the rum soaked fist: internal martial arts forum

Five Kinds of Guard
The five kinds of guard are the upper position, middle position, lower position, right-hand guard, and left-hand guard. Although the guard may be divided into five kinds, all of them are for the purpose of killing people.
There are no other kinds of guard besides these five. Whatever guard you adopt, do not think of it as being a guard; think of it as part of the act of killing...

The Body of the Short-Armed Monkey
The posture of the short-armed monkey means not reaching with your hand. The idea is that when you close in on an opponent, you get in there quickly, before the opponent strikes, without putting forth a hand at all.
When you intend to reach forth, your body invariably pulls back; so the idea is to move the whole body quickly to get inside the opponent's defense...

The Sticky Body
The sticky body means getting inside and sticking fast to an opponent. When you get inside the opponent's defenses, you stick tight with your head, body, and legs. The average person gets his head and legs in quickly, but the body shrinks back. Sticking to an opponent means that you stick so close that there is no gap between your bodies...

-Musashi

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Three or more strikes is martial arts, two strikes is a good fight, one strike is Systema.

-Ryabko

Ian:

Musashi who?

But given this particular example - would any Western teacher admit he is not good on national TV and then follow by allowing younger men of a different martial art to teach him how to get better? Since I don't see this happening with any other teacher in any other country, it might just be that you're expecting too much of them... =\

I don't see this is relevant at all. Maybe i misunderstood the video.

However where would the teacher be looking to admit he isn't good on TV according to you? i didn't see this at all and didn't see the presenters attempting to do this.

What i saw was him being unable to produce a good level of skill against a resisting opponent. If he didn't want to look bad he shouldn't have agreed to that format at all. He will have lost more face in that 5 minutes of sparring than he could doing anything else.

There was no 'teaching him how to be better' just exchanges that highlighted the shortcomings IMO. So Chinese culture, saving face and all of that stuff, though relevant i am sure to earlier parts of the episode is completely irrelevant in these exchanges. There was no where to hide behind that stuff when the other guy wasn't playing to make him look good. All he could do was try to show his stuff and it showed to be poor against real resistance.

I see trainers rolling & Sparring with students consistently in MMA, Muay Thai, Boxing, San Da, taekwondo, karate and BJJ gyms all the time, so i am not sure where this idea of it never happening in other countries is coming from either.

Cultural context disappears when we face someone who isn't playing our game, all we are left with is our real, honest and true level of capability to deal with them. That's what i saw in these clips when the pressure increased.

thanks.
Chris

middleway wrote:
Cultural context disappears when we face someone who isn't playing our game, all we are left with is our real, honest and true level of capability to deal with them. That's what i saw in these clips when the pressure increased.

thanks.
Chris

I think Bruce Lee would have agreed. If you don't regularly spar with resistance you simply can't use your art. It's a simple truth. Another simple truth is that martial arts stop looking so different when you spar with resistance. It's the reality of fighting.

I like the quotes of Musashi. I find a good link in the type of silat I practice that promotes fighting at very short distance (about 30 cm). As soon as you are further away you have to deal with a lot more firepower of the punches.

In the past I always thought of Wing Chun as a short distance figting system, but funnily enough the guy fights mainly at medium distance. He did have a reach advantage on that distance which made the Xing Yi guy totally ineffective in his attacks and the Wing Chun having multiple occasions to knock down his opponent but he played nice. Also the WC guy had a lot of control even while walking backwards. I think even the mental state of WC guy was better than the XY guy who I guess got a bit frustrated.

What I do see is that there was a lot of room to walk backwards which made it more difficult for the XY guy to put any forward pressure on the other guy. Wonder how that would work in a crowded bar..

What I do see is that there was a lot of room to walk backwards which made it more difficult for the XY guy to put any forward pressure on the other guy. Wonder how that would work in a crowded bar..

IME, Xing Yi closes the distance when the opponent is coming in through clever angles then runs through them, more than chases them back till they hit something to stop them. Also i think if he had used his legs more he would have been able to trip the fellow over or at least slow him down in his retreat.

cheers
Chris

jonathan.bluestein wrote:This is footage taken for a reality TV show in China, focusing on taking young Wing Chun and MMA guys to train and fight with exponents of various traditional Chinese arts.

