the rum soaked fist: internal martial arts forum

charlie_cambridge wrote:All of the old teachers of his generation and before did the same thing.
Nothing in the old form videos of all the old masters is accurate, they all did many things wrong on purpose.
In their day and age that was considered more responsible than putting real martial techniques in the hands of complete strangers.

Don't know about "wrong" do know some things I've seen are not as detailed nor explained very clearly
why would they be
being just demos of ones work...

A noted teacher I knew gives some of the historical background for doing so...

How do you know if your kung fu is real? Secret teachings, closed-door disciples, and special transmissions permeate kung fu legends. Feuding lineage branches frequently accuse each other of not receiving the true teachings. “Grandmaster never gave them the real stuff, only us!” or so the story goes.

Do genuine masters really withhold their techniques from their students?

According to Grandmaster David Chin, they do. “The old traditional masters, they were so protective of themselves,” comments Chin. “They made sure they could make a living. They didn’t want the students to compete against them.”

In ancient times, a kung fu master’s art was his livelihood, so they were always vigilant against potential traitors. While few still earn all of their living from martial arts, the tradition of secrecy continues to create swirling controversies.

In many traditions, keeping secrets is inherent, not just from students but also from the government.

With our own national security now wrestling with the touchy issue of personal privacy, it’s worth examining how our martial forefathers hid the arts underground.
These subversive masters were catalysts for evolution.

https://www.usadojo.com/keeping-kung-fu ... avid-chin/

There is a real difference between holding back some knowledge to those that are not ready to receive it and deliberately spreading false information
YCF directly addressed this saying that it is so hard to find a good student that to hold back would only hurt the teacher

It has been my observation throughout past years, that many professional teachers, especially among Chinese teachers, deliberately alter their form set sequences and drills at public demonstrations in order to conceal their true skill level and to prevent spectators from stealing their form sets by recording them on videos. I have done this myself many times for the same reason.

I only choose to not teach advanced training material to students who aren't ready to learn such things, usually because they haven't sufficiently practiced what they have already been taught, and simply want to collect more forms, more drills, more applications, etc, which they also won't really practice.

Doc Stier wrote:It has been my observation throughout past years, that many professional teachers, especially among Chinese teachers, deliberately alter their form set sequences and drills at public demonstrations in order to conceal their true skill level and to prevent spectators from stealing their form sets by recording them on videos. I have done this myself many times for the same reason.

intersting

My mantis teacher, teaching at a US Army camp,,, while Korea was still under martial law... late 70s.
would show something a couple of times.
This would be If one was not able to pick it up,, he would change it and continue to do so until one was able to grasp it...
While still managing to keep the essential ideas of the movement.

What this meant, different people using the same idea might have different ways of implementing it.

He would teach 8 of 10 lines of his TanTui while letting you know there was 10

Mentioned at the time in Korea, the Chinese did not really want to teach the Koreans....

He would go in with a couple of other people meeting different masters,,,each one would watch one part of a set or movement
which they would later reassemble.

It would be some 20yrs before I was able to find out his teachers name, not something he shared...
Skilled in his craft...The mantis style he taught plum flower quite different from some of the other variations.

the weapons he trained with meant for usage. Quite heavy...

a little of his history.

Park Chi Moon.
Shifu Park Chil Sung was born in 1930 in what is now North Korea.
He first began studying gong fu within his family at a very young age (around 7 or 8 years old).
He later traveled around the Korean peninsula studying under any master he could find.
At that time he met his main master, shifu Lin Ping Jiang.

During the Korean war he along with most other young men from his home town were recruited to fight for the south as guerilla fighters not actually associated with the formal army. After the war he was able to relocate to the south and has not seen his family since then.
Shifu Park Chil Sung worked for some time after the war for the South Korean equivalent of the American CIA, training in hand to hand combat.

http://www.oocities.org/mantiscave/parkchil.htm


Roger Haygood one of his more public students would later go on to learn s-mantis / now teaching in China has online courses for those interested


https://hakka-mantis.com/features/


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfAYArU ... UF95s&t=8s

One thing to remember
about Adam Mizner videos are that the first 4 weeks are free, also if you stop at any point you keep the lessons you have paid for unlike some courses you lose the previous lessons. There are also seminars with Adam and his senior students which enable you to touch hands with other students.
One thing I have noticed most have his students have all had previous experience with other teachers/arts.
Regards
Peter

Free trial seems like a great idea for Wayne’s friend or anyone, really.

PQS1 wrote:One thing to remember
about Adam Mizner videos are that the first 4 weeks are free, also if you stop at any point you keep the lessons you have paid for unlike some courses you lose the previous lessons. There are also seminars with Adam and his senior students which enable you to touch hands with other students.
One thing I have noticed most have his students have all had previous experience with other teachers/arts.
Regards
Peter

I subscribed for five years. If you have a solid base it can be helpful. I wouldn't recommend it for a beginner, you're never going to get it that way.

Ray Hayward's patreon is much better as far as getting something useful out of the practice.

That’s what I was interested in
I am sure over the years I have heard people here talking about several courses they have done
I was hoping people would rate then in order of value to themselves and state what they got from each course

wayne hansen wrote:That’s what I was interested in
I am sure over the years I have heard people here talking about several courses they have done
I was hoping people would rate then in order of value to themselves and state what they got from each course

Alex Dong has his online material which is pretty good, but it's not very well organized or accessible per se. A lot of different transactions in different places.

wayne hansen wrote:That’s what I was interested in
I am sure over the years I have heard people here talking about several courses they have done
I was hoping people would rate then in order of value to themselves and state what they got from each course

Apologies for the long digression. To this point I recommend anyone interested try their best to physically follow along this free 30 min class on youtube and then decide for themselves:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_51xRJfQ7Xo

Training starts at 6:35 of the clip if you want to skip Guillem's self intro and jump right in.

it doesn't seem like there is a critical mass of people (not many people here in general) who have taken a lot of them where a collective ranking could be really, really interesting/helpful. hearing about them has me personally interested anyway. not a "beginner" in terms of all the "outside" movements. one could always improve at anything, of course. consider myself a beginner on doing things "inside". something that seems a little unfortunate (but it's understandable) is there is no way to fast forward through one video/week type of pricing structure (yeah, yeah it makes sense from a seller pov).

it would be nice to do a lot of free trials all at once, then we could probably give your friend a ranking.

Or Wayne can just send your friend a list of free intro video links and they can try themselves. (presumably they're looking to practice regularly anyway so they can take a week to try a few)

everything wrote:it doesn't seem like there is a critical mass of people (not many people here in general) who have taken a lot of them where a collective ranking could be really, really interesting/helpful. hearing about them has me personally interested anyway. not a "beginner" in terms of all the "outside" movements. one could always improve at anything, of course. consider myself a beginner on doing things "inside". something that seems a little unfortunate (but it's understandable) is there is no way to fast forward through one video/week type of pricing structure (yeah, yeah it makes sense from a seller pov).

it would be nice to do a lot of free trials all at once, then we could probably give your friend a ranking.

would say that's a must. given he doesn't know what he's looking for, if he could hear reviews from supposedly experienced, at least moderate experts, might help (or maybe it'd be just a load of crap arguing and posturing and hype, lol)

Just have him look for somebody approachable who is willing to explain things and doesn't regularly compare himself to Jesus and Buddha as an excuse to spread ignorant fascist propaganda.
Ray and Alex are good for that.