That's all very true for each of us.
Printable View
I think that the beginning material up through brown belt offer a very good foundation for the brown belt material and some of the black belt material (hua fist, black tiger). When GM sin started teaching the eight drunken immortals there were alot of strength training, post training to go with learning the forms.
BQ, you say you teach silkreeling, etc. Did you get these outside of SD or were they taught be sin the'? Because when I learned yang taichi and pakua from him these types of training methods were not taught. Just curious.
I also received a very extensive breathing meditation class from GM sin. It included standing, sitted, and lying meditation. As anyone knows meditation is a cornerstone of internal training, standing especially.
One thing SD obviously doesn't teach is quote-fu. Holy shit guys, some of the posts on the last page are painful :D .
BQ, the problem is that a prospective student to SD won't know in advance which teachers are like you, Bruce, etc and have concentrated on a particular aspect. So he/she might sign up at a school where they think they're going to learn something, but end up with a teacher like the ones on the videos. IMHO you're not going to learn much if your teacher never learned it. So it becomes a matter of choosing between particular teachers/schools of SD if you want to learn a specific thing in the same way that we all have to choose between particular teachers/schools. If the teacher at a branch doesn't have a skill then that whole branch will lose it in subsequent generations.
And of course it's mildly offensive to me that my whole system is treated as a stepping-stone in a belt/sash progression. That's kind of annoying. How can something that's so difficult for me concentrating solely on be learned by someone amongst other things in a < 1yr timespan and they then say "Oh yeah, I've learned x"? No, you haven't. It's more difficult than that. You've learned some vague movements, that's it. (generic "you")
It was not my intention to imply that SD was superior in any way to other systems or styles. I believe true kung fu training should include the internal arts. SD provides that training and I believe that is great. Many kung fu schools have gotten away from the internal arts and I believe that's a shame and unfortunate. Fortunately, there are other schools who do teach the internal arts, but not as many as there use to be. Perhaps it is simply supply and demand. I think it is great that any school continues internal arts training whether they are SD or not. I trained for years in Hung Gar and Choy Lee Fut and we also spent time working on Chi Kung training. A lot of schools simply do not do that and I believe they are missing out. Simply, to each their own.
From discussions & working with GMS and other upper level masters in the systems that love the internal (GMS, EML, EMM, EMS, MR, & MBC)....GMS doesn't call it by the common names he just explains the mechanics....the actual exercises I brought in for Chen....via GMS encouraging research.......he gives us all the tools...it's up to us to learn how to use them
You should be used to it. Internal arts, taiji, xing yi, and ba gua, are getting added on to many kung fu schools where there teacher (some very well respected teachers) don't really have a background in them, but they are catering to the market. More so in taiji, but the others are becoming more common as well.
But to address SD, if you are talking about the core teaching progression, the internal shouldn't be taught until they are an advanced student. I wasn't taught any tai chi until I was a first black (which took me 3 years). At that time, my teacher would refer to SD teachers that specilize in internal arts, such as Eric Smith, as a reference in SD. At that time, there was no other tai chi in my area. The internet wasn't a major factor. I couldn't look things up for myself very easily. Now things are different. I think students are much more savvy and that's good for SD. It forces teachers to improve their teaching and to train harder themselves because there are so many other options. Hopefully, many of the shortfall we discuss here will be corrected by the next generation of SD intructors It sounds as if they can follow BQ's example.
