style habits

[David Jamieson]

If you are a martial artists who has come from one style into another. Especially completely diffent styles both culturally and geographically in origin, did you find that these styles conflict with each other in your understanding of either?

Do you find it difficult to leave accustomed habits out of new lessons?

I went through Karate to Tae Kwon Do to Kung Fu and found each of them very different in foundations and applied principles.

For instance, in Karate, aggressive and snapping as well as rigid blocking was the norm.

Tae Kwon Do used a lot of momentum and spinning to deliver power.

Kung Fu had these, but more interated with each other. I find that in Kung fu you are doing hard and soft and momentus and stopping together or in rapid succesion. Sort of like on off on off on off and so on.

Anyway, it took time with each new beginning to absorb and replace learned behaviours from other styles.

How about you?

[qeySuS]

What i found most hard was to prove to the instructors that i'm not there just jerking off, i'm there to learn a new style. Often if i did something incorrectly (this is when i was first starting) it was almost as they thought i was provoking them (this is going from Kung fu -> TKD). But once they saw i took their pointers and followed them from there on they got looser. But it's often like they take the mistakes that all beginners make and get marked as mistakes were soemtimes (or so i felt) written down as done on purpose by me.

F.x. sometimes i'd forget to bow to a teacher at the right time, and i'd be told and sometimes i felt as if they thought i was doing it on purpose to show some kind of disrespect.

As for style changing the biggest change was that in my Kung Fu training i had NEVER done any footwork, and so i learned that as a total newbie (that's usually my favourite class because then i always feel like i'm learning something new the entire class insted of doing kicks i've done many times before). Also all kicks i knew were from kickboxing and TKD had a whole other philosophy in kicking, took (and it's still taking) time to get used to it and trying to reach soem kind of proficiency in it (i've seen it used so well i'm really enthusiastic to get it right).