Since the topic titlre deals with the internal.
Trying to avoid the disappearance of the original topic.
A top quality Chinese and some other martial arts - to be good, will have both external and internal elements fused together.
Good teachers pass on that fusion to good students.
Sometimes the chain of transmission gets broken by teachers with incomplete knowledge or students with poor learning skills. And with external aspects of training and internal there can be and are phonies and hucksters.
Ip Man was an avid learner and IMO he had the fusion of external and internal. To those he taught carefully he was able to transmit the fusion. Other who were just public class members or non tuition paying or haphazard learners didn't get it and developed what they got in their own way...hence
a source of great confusion.
Ip man's hands on teaching didn't depend on much chit chat, or discussion of metaphysics but it did mean a good fusion of TCMA and WC physical, mental and energy principles.
I agree with Hendrik in part and disagree in part. The fusion has not completely died out but the internal has become in many circles just a word or object of ridicule or a source of fraud, depending on who, what, when and why.....please no Dillman, empty force etc.
If you don't have proper stance and structure and natural breathing and self control to begin with, one can forget about the internal IMO of course and internet chit chat won't resurrect it.
joy chaudhuri
A hopefully brief response
Quote:
Originally Posted by
m1k3
Joy and Robert,
Now that we are back on topic could you perhaps provide some form of an explanation of what we are talking about when we are discussing internal arts.
For example:
How is a strike internal vs external. (It is obvious that I have no internal training what so ever.) For example could a boxing punch with good structure using the body as a whole, no separate parts be considered an internal strike? If not could either or both of you take a shot at explaining the difference.
Thanks,
Mike
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Hi Mike- w ref to your sig- I have taught wc toa couple of good people who also had Semper Fi as their motto.One was in Vietnam and middle east among other places. Another was in Desert Storm."Internal" is just nature at work. But the west has had a more zig zagging path emphasizing "phenomena'" and downplaying "noumena" specially since a major church conference (Nicean?) and edict many centuries ago.
In my time, I boxed and didn't do badly at all in that activity or in "real" fights. But on occasion a good boxer may show a flash as in Ali's short punch in the second(?) Liston fight- most people didn't even see it-some didn't believe it-Ali towering over the downed Liston was hollering at him to get up-because he didn't want people to disbelieve what happened. But he didnt really reproduce it again.The latent primitive element just came out.Good internal work based on structure and related dynamics and natural breathing rather than "snorting" or "kia-ing"- tries to integrate that element without abandoning external work.
Boxing punches are normally effective against people of roughly the same weight class. And the efficient time window of a boxer is relatively short. A boxer's stance is generally top heavy- that is not the case with good internal training.
Many wing chun people don't develop a good punch because the structural linkages are missing
or broken.
There is more- but this is not a lawyer's brief.Won't convince evryone-but that is ok. You did ask.
Regards, joy chaudhuri