Standardized Wushu forms good or bad

[SPJ]

The Wushu forms evolved or changed since the 1990's.

They are still changing.

What do you think?

It is good for promotion and propagation of the styles.

Or waste of time.

good references to study and practice.

--

:D

[bodhitree]

I voted "no difference" because It is good for what it is. If you said is it good for fighting I may feel different. Personally, although I do not train that way, I think wushu forms are beautiful to watch and wushu players are talented athletes (combatants is a different story).

[lkfmdc]

the clarification needed is

go for what exactly???

[BruceSteveRoy]

i discourage ppl from doing contemporary wushu. aside from the lack of martial application it is bad for the joints. like gymnastics if you start young and really stick with it you will be used up by your mid twenties. (most people, of course there are always exeptions). however, unlike gymnastics there are no wushu scholarships to colleges that i am aware of. there is no wushu as an olympic sport to earn sponsorship deals, etc. so basically its not a healthy sport to play and the pay off for the damage it does to your body isn't worth it. at least if you are learning a style that has and teaches a lot of practical applications and fighting techniques you can always get that as the payoff as well as a good work out. just my opinion. then again i won't discourage anyone from doing somethign they really enjoy.

[BruceSteveRoy]

i shouldnt say there is no pay off. that is wrong. there is a sense of satisfaction and confidence and all that that goes with competing. so there is the intrinsic reward but i think the damage to the joints over shadows it. i know what chronic knee pain is like and it is almost never worth it. i cant even cross my right leg anymore with out spending a few minutes trying to get it to stop hurting so i can walk normally again. and thats from wrestling i can't imagine how much worse gymnastics or wushu would have made me.

[Shaolinlueb]

well if you are talking about what was at the last china games, it was all gymnastics with a front slap kick thrown in here and there. it was bad. but the compulsoraries from the late 90's were pretty good.

[Jingwu Man]

I liked the competition forms from the 80's. Those people basically made up those forms, but they were still martial artists at that time and expressed a lot of power in every movement.
That is what I feel is missing in Modern Wushu, the power, the jing. What they do is certainly impressive though. I know I would love to be able to a jump front kick 8 feet in the air and clear 10 feet of carpet. Still, they need the jing. I love to watch the old masters doing forms, nice and slow, then WHAM! they shoot out a punch. Very cool.

[SPJ]

:confused: the idea behind Kuo Shu in ROC and Wushu in PROC;

it is to promote and progagate Kung Fu.

from the Kuo Shu team in Berlin Olymics in 1930's to special events coincidental with Beijing Olympics in 2008.

if you want to make something popular, you would make the forms short and easier for everyone to learn.

if you want to do performance and competition, on the other hand, yes you would increase the "technical" difficulties in the forms.

can't have them both ways.

we are not talking about fighting aspects at all.

Wushu is geared toward performance and "exercise" routines for "all"?

--

a good link to history of both Wushu and Guo Shu:

http://us.geocities.com/ottawakungfu/052Overview1Hist02H.htm

:confused:

[golden arhat]

personally i would like to see a return to the old school
i think standardised forms allow for variation by giving domething to work from
they give people an equal chance for competition
and thats why their is a seperate category for personal forms
so both are good :D

(also im gonna infuriate everyone here
i think alot of wushu is very practical ive found inside and outside crescent kicks and constant drilling very effective when i spar in valetudo
no one expects them lol :D )

[firepalm]

the clarification needed is

go for what exactly???

sure you don't mean 'good for exactly what???' Too many shots to the head David, starting to lose some motor functions? Words starting to slur? Just funning with you. :cool:

Anyhow my feeling on the question, they're fine if that is what you are into. If you are into the sport of Wushu, then the routines have served there purpose of elevating the levels & standards of the athletes within the sport on a global level. The International Compulsory routines of the 90s certainly had greater resemblance to the traditional styles they were supposed to represent. The versions that came out in 2000 were certainly more difficult and forced athletes to further elevate their standards within the sport. Now you have the 'Nandu' Difficulties Rules and they are certainly much more difficult then the two sets of International Compulsory routines. The new Nandu Optional routines are certainly not to everyone's liking and definitely have switched the emphasis of sport Wushu further and further towards acrobatics. But then China as far as I can see is always retooling things and who knows in a short while it could go completely a different direction (keeping on top of what China does with this sport is always difficult). Wushu has become like Gymnastics & Figure Skating it's evolving and it has become all about performance, greater difficulty and flash.

