Reading this and other forums, as well as surfing various Kung Fu oriented websites, it amazes me how many CMAers talk about most KF schools "kickboxing". They harp on the fact that "CMA isn't about kicking and punching" and that we don't make enough use of our techniques. For example, from http://wongkk.com/answers/ans02a/apr02-3.html, Wong Kiew Kit's website, we get this little gem: Ignoring the obvious comments about "t3h deadly" or lack of sparring training that plagues CMA, what about this idea that those who do fight use other styles? Are we seriously so arrogant that we think we're above roundhouse kicks and good old punches and that we MUST perform some flowery sweep, parry and open hand thrust when a good old right cross will do the trick? This isn't the best sample, but I've seen this sentiment all over the web, mainly, when many CMAers spar, we "kickbox" instead of doing "kung fu"... What do you think? Are we training realistically by incorporating more of the hard core techniques, is it part of our tradition that our more "flowery" brethern should just accept, or are we compromising tradition to jump on some bandwagon?
That is the biggest load of horse ****. I don't use a damn karate, TKD, or kickboxing technique in my sparring. My round kick is influenced a bit by TKD, but that's it. My instructor took off after teaching us for a year or so, and we just practice basics. MMA'ers are sort of doing that. They learn the basics of many arts and practice them for a long time. I'm sure that many MMA'ers move into the advanced techniques of some styles, but what I mostly see in the better MMA fighters is very finely tuned basic punches, kicks, takedowns and groundwork. The way you get good is by practicing and using basics in your sparring. We learn a cross, jab, hook, round kick, a front kick, a sidekick, crescent kicks, etc. I might do kung fu, but we still have basics, and those are the most important techniques when it comes to fighting. People ARE compromising tradition to jump on a bandwagon. People see kickboxers, BJJ'ers, and Muay Thai guys winning matches on TV, and they think that the way to fight is to kickbox, to do BJJ etc. Are you jumping on that bandwagon BKG, or are you actually using traditional methods and techniques to learn how to spar? (not confrontational, an honest question) Personally, I would like to think that I am training realistically and traditionally by using basic, effective techniques.
hence my deletion of my post, as i think i was just repeating tired arguments about MMA Vs CMA and wasent really answering hes question which is suptaly diffrent
Well, see, here's my position: CMA has always HAD the stuff kickboxers use! Kickboxers don't have the market on roundhouse kicks or cross punches. We may use them slightly differently depending on the style, but I find it difficult to believe that CMA, which gave us butterfly kicks and crane style, doesn't use the standard kicks and punches common to Japanese and Korean arts! My school also uses "tradional" methods such as Chin Na, Paqua and the 5 Animals. We also use traditional Chinese grappling/Shuai Jiao. That's been part of my style for decades. I just hate seeing "Masters" going around acting like Kung Fu stylists never learned to kick or punch and that we only use stuff that's really "too d3adly" and can never be taught!
I definitely know basic techniques, as do all other kung fu practitioners. I don't care if you take the shaolin death flower poison hand killer death boxing style, the first technique they teach you WILL NOT be the chi stomping neck snapping killer spinning jumping back side elbow fist kick. They will teach you a straight punch, a front kick, and a stance. It may not be a jab, it may be a palm strike, or a phoenix eye, but the basic will be there, and that's whats important. Basics are the basis for any style. That's what the advanced techniques are based on. The chi stomping neck snapping killer spinning jumping back side elbow fist kick is not the basis for anyone's style. I would like to add that I don't like this wong guy at all. $1000 for a three day kung fu lesson where he says that shaolin is the greatest MA ever out of one side of his mouth and then says that a kung fu practitioner could be easily beaten by a karate brown belt? . . . wait something is definitely wrong here. I think I'll buy a new computer instead.
You noticed that too, huh? KF is da bomb, but we all suck and would get our butts handed to us in a New York Minute if we ever tried to fight....
