is kung fu gone soft

[dane]

hello everyone i do still do wing tchun personally i think kung fu is or can be very aggressive i dont think its going to soft

does anyone know if nick smart has any classes in the preston area

[s00perb4k4]

I have no idea WHAT type of kung fu people take if they say it's "soft". My system is kicking my butt, but then again, my sifu expects a lot more out of me than other sifu in the same system do, so... I guess it depends on martial art and/or sifu/practitioner.

Just a thought...

[David]

A good lesson is one from which you emerge black and blue :)

Rgds,
David

[Marku]

i agree with David ^_^

[jmd161]

I'd have to agree that many styles have been watered down.

So is kung fu getting soft?

I'd have to say 100% Yes!!!

There are too many teaching watered down kung fu to people that already don't want to put in the required training. Thus making an already weakend art weaker.

I'm not saying this happens in 100% of the kung fu schools around. But i would say it happens in anywhere from 50% - 80% of the schools.It happens for different reasons though.Some people are just outright out for the money and really don't care about teaching.

Others know if they force their students to train harder than they want they would loose students and have to close their school.So you can't blame sifu's that don't really give the training to their students the way it was given to them.

Then you have the sifu's that either learned from a fake and did not know they were learning from a fake.Or the people that went to a few schools for awhile may have learned some forms and think they know it all now.So they go out open schools and continue this downward trend of bad kung fu schools.

There are so many reasons why kung fu has gotten the soft rap.This is just a few.


jeff:)

[CKava]

Originally posted by David
A good lesson is one from which you emerge black and blue :)

I'd say thats a lesson where you practiced with someone with a lack of control... unless of course your doing conditioning of course (pretty hard to do that without bruises in my experience :))

[creamcheese]

I can only talk from personal experience. In my school sparring was every week sometimes twice a week. I mean heavy sparring so we always wore protection (my Sifu didn't want us going off to the hospital) but even with protection there were incidences that ended up in the hospital. Our system is hard and soft, ying/yang yeul gong, it's vicious (Southern Praying Mantis) and we did compete against other Kung Fu schools and had day long seminars with other kung fu schools to learn from one another and even invited instructors over to us from Judo, Sambo, Tai Boxing, Karate and others. A 14 years old small girl from our school, learning for 3 years, was attacked in the street by a 26 year old man. (A guy who was previously in prison for Rape). He dragged her from behind into a building but she unleashed her kung fu on him, he was hurt and the cops caught him also. BRAVO. I don't think Kung Fu is soft but I only know SPM so can't speak for other styles.

[Mo Lung]

Your class will be as soft as you let it be. A teacher will push you, but only you can respond by working hard. The more people in the class that work hard, the harder everyone else will work. Before long your class is kicking butt!

The teacher should motivate his/her class, but everyone needs to get behind them and work it.

[never]

Again, I can't speak for any other style of kung fu, but mine isn't soft (lau gar I think). It goes without saying that it all depends on the school, and more infortantly the sifu.

[englishpremier]

i certainly don't feel kung fu is softer of harder than any other system, all have good and bad teachers, hard working and lazy students. I do wish that kung fu was in a posistion where cash wasn't important and where schools survived on the quality of their tuition and their students.

I would like to be taught in the old traditional ways much more, e.g if my leg isn't bent where it should be in a particular stance then the master hitting it with a cane to bend it. lol.

I'm currently doing choy li fut, and i feel that classes which i am in are a little too soft, but then i am at a stage where i am inbetween begginers and intermiediate. I haven't pasted the grading yet to enter the higher class but have done almost all of them in the begginers. Also in the past few months we have probably had 10-15 new students in a class of 20-25 so the content has been geared slightly towards them, but we are all still worked hard, problem is i don't seem to benifit as much doing techniques with new students as i would with those who know exactly what they are doing.

Only 1 more forms to go then i enter the intermidiate classes and the world of full contact sparing and weapons.

[keef]

Our system is hard and soft, ying/yang yeul gong, it's vicious (Southern Praying Mantis) and we did compete against other Kung Fu schools and had day long seminars with other kung fu schools to learn from one another and even invited instructors over to us from Judo, Sambo, Tai Boxing, Karate and others.

Hi, I know its of thread a bit but is there any chance you could set us up a thread about your style of Southern Praying Mantis, it is a style that has always interested me and it would be nice to know more.

P.S. I practice Northern Praying Mantis and yep, I know they aint got owt in common apart from the name ;-)

Keef

[Masamune7]

In my personall experience I would have to say that most schools are going softer. It is becoming increasinly difficult to find a good school for anything that actually teaches it as a method of combat. IN the realm of the Chinese, I have actually only seen three schools of Kung Fu, Eight Step Praying Mantis, a wing chun school, and a style of tiger which was never identified by the instructor. Of all of those, I would have to say it was the tiger school that was really the weakest in the area of its teaching methods and often I would leave feeling like I hadn't learned anything. We excersised, I guess, but it was mostly callistenics and that was about it. Of the actual techniques, I don't think I learned any. The other schools taught me quite a bit very quickly and I loved it.

So, yeah, it does depend on the school.