Tag: Wing Chun

Most martial arts don’t fit together easily. You take the circular hands of Chinese kenpo Karate and try to put them atop the linear stances of Japanese shotokan, and you are going to get an uncoordinated mish mash. Or, the quick and slick jabs of boxing might fit with wing chun, but the round house power punches don’t fit at all.

And, of course, there are arts that do fit together. You can put aikido together with pa kua chang, but it is going to take discipline and logic to categorize individual techniques. And, this leaves the creator with a problem of how do you teach the beast without confusing.

That all said, I was taking an Aikido class one day, I was a mere beginner in that art, though I had seven years of kenpo and karate and a bit of wing chun. So they asked me to partake in randori. which is the freestyle aikido employs to train students. And, it was a sad experience, at best.

I didn’t want to give them my punches, karate had taught me to lock down and become immoveable, and the result was that nobody could throw me, and the give and take of the randori exercise broke down. I blame no one, it was mixing apples and peaches, and one could argue they should have been able to make their art work, but I should have been able to work with them. Interestingly, it was what happened after that that became interesting.

Paul, one of the advanced black belts came up to me and wondered where the breakdown had been. Other black belts, lower ones, stayed away from me like a pariah, but he wanted to learn, and that was the mark of an advanced belt.

So I explained about l how I had been taught to lock down my stance, and we looked at that in conjunction with aikido techniques, and how things could have been different. Nothing was really making sense, until I asked him if he had ever heard of sticky hands. When I showed it to him the lights began to go on.

Wing Chun, you see, has more mobile stances, and we spent hours figuring out how to get the feet to go fast enough to keep up with the aikido centrifugal action. Slowly, we figured out how the feet were supposed to cross or circle with the action of the attack. We began to go into advanced techniques, Paul excited because of all he was learning, myself grinning, because I was getting a super advanced lesson in higher Aikido that the other fellows in the school, the lower black belts, would have died for.

It takes logic to put arts together, and very few people are successful at the endeavor. I succeeded wildly, and this because I always seem to run into people that are willing to look a little deeper, and willing to share what they learn. If you think you know it all, if you’re proud, if you look down on other students, then you will never open your mind and be able to ingest all the wonderful truth that flows so freely in the universe.

Many are familiar with Chinese martial arts either through their exposure to the arts via kung fu movies or through theatrical presentations of wushu. While both presentations are rooted in the classic traditional Chinese martial arts, the original form of the arts are much different than what we see today.

The origins of Chinese martial arts are somewhat incomplete since many written records were lost or destroyed over the years. In some cases, the original records were never recorded in the first place meaning we are left to speculate on how some martial arts came to be.

Most records do point to the original Five Animal styles, tiger, leopard, snake, dragon, and crane as being the original systems of kung fu. These systems were a hybrid of yoga training combined with traditional Chinese military approaches to grappling and striking. The concept of the arts was that they were to appeal to people based on physical attributes and psychological dispositions. For example, tiger style was designed for strong aggressive types while snake system was for weaker and sneakier individuals. Of course, there was no rule against mixing and matching components of the Five Animal styles and we see this in arts such as Wing Chun which fuses snake and crane and hung gar which fuses tiger and crane.

Another common misconception associated with the Chinese martial arts is that they are intended solely for fighting. To arrive at such a conclusion would entail ignoring the many philosophical underpinnings of the Chinese martial arts. There is a significant Taoist and Zen influence on the arts. One component to such influence would be the moving meditative aspect found in the forms of the arts. Frequently, the performance of forms is intended for self reflection and pondering. The hope here would be to attain enlightenment in a manner different from the seated, dull form of traditional meditation.

Health and physical fitness was a large part of the study of Chinese martial arts. Enhanced flexibility and increased isometric strength were routinely the goals of the performance of kung fu exercises. These exercises were not easy but their difficulty levels could be modified to meet the needs of the practitioner. Ultimately, the improvement of one’s physical condition would translate into a strong body. Certainly, a strong body can prove more capable than a weak one when self defense becomes an issue.

The concept of the difficulty of the training is not limited to the physical benefits. The notion that a person is able to conquer’ the physical limitations present in training opens the door to developing the character strength needed to be successful in other trying endeavors in life. Many consider this component to be the most important aspect of training in the Chinese martial arts.

It is this that has drawn many people to study the arts over the years. While the perception of the arts have changed over the years due to the infusion of sportive training and theatrical presentations, the traditional approach to the arts still endures. This is a positive thing as the traditional components still have great value in modern times.