steve Cotter do a video of Xu Hongji's Fu Hu Gong. It is a very challenging set of bodyweight exercises. An obese person like Hong Yixiang could have never performed these. I did not make sense to me therefore that Hong could have invented them, or even have taught them when he was middle-aged or older. Maybe he was thin when much younger. But it didn't seem to have come from him.

[wayne hansen]

I imagine in his judo days he spent a lot of time on the floor
Like many Chinese schools he might have taught a younger student while he was a fitter man
I have never met anyone who disputed him as the originated within TST
As a Shen lung student we practiced them as part of our conditioning but were not given any name
It was not until I saw Steve cotter do them I realised they were part of a set

[aiasthewall]

As far as I know, many of the exercises came from Hong Yixiang's studies of Judo. I have seen similar exercises in Judo classes. Some (like the two and one armed "gathering" body dragging), seem to be original creations, though I may be mistaken. I love that set.

[Andy_S]

SNIP
I also heard the story Bill relates about Hsu seeing a man of mystery in the park- but I've heard the same story related about other teachers as well, and also told by other teachers - it seems (IMO) a popular "tall tale".
SNIP

IIRC, this story is in Smith and Draeger's old "Asian Fighting Arts." But in that version, it is an old man walking into the courtyard of the Shaolin Temple and cracking all the paving slabs as he challenges the monks to a spankdown. Interesting that people adopt these stories and tell them as if they happened to them...though I am not sure what the point of this tale is. (Work on your rooting skills?) Those crafty commandos of Old Japon, of course, have the opposite tale: A really good ninja can cross snow or sand without leaving a footprint behind.

[wayne hansen]

I would often laugh as stories of my own life would come back to me through the students of a well known sydney teacher as part of his life
They were always more exciting and embellished than the real events