Seriously though BKG You come from a MCMA environment. You don't feel that your style/your school/you are jumping on an MMA bandwagon and adopting to their techniques? You use traditional stances and techniques even when you spar? Does your school leave the forms behind when you get ready to fight or do you use what you have been taught?
I don't think its only because people see the styles that win and then conform. I think most of it has to do with the ruleset and environment of MMA type events - grapplers clearly have an advantage. Point sparring tournaments and Full contact karate tournaments (like PKA tournies inthe 70sand 80s) didnt allow grappling. People adapted to those rules - no one had to learn grappling, henceno one taught it. Now tournament rules are allowing it,hence since many styles/schools out there haven't adapted yet by including grappling, grappling then has an advantage. People see Kung Fu practitioners spar or do MMA and to them it looks like kickboxing because you have to adapt to the rules and such so you end up doing basics,like you said. Since kickboxing is all basics, they immediately see what you do as kickboxing.
But there is alot of that out there. Alot of people still cling to the "too deadly" excuse, regardless of whether they actually learn those techniques or not. And its not just in Kung Fu, I've seen it in all sorts of different styles.
Let me explain a bit about my style: If we assume that MMA as we know it really began in the early 1990's with shootfighting and the UFC and the Gracies, my style's use of shuai jiao and combinations predates what we would call "modern mma" by several decades at least. And it also evolved in China, not the US, so I suspect it was relatively immune to the Gracies and American pay-per-view. From what I know about my style's history, stand up and grappling have always been part of it. So technically, I'd say we predate "modern MMA" by about 800 years. Have we evolved? Of course! But at heart we've always been a fighting style which recognizes the value of both stand up and grappling, as well as "taking the most useful from each style" mentality. So at the very least, the current incarnation/evolution is at least 50 - 60 years old. So I don't see us as jumping on a bandwagon. Now for the second part: We use what we've been taught. All of it. When we spar, we are constantly reminded to watch our stances, and if we're just "brawling" we are pretty much thumped on the heads and reminded that we also have numerous "traditional" techniques to use. Our drilling, whether it be bag work, padwork, resistance testing, etc, is all based around the chin na, paqua, and more traditional aspects of Kung Fu. But we also practice our punches and kicks. This is especially important at gradings, as student are required to perform our techniques at speed against a resisting opponent. We pressure test our techniques quite frequently with the admonition that we should do "kung fu" and not "kickboxing". To use myself as an example, I am constantly being reminded to watch my stances; as a short man with a low center of gravity I need to rely on them. Sifu has given me specific sparring instructions at times to address my KB background and break me of any bad habits I developed from it. We do forms, and it's actually amazing what you pick up from those! I never discount the value of them, and as I progress and understand them better, I expect I'll be pulling more out of them. Edit: We do, however, learn everything in pieces. The first couple of belts are the basics, kicking, striking, and basic Chin Na. To get to the next belt, you work a lot more Chin Na and forms, so it's more traditional. Once a student gets to the rank of purple sash, you begin grappling. Then later come the animals, and by black sash, you've figured out what works for you and what doesn't, and now it's time to put it all together
having only had exposure to the one CMA, i dont really know how relivent this is. But in 7* alot of emphasis is placed on intercepting an attack by catching it, as it puts you in control of your opponent and the conflict, and leads you into your next attack. However effective mantis catching is, or isent, it is instantly neutralised once you put gloves on, thus this skill which I personally spend alot of time practicing becomes redundent if i was to don the gloves further more sticking hands routines, how are you serposed to feel your opponents intentions (whatever you are serposed to do in sticking hands (i dont really properly get it but it will come with time)) i dont see how this is posible with gloves on, and a significant portion of many CMA styalists spend alot of time training this skill which is redundent in NHB sporting events ok, i know the topic of specific banned techniques is a tired one, but just to restate it, CMA (espercally 7*) have alot of techniques specifically designed to mutalate your opponent, these would not be welcome in a Sporting competition because you dont dislike your opponent, and dont want to do them lasting damage that would could be caused by techniques specifically there to breaks joints and bones. (note no mention of banned eye gouging) where as these techniques are a corner stone of 7* and there will be atleast one such technique in each application. the aim being to mangle them badly enough to end the fight rather then trying to wear them down or knock them out the my 2 cents
Yeah you guys have the good stuff up there. I would like to learn more about it. It seems like most martial arts styles in that it came from something that evolved from something. The wrestling is probably a great addition to kung fu. Stressing the stances is one of the most important thing in a good CMA I think. Even if your techniques are designed to mangle folks, you could still spar with it. Just turn the deadly techniques into palm strikes/punches. Use it to set up the really evil stuff, then if you pull it off, break of the sparring before you actually hurt them. You can practice that stuff with control. I won't even lie . . . we end up brawling a little bit sometimes. sometimes more then a little bit. We do a lot of intercepting and redirecting energy. If you practice it in sparring and fine tune it, it will really help you against anyone who doesn't know how to do it. We practice with the pads and the fingered gloves, but the main reason that we do it is because we need to get used to getting hit hard and hitting hard. When we use the gloves we mostly box and knock the crap out of each other.