My two bits.

[David Jamieson]

The 1970s wushu forms which were not hard nailed down like the 90s ones i thought were better. the ones from teh 90s removed even more of the martiality and added more gymnastics.

the way it is going, it will eventually become floor gymnastics with a slight martial flavoutr similar to an Elvis Stoyko martial flavoured figure skating routine.

which is ok. contemporary wu shu is what it is. People see if for the athletic and gymnastic endeavour that it is and I don't think anyone holds it up as bonafide fighting arts.

takes effort and lokos good, looks way better in a movie too than watching some lumbering hulk just smashing through stuff... definitely less boring than ufc talent wise, unless you're into visceral carnage in which case it would be the other way around. :)

[ngokfei]

What we call the "Contemporary Wushu" was the logical step in the evolution of standardization of Wushu for the masses.

It took the base concepts founded by the Chin Woo and the Kuo Shu.

Where they failed was in the fact that they just cut and pasted various forms from different systems into a curriculum. Regardless of the diverging foundations that these sets came from.

This caused many forms/sets to be performed with the "wrong" foundation.

The 32's of the late 70's and early 80's are very systematic. They choose the Long Fist system (Cha, Hua, Pao, etc.) to be the common foundational base. Then specialized sets were forumulated from there (most of these specialized sets IMO are not very good as they muddied the Long Fist with other specific systems like Tong Bei, Fanzi, etc.)

The recent forumulation of the Contemporary Wushu Duan System is very good. (Jie Ben Basics, Wu Bu Quan, 16 and the three 34 long fist routines as well as the matching weapons sets) A systematic approach in developing strong foundations in the students. Later on if they choose they may participate in Competition by learning the Compulsories of the late 80's.

The new Compulsories for me are Garbage. They really disregard any real martial application. For me it resembles your average Gymnastics Floor Routine Competiton.

Now this concept of Duans can easily be adopted into "Traditional/Classical" systems by emphasizing the Primary Actions of the style. This way a student can master these skills then be able to understand and execute the more advanced Secondary Skills which is what most Traditional Forms are dominated with.

[ngokfei]

oh forgot to mention.

They also had a Southern Duan System as well.

It was/is not very popular so it has not been widely produced for the masses.

But I believe there are pieces of it around.

I know that www.plumpub.com
has the Northern Duan's and probably some of the southern ones as well.

[GeneChing]

We addressed the problems head on in our Nov Dec 2006 (http://ezine.kungfumagazine.com/magazine/article.php?article=680) issue. The two relevant articles - the cover story and the one with Master Bryant Fong - are both live on our website so you can catch up on the issues if you haven't already. It was discussed more on Jiayo (http://ezine.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?t=44344).

[PangQuan]

as a martial artist, i recently had to make a very sad decision.

the school i most recently studied at, i had to leave.

there is very good, traditional material that i absolutely love. however there was a large modern contemporary wushu element, which i do not wish to practice.

In todays world, contemporary wushu is a wonderful tool for the promotion of chinese martial arts.

I do see a few flaws however in the gaining popularity of the modern wushu. The common misconception of what CMA has to offer is becoming an increasing concern for many of todays CMA practitioners, whom do not focus on modern wushu.

For those who train for self defense/fighting, the promotion of CMA through modern wushu, can be detrimental to thier goals in relation to the majority of the ignorant public as to what CMA has to offer.

in other words, modern wushu hurts our numbers, in regards to the amount of people becoming interested in TCMA. your average person goes by what they see, and most of what you see on CMA is modern wushu, thus pushing the image of non combat related studies.

For instance, my current situation. I would have loved to continue my training on the traditional shaolin sets i was in the process of learning.

however my teacher presents a structured study program. in other words, you study the same thing everyone else does. including modern wushu.

for people like myself, getting older/more focused on actual self defense, this is a very bad thing. I found myself gaining more and more "sport wushu" related injuries, completely detrimental to my over all training. Increasing my down time and removing time i could be spending on actual combat related training.

For myself, I purely enjoy CMA. I couldnt tell you why, other than that is how i feel.

Now for the search on a new school. I have decided to stick with CMA, however it was a very very tempting move to go MMA.

I do plan however to incorporate judo/bjj into my training within the next few years.

This current aspect that many schools share, of conforming to the modern wushu craze, is pushing more and more people away from CMA studies, at least those interested in fighting.


i dont hate wushu, i just dont like to practice it any more.