Not quite. They took different HK athletes out in each episode. The Xingyi episode didn't have any MMA guys in it. Just a combo of Wing Chun and Sanda/kickboxing. Maybe someone translated the subtitles for you as "MMA" because in the subtitles is says "bo ji" but you can hear the audio (I can anyways) and even in Cantonese I can undestand "Sanda" and the part where the subtitles say "bo ji"(MMA) you can even hear him say, in English, "kickboxing".

...fought the hosts (Wing Chun guy and MMA guy), and did poorly against them overall. . .

Worth mentioning to anyone who doesn't remember: The mongolian shuai jiao dudes ate their (the HK'ers) fucking lunch.

FWIW, full episode in decent resolution here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnTsOxS_VbA

Can't find one with English subs at the moment. One thing that really stuck out to me watching the episode was how badly the hosts seemed to underestimate their guests. I was reminded any one of the 1000's of times, countless really, over the years when I have been giving some sort of kung fu "lecture" like I was a 3 year old or something. Mainland Chinese people love to make a way bigger fuss than they should over some of their theories. I hate being talked down to as a 'dumb guai lo' so it was oddly pleasurable for me to watch some of those guys get taken down a notch. Listening to the guy in white lecture his guests on the breathing/sound methods of the exercise here really made me wanna smack him. I'd have been just as polite as those two HK guys but underneath.....*grumble* I mean it's not like they were a couple of neophytes. They were traditional MA'ists with semi-pro fight records.

middleway wrote:

But given this particular example - would any Western teacher admit he is not good on national TV and then follow by allowing younger men of a different martial art to teach him how to get better? Since I don't see this happening with any other teacher in any other country, it might just be that you're expecting too much of them... =\

I don't see this is relevant at all. Maybe i misunderstood the video.

However where would the teacher be looking to admit he isn't good on TV according to you? i didn't see this at all and didn't see the presenters attempting to do this.

What i saw was him being unable to produce a good level of skill against a resisting opponent. If he didn't want to look bad he shouldn't have agreed to that format at all. He will have lost more face in that 5 minutes of sparring than he could doing anything else.

Agree. He probably expected he'd do a lot better than he did. Mike Patterson says it best:

"When faced with and pressured by a worthy adversary... Rather than rise to your level of expectation, you will instead sink to your level of true ability"

In general it's a bit sad to see this performance from the homeland of my style, but there you go. It is what it is

Matthew.

rise or sink, i believe we are engaged in an endeavor that requires utmost honesty.
if it is not what you expect, it is ok; we can always go back and train some more.
chinese say "victory and defeat are common occurrences for a warrior"

bailewen wrote:Worth mentioning to anyone who doesn't remember: The mongolian shuai jiao dudes ate their (the HK'ers) fucking lunch.

FWIW, full episode in decent resolution here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnTsOxS_VbA

Is this the Mongolian wrestling episode?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQsvSOtu1n8

While I like Fan Zi, the taste of Fan Zi is different from Xingyi. (Fan Zi like to throw many attack in on step. And Xinyi foot work is just dame fast.)

SNIP
Worth mentioning to anyone who doesn't remember: The mongolian shuai jiao dudes ate their (the HK'ers) fucking lunch
SNIP

Right. But then, the Mongolian training is basically rassling, conditioning, rassling, conditioning, rassling, etc, etc. It is a no- bullshit combat sport. You cannot say that of the HsingI shown here.

It would have been interesting to see the HK guys going to do Taiji in Chenjiagou. I strongly suspect that if they had done shuai PH with the Chen sub-instructors, they would have been thrown hither and yon: The Chenjiagou are not Mongolians, but they are decent stand-up grapplers, and they do it every day.

Yet many, many Taiji pracitioners knock the shuai PH, as being the "sport" part of Taiji, not the "martial art" part. The truth that they miss is that the the sportive form of training is what makes it effective: As Graham notes, you must have a sparring format against real resistance.

Compare this to Taiji people who sneer at this "low-skill grappling" and instead spend their time doing form, set PH drills and "applications." I would guess that in sparring they would be eaten alive by our two HK lads, just as the HsingI peeps were.

Oh, irony...

just a honest question do you know taiji people who sneer at low level grappling but dont spar??

Adam S wrote:just a honest question do you know taiji people who sneer at low level grappling but dont spar??

Are you serious? That sums up pretty much most all the Taiji people I know.

Perhaps "sneer" means "says it's not internal enough to qualify as high level".