Very interesting thread thus far Here's some food for thought: In this thread the technique that is being discussed is a variation of a Longfist technique called raining fist. The idea is to overwhelm the person (like a rain of fists) the variation is rather then a cross we use a hammer fist like strike (almost like an inblock and a hammer fist) and we alternate with upper cuts (rain comes down and splashes up). The punches and kicks in Karate came from early Kung-Fu systems and Judo and Jujutsu were influenced by Shuai Jiao and Chin Na. CMA encompasses quite a bit of material, some good for sporting competition, some not. The front, roundhouse and sidekicks, jab, cross, hook and uppercut are just as much a part of Kung-Fu as any other art. The differences are just minutia.
Competitive sports have different demands. I don't think you can block or parry through a five minute round . You'll get tired no matter how economical your movements. That's why you see more "absorbtion"- oriented techniques in the UFC. Secondly, the grappling aspects of KF (if any) are not dynamic enough to handle BJJ. And the last point - most KF schools don't focus on fighting people in other styles. But all of that can be changed...
If you can't use the majority of your techniques in contact sparring with open rules I can say with great confidence that you will not be a successful fighter. If that's not what you're aiming for, then fine I completely understand the desire for light-exercise or spiritual aspect a la Aikido. Let's break this down: If I am taking a martial art based on joint locking, with the goals being: incapacitation, injury, and death I need to be able to execute them in a full speed environment, best simulated by sparring. Obviously we don't want to injure our partner, which is where the genius of submission grappling and Judo training methodologies comes into play, the locks are made into submissions with the outcome being a tap. Almost all submissions in BJJ and Judo and Sambo would end up in breaks, unconsciousness, or death if followed to their full conclusions so the tap was introduced to allow their safe training. That doesn't mean a Judoka like myself can't execute a full arm lock and execute the break in a self-defence situation, quite the opposite I'm very likely to do so because it's the immediate progression from applying pressure to the lock, all I do is apply it faster and stronger than I would if I'm tapping them. The same applies to Qinna, almost all of the locks can be applied actively like in Judo if some logical restraint is placed on execution. It's certainly better than running through passive drills which I have seen so many schools do because apparently teaching the lock actively would end up in unfortunate consequences. The same applies for things like eye gouges and jabs. Regardless of the overall effectiveness of an eye gouge (which I think is great, if used in immediate conjunction with a clinch and follow through, but not so much if it's more of an isolated blow) most schools don't teach it actively. Why? There's no reason not to when sports eyewear with elastic bands costs so little, that stuff is made not to fall of the face so I don't see why we can't use it. Another point is that if you don't train in how to effectively hit the face of a moving opponent with even your fists how are you ever going to be able to deliver an eye jab? If I can't land a solid jab or cross onto my sparring partner's nose or lower forehead, what chance have I of ever getting my fingers into their eyes from a distance? I'm not going to spend much time on telling you how to train knee kicks, but my opinion of them has decreased dramatically after receiving them in Muay Thai. Though, the effectiveness of knee kicks notwithstanding, training of them is poor at best. A