[mantis108]

I hate to sound like a broken record but ...

Didn't vote unless you have this option:

Modern Wushu is fragmentation of martial academia by sportification.

Modern Wushu forms are soul less dance. That's all. I rather learn to Tango at least you might get a hot chick for partner.

Mantis108

[firepalm]

I do see a few flaws however in the gaining popularity of the modern wushu. The common misconception of what CMA has to offer is becoming an increasing concern for many of todays CMA practitioners, whom do not focus on modern wushu.

For those who train for self defense/fighting, the promotion of CMA through modern wushu, can be detrimental to thier goals in relation to the majority of the ignorant public as to what CMA has to offer.


PangQuan, find a school that has exactly what you are looking for be it self defense, health, sport or otherwise. However the popularization of Modern Wushu is not really the detriment to traditional CMA, it's the majority of the instructors of traditional CMA. Here in Vancouver there are a lot of active CMA instructors (traditional & modern) and the bigger more successful of the schools tend to include Modern Wushu within their traditional CMA cirriculum (sometimes succumbing to market demand) and there are a few schools that are purely Modern Wushu clubs but the vast majority are traditional CMA clubs. Of those many traditional CMA clubs very few seem to do more then teach a collection of traditional forms & weapons. Many of those same schools will send out their students on a regular basis to join local competitions and will frequently have their students do performances that center around forms & weapons. Few if any of these schools has fighters that compete in those tournaments and even fewer show any sort of self defense or fighting applications in public. Now the Wushu clubs don't profess to teach anything more then a sport performance art where as the traditional CMA clubs that profess to teach self defense / fighting art yet display themselves in almost in exactly the same manner as the Wushu clubs. Furthermore I've trained in past years with some of these traditional CMA clubs and have visited many of the others and few of them actually train application.

Of course their are some traditional CMA clubs that can produce fighters and do put that out to the public but it seems to me that this is still the minority and there in lies your problem. If traditional CMA teachers are worried about misconceptions then go out there and educate the public however if all you are going to do is produce & present nothing more then a batch of forms & weapons performers don't be surprised if the general public sees you in no different a light then the average Wushu club. :cool:

[PangQuan]

The key elements to my statements:

"For those who train for self defense/fighting, the promotion of CMA through modern wushu, can be detrimental to thier goals in relation to the majority of the ignorant public as to what CMA has to offer."

i did not mean to put forth the attitude of a blanket statement to be all inclusive.

what i did, is state one of the few flaws i have noticed in the mounting climax with the modern wushu craze. as i am not so eloquent with my words i may have written confusingly. I did not mean to say that is the case in all situations, but, and you cannot deny, the mounting popularity of wushu has detered many people from taking CMA seriously as a combative art.

there are actually several people who post on this very forum i could state as evidence, however, i shall not name names.

what i did not do was state all of the beneficial aspects i see of wushu. and there are many. that was not the focus of my last post.

sorry for any confusions i may have caused.

[ngokfei]

Pangquan

I see no difference between todays Chinese Martial Arts Schools and other Karate/Taekwondo Schools.

The most popular and financially elite teach it as a sport. This is nothing new just that it has now caught on to the numerous CMA instructors.

wushu = sport karate/taekwondo (and there is no loss of interest in the public. actually with all the many chinese martial arts movies making it to the western audience there is definetly a rise in interest in CMA. (the problem is that most TCMA schools are boring to train in for the beginner and more than not "unorganized". That is why instructors now have created a program based on the "sampling" of many topics which take about 2-3 years to learn and become efficient in = a "black belt". then if they want to go on to further their training.......

As for public's view of any of these MA's is seen as being non-functional. That is what the MMA craze has taken off. One of the best success stories is Tat Mau Wong's CLF schools. He was one of the first to have a structured program of Traditional skills. And in order to satisfy those interested in fighting/sparring he opened up a sister school that focuses on that aspect specifically.

Curious, what traditional shaolin sets did you learn. Most do require an elevated level of foundation to make them work. But you are correct that there are alot of exercises in both traditional and contemporary that are detrimental to the human body (where you are young- and will feel it over time, as well as those getting up there in years)

You said you wanted to focus on "actual self defense". Well there are alot of schools/clubs out there that will satisfy your needs. And many of them also have some heavy conditioning regiments that will put alot of strain (injuries) on the body, so beware.