beegs wrote:in order for one to fix a problem, one must admit their is a problem to begin with.
![wink ;)](./images/smilies/yabb_wink.gif)
The vast majority of neijia practitioners are practicing for health, not fighting ability. For those people, the fact that few can't effectively fight with it is irrelevant. Most teachers cater to this demand. It isn't a problem.
There are lots of practitioners who say, "Yeah, I want to be able to use this stuff to fight", but few are willing to train it as is necessary to reach that goal - even with the proper instruction. The problem, I believe, is less with the instruction and more with the fantasy/wishful thinking of many a practitioner. For most, it appears to be exercise with an academic /philosophic twist. It is so much more fun to practice to trigrams, 8 energies, blah, blah, blah, then it is to, for example, just to do reps in a gym. And, there is nothing wrong with that, as long as no one misrepresents it as something it ain't.
For the relatively few who REALLY want to be able to effectively fight with it, most of what is being taught as "internal martial arts" is largely irrelevant to developing fighting abilities. The few who REALLY want to use it to fight, find teachers who can teach them to do that, albeit it isn't easy to do so with such a low signal to noise ratio. The problem exists only for a relatively few.
my two cents worth.