stationary target like a wooden dummy isn't going to simulate the movement of a fighter in battle, nor are one step drills. A guy I knew in Hong Kong set up a Mu Zhuang Ren dummy in his basement and attached some sort of pulley and motor system to its leg pivots so that the leg moved in an almost three dimensional plane and he would spend a lot of time practicing leg kicks on that moving target to simulate what would happen in a fight. Whether this is the most effective method, I don't know, but it's certainly innovative and examining other options can only improve our effectiveness. And when it comes to kickboxing and especially MMA competitions, you should be able to showcase most of your martial art regardless of how "deadly" it is. If it doesn't stack up to other martial arts in the full contact, limited rules ring then perhaps it's time to examine what didn't work there and revise your training to incoporate things that do. The fact is that the better part of your joint locks and such like are perfectly admissable in MMA and there's no better forum to try them out. And frankly, let's examine how effective groin shots are by looking at early Brazilian vale tudo and the first UFCs. Some times there was a great use for them (like when Joe Son got castrated) but often there was less effect than desired (I remember someone hitting Royce Gracie there and not greatly changing the flow of the fight). And from my personal experience my kicks to the male genitalia doesn't always cause my partners of the opposite sex to keel over and flop around, especially if they're pumped with adrenaline. Obviously a repeated pummeling there has very noticable effects, but a single blow isn't always enough to drop the guy. Which leads me into my next point about "too deadly for the ring" techniques... if you can't train them actively who's to say you'll be able to do it any better than a Muay Thai fighter who routinely knees and kicks his opponents on the inside and outside of the thigh, full speed. A slight adjustment is all that is needed to make that a groin shot and the training is more active than most CMA ways of training that... so shouldn't the Thai fighter be able to pull it off at least as well? If your fighting with light vale tudo gloves in MMA looks like standard kickboxing and not what you think of as kungfu, that's probably because combat doesn't happen like your forms or one step drills or even light contact or point sparring. Trust me, a ring match doesn't exactly look like the way a Muay Thai fighter trains... it's just that they train the tools that seem to work best under such high speed and high stress so a ring match looks more like a muay thai fighter's training than perhaps Eagle Claw practitioner's (and I speak from experience in both). Remember, no martial art is perfect and the problem with frozen martial arts like so many CMA is that they have not evolved far past their conception. Many are the product a single person's combat experience that was preserved and passed down, relatively unchanged in perpetuity. No single person is capable of making a perfect martial art, and is certainly less likely to produce such a thing than a group of thousands of practitioners constantly changing and testing the art to fit their needs and then assimilating and modifying. For example, Bruce Lee's Jun Fan under Dan Inosanto and many other hands has changed dramatically from Bruce Lee's techniques because many many people took a look at it, took a look at other things, and tried out what they thought would work and incorporated that which they felt did. Muay Thai is the same way, it is constantly being refined by thousands and thousands of practitioners and is never static, so while it is one of the oldest traditional martial arts, it is not frozen but ever evolving.
