the rum soaked fist: internal martial arts forum

I find this video to be very interested. Your thought?

johnwang wrote:I find this video to be very interested. Your thought?

It's more educational to see them used in real fights, as the video shows.

I posted the same video here, viewtopic.php?f=6&t=26009&st=0&sk=t&sd=a.

johnwang wrote:I find this video to be very interested. Your thought?

Someone went to great lengths to compile that video. I thank whoever it was for going to the trouble. I find it interesting too.

What worked a thousand years ago in China will still work today. Still, some of the moves in the video, the high fancy kicks, have never appealed to me. Too vulnerable to counter-attack.

I owe to you some of my reservations about high kicks (your leg-over-shoulder thing).

Imo this sort of video is missing the point. The individual techniques are not really what make mma athletes good fighters, so much as how they train.

There was a similar vid comparing mma and karate a while ago. Interesting to see regardless.

Well, a lot of it was TKD and karate. But, imo, it's what hits, that counts.

middleway wrote:Imo this sort of video is missing the point. The individual techniques are not really what make mma athletes good fighters, so much as how they train.

There was a similar vid comparing mma and karate a while ago. Interesting to see regardless.

I think it safe to say that some techniques get reinvented as they are needed. Knee hook with stomach push is something I could not find in traditional European martial arts, but the knee hook with ball kick is definitely in there. Oh, wait. That got adjusted for the UFC rules.

Ex libris: You are on your back, your enemy is advancing. You hook your foot behind his knee and put your other to his cods.

middleway wrote:Imo this sort of video is missing the point. The individual techniques are not really what make mma athletes good fighters, so much as how they train.

There was a similar vid comparing mma and karate a while ago. Interesting to see regardless.

One valid point is: these are techniques that worked in an actual fight. Rather than, here are some techniques that work in an unrealistic demonstration (e.g., no retraction of punches, etc.). You figure out how to apply them in a real fight.

That is why I am not that interested in watching highlight videos with only the finishing moves. I am more interested in how the technique was set up (e.g., defense/offense patterns, weaknesses, timing, etc.), in order to be successful.

Kung fu in UFC???? Never heard of such a thing!!!

Posted by Marvin8:
"....I am more interested in how the technique was set up (e.g., defense/offense patterns, weaknesses, timing, etc.), in order to be successful."

Nice Marvin...like that sentence for sure.

I have yet to see something in the UFC that I haven't seen in Kung fu
Their secret is training and practice

I have yet to see something in the UFC that I haven't seen in Kung fu

Or any other myriad of styles. The age old adage that we are all human and how we fight, or what we use to hit each other, is limited by our biology rings true.

The interesting thing in many of these MMA bouts where unusual techniques appear is that afterwards when the fighters are questioned on the methods they often say 'I just did it, we have never trained that technique'. This points to them being in a state where the spontaneous execution of technique appears as a gap or opportunity is recognised. A very useful position to be in.

This suggests to me that many of the strange techniques found in Traditional arts were created when, in a real fight, an exponent pulled off some crazy move in the heat of the moment and it then got codified into a technique library. Which sort of missed the point of what made the technique effective in the first place (an opportunistic application of prinicple)

Just a theory of course.

Steve James wrote:Well, a lot of it was TKD and karate. But, imo, it's what hits, that counts.

As the plot thickens...

Okinawan karateka are quite open about having cribbed a bunch from Southern Chinese and particularly Fujian province kung fu, including the sanchin kata (form, daolu), which in my opinion karate ruins with too-forceful breath work. The same form exists in China but is done with better understanding. A comparison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWh-uhw4C9s

Japanese karate, developed from the Okinawan sort, is a bit stylized in its own direction of swift compactness, and often omits sanchin as inherited from Okinawa, and other similar huffing and puffing.

Korean Tae Kwon Do was in its formative years Shotokan (a Japanese karate style) with a Korean accent, though it has since developed its own greater fluidity and an emphasis on high kicking. (The original forms used in TKD are quite obviously Shotokan-derived.)

So then, it is difficult (perhaps not impossible though) to find in karate or TKD any movement or a concept without its cognate in kung fu, since at most you are looking at something only three steps in development removed from CMA.

It looks alot like Goju-ryu and what may be termed traditional Okinawan karate.

It's not surprising that the creator of this video believes that kung fu is the precursor of all martial arts.

I've always wondered just how good these vids are for Kung Fu's rep.

AFAIK, it seems the best examples of Kung Fu in MMA (as can be seen in this video) are people who don't train Kung Fu and use techniques that are common between many arts. But that leads to the question: Is Kung Fu good because it has stuff that's useful? Or does Kung Fu suck because Kung Fu guys for the most part can't represent their own techniques in MMA while people in other styles can. The latter would perhaps even imply that Kung Fu is detrimental for fighting in the sense that, if anything, Kung Fu makes people unable to apply skills that normally work across various/all martial arts.

Maybe I just have this issue with vids like this because I'm primarily a Wing Chun guy, and the Chun is full of people who can look at any darn technique and say "oh yea, that's in Wing Chun, it's in so-and-so form right at this part...." Meanwhile they can't for the life of them pull off these same moves (even without an opponent) that they claim are in the forms that theyve been practicing for years.

Since the the OP's video was created under the impression that many MMA guys have used Kung Fu techniques in the ring, I suppose a simpler question we could ask ourselves is this:

Can we say that technique A from XX style is the same as technique B from OO style just because techniques A and B "look similar"?

Ex.)
- Is the right cross from boxing the same as the Xingyi's Beng Chuan?

- Is the diagonal strike throw from Baoding Shuaijiao the same as Judo's O-soto-gari?

- Is the Muay Thai low roundhouse kick the same as the Kyukushin Karate low roundhouse kick?


My answer is no, hell no.