by Bob on Fri Jun 27, 2008 6:38 am
Kreese:
I'd say that 8 step praying mantis is taught first and quite a bit although not all the forms are taught from the complete system.
They also all start off holding 7 or 8 basic stances from the praying mantis forms. Not for 8 breaths like baji but for a minute or so.
Beng Bu is very big and for advanced students Fen Shen Ba Zhou is also taught.
We also learned 2 forms of mei hua lu.
Xiao Hu Yan is also a big favorite.
My favorite when I was having to learn mantis was Qi Xing Zhai Yao. It had some elements of 6 harmony mantis which I think I would liked to have really gotten into.
We learned a couple of single posture movements from 6 harmony mantis and also the Liu He Duan Chui [6 harmony short punch which I really liked]
Students almost all start out with 7 hand, learn the fight behind 7 hand along with 3 sets of 8 different moving postures for a total of 24 postures. They are taken from a lot of different systems. Tons of warm-up and stretches, lots of two man exercises, each of the 24 moving postures have a B fighting side.
When summer arrives the students usually learn the crazy demon staff form and a basic dao.
We had the privilege of having Master Sun De Yao stay with us for 3 years or so and some of the senior teaching disicples picked up a number of his forms under one-on-one instruction. Rob Peterson picked up the most and then went to China and learned from one the taiji meihua praying mantis masters from Yan Tai. They also picked up some things from Master Zhang Wei Fu of Qingdao.
We have never trained any type of longfist primarily because Master Yang's favorite system throughout his life has been praying mantis. I put up some old clips of him and one of his very early students T.W. Ruff [highly ranked state high school wrestler] when they were at MIT when Master Yang just arrived in the US. He didn't speak much English so T.W. got him a job as a bouncer at a pretty tough bar called Fireside. They did this for a couple of years. All fights in the bars transcended systems i.e. praying mantis, baji etc. etc. and strategy always had to prevail, some of it quite dirty. Like being challenged by someone and you tell okay let's outside and settle this and as they turn to go out the door, you nail the back of their head and knock them out. One of many stories. LOL
No superior systems in a street/bar fight.
Anyway, I don't spend much time in this any longer but still love to watch them. In order for the school to survive a belt program that takes them through a lot of praying mantis and builds in some da qiang training and eventually some baji/pigua training was put into place. After they reach the highest level, they can continue deeper into the baji/pigua system.
Later.
Last edited by
Bob on Fri Jun 27, 2008 6:40 am, edited 1 time in total.