God I hate that crap. I'm sure this post is going to tick someone off (maybe a lot of someones) but the kung fu community is producing more excuses than it is real fighters at the moment. I'm personally ashamed I get lumped in with losers like this guy because we both practice "kung fu"..... a name as generic as "toothpaste". I would agree with one thing he said though, which is most alleged "kung fu" players that have competed publicly didn't fight with any method even remotely resembling Kung Fu. I say this not because of the techniques they use, however, (what art truly has no front kick or roundhouse or straight punch of some sort?) but the way in which they used them. They bounced around on the balls of their feet, they would throw one or two strikes then back off, they would constantly lead in with lame kicks and other highly telegraphed moves that their opponents saw coming a mile away and had them for lunch for it (witness the Jason DeLuca vs. Royce Gracie fights. Both of 'em. If he does five animals kung fu, I want to know which animal that was supposed to be, the lame duck?!). I'm sorry to say, this is NOT good kung fu, so in a way, they ARE in fact fighting more with kickboxing or something else that is NOT kung fu. Unfortunately for them (and the community at large) they don't train in kickboxing, so they aren't as good at it as the real kick-boxers. I will now repeat my mantra: YOU CAN NOT TRAIN ONE WAY, AND EXPECT TO FIGHT ANOTHER. IT DOESN’T WORK. In no small part, the reason Thai boxers and BJJ players are so successful in tournaments is they train EXACTLY the way they fight. Sad to say, but the reason Kung Fu isn’t winning NHB tournaments is the Kung Fu community is not producing high quality fighters. It definitely wasn't always this way. I attribute the decline to a serious lack of competitive fighting environment. Before the cultural revolution in China challenge matches and impromptu fights between kung fu players were rather common. They were a fact of life, and having REAL fighting skills, and not just excuses and flowery forms was a necessity for survival. Now days, they are practically non-existent. You simply can't produce high quality fighters without the highly competitive environment (no, I’m not saying we should all be fighting in the street, just that we need to get back to serious, full contact competition to sharpen our skills). The rules at the CMA tournaments where sparing is even a real event (which is by no means all of them) do nothing to encourage real kung fu fighting methods. Instead they encourage something more like kick boxing or Korean style point sparing. San Shao tournaments do only the tiniest bit to encourage them. The system is in dire need of an overhaul (if anyone wants to hear my ideas on it I’ll post it in another rant..er..post, I’ve bored you all enough already). The argument about "banned techniques" holds no water. Jiu Jitsu (especially in its original form) has many such "foul" techniques; they simply don't use them in competition. Somehow their art isn't rendered helpless in the ring because of it. Ours shouldn't be either. There is plenty in any legitimate kung fu style that applies fine to a NHB environment. The key problem is our community is lacking two key things: the competitive environment to produce high quality fighters, and instructors that make their students not only spar regularly, but spar with Kung Fu fighting methods! Until this situation is remedied, Kung Fu will continue to be viewed as an art for weekend warriors rather than serious fighters. I’ve said my piece, I’ve got my asbestos underwear on. Let the flaming begin.
Because seem to either think Kung Fu is crap, or brilliant Crouching Tiger moves. Both spark incredible amounts of ignorance. I will give an example, of my Sifu and how he fights. Fighting position, hands held close, elbows tucked in, protection the face and ribs. Stance is fairly high, narrow, and mobile. Opens up by throwing jabs, crosses, evades quite a bit, blocks, deflects, proceeds to jab/cross more usually followed by roundhouse and side kicks, and once the opponent starts to open up or break Sifu throws the big CLF stuff, the Sao Choy, Gwa Choy and such, or he'll go for some takedowns, which he is quite proficient at (he did do Judo for a while I think). There are no "super deadly techniques." Everything is down and dirty. We might RESEMBLE "kickboxers" but in fact we are just using our Choy Lay Fut. We have roundhouses, jabs, elbows, almost everything kickboxing has. What techniques I use personally and enjoy using is up to me. Some people prefer using more jabs and basic techniques, some people enjoy throwing the bigger stuff around, some like to mix up kicks more, some like to go all boxing, it's all the individual. I fight differently from all my sihings, from my Sifu, etc, but we all use CLF, not "kickboxing." Hell, half of us call CLF "Chinese Boxing" half the time, because THAT IS WHAT IT IS.
Keep this coming, guys, this is good stuff, glad to see that many of us don't ascribe to the quote in the first post!
I haven't bothered to read much of this thread. I'm not affiliated with WongKK Sifu in any way, but I find myself agreeing with him alot. If you are not using the patterns you are practicing in your kung fu but discard everything but simple punches and kicks, what difference is there between your fighting and kick boxing? What's the point of learning patterns you don't use when fighting? Kung fu is different from kick boxing, in mindset and in technique. The patterns are not for show. They are brilliant for fighting! At least this is my experience.