Martial Art is a personal journey much of what is taught is never absorbed in the physical manifestation of the art studying. If the teacher gives all the answers then there is no self discovery , thus you are doing something instead of experiencing somthing. Basics are taught in SD They are not stressed as long as I feel they should be but what student of today will do stance training for 6 months or a year?? Also many that do work on the nuances of the Internal arts do not post. Likewise there is the X that you compare it to is also possibly not completely accurate as well. Remember if you are looking for a particular mechanical application of a technique , everyone will do it different and with different emphasis. Not to say the basics arent there, they are just at different levels for different people. Some are good kickers and some punchers. KC
I just don't understand how a SD student can ever think they'll learn enough of one art with the amount of material in the whole system. E.g. components of my style are taught in the progression from "2nd degree black belt" to "3rd degree black belt". There are 16 "katas" that have to be completed to make that "belt progression". Along with that presumably a student would have to train all the stuff they've learned to get to "2nd degree black belt". I mean, it's just not possible to be even competent at any of the stuff you're supposed to know. Unless, you reach a level where you decide to concentrate on one aspect, like Bruce and maybe others (BQ?). But then IMHO you're not doing SD any more, because you're neglecting other aspects that don't interest you but which are still part of the system and that you should probably excel at in order to be a high-level SD practitioner. It's a bit hard for me to explain what I mean but you probably get the gist of it.
A parallel analogy - in my case I learned a style (WC) and spent a fair amount of time doing it but my skills are rusty at best and I wouldn't necessarily call myself a WC student any more although I still regularly practise it. 95% of my training time is spent on another style now though so it's not fair for me to be a WC student. Even e.g. my teacher is the keeper of a different style, but he rarely practises it so he is reluctant to call himself that any more.
Even our higher level WC students do "qigong" exercises every session in the warmup (or used to when I last attended group classes). I try to stand in san ti for 10min pretty much every day from when I first learned it. It's still changing constantly. I very much like it and IMHO it's very important. You can do other things too (i.e. not solely stance training for 6/12mths), but keeping up the stance training is good for the mind, body and soul IMHO. Even for much, much longer than 6/12mths.
Yeah, but if the teacher doesn't have the answers in the first place (as I suspect many SD masters don't), then they won't be able to point the students in the right direction to discover the answers for themselves.
Yeah, I accept this. I have preconceived ideas, everyone does. OK, from my perspective when I see "internal" videos, I expect to see people move from their dan tien. I want to see body movement, I want to see coordination, I want to see strong structure. Some of those guys walking the circle a couple of pages back looked like they were going for a stroll in the park. That'd be OK if you walked in the park with "internal" structure but I didn't see that. Simple example (but my words will suck) - if you're just standing there and you lift one leg up do you just kind of lift it up using predominantly your quadricep? Or do you lift it up by (amongst other things) pulling it up through your dan tien (i.e. using your trunk/core that you've worked long and hard to develop via "internal" exercises to do most of the work, kinda like doing a standing crunch)? It might produce a similar effect (your leg is lifted), and if you are subtle about it a bystander might struggle to tell the difference, but with time it can create a massive difference in structure/power/body unity (IMHO).
Most (98%) never will reach the levels you are talking about :eek: The ones that do really have dedicated more time then I will ever have. But, even then, they are still doing SD because that is still their core. They focus on other things, but their core is still short form and the core long sets that comprise the base material.
I have "progressed" to the "next belt" through your internal art. I understand the rudimentary elements of it, but I'll never be arrogant enough to say that I understand it as well as someone who trains in hsing ie exclusively. We could share ideas, but I am still a novice compared to others. So unless I take time to really break it down, I would say I have a background or an introduction to the movements, postures, training methods, and internal concepts but nothing more. I would be a beginner at best in your style. But here's the thing:
SD builds upon all these different concepts. One of the biggest reasons it lacks certain flavor is that it merges with everything else. My Hua looks different in certain areas because I probably unconsciously try to infuse my hsing ie with it. Everything any SD student does is mixed to some degree with short form. Does that make our Hua "real" Yes and no. It is not pure the way someone who simply learned Hua and nothing else from a teacher that only taught hua. It's the form; its the concepts, but the expression of it has been combined with other things of SD. Some will say this is bad, some will say its good. It is. And it works. An equally dedicated SD person with the same amount of training will match up well against any traditionally trained student of equal training in one art. In the end, it will be the individual that determines the outcome, but there will be no difference in martial skill and training only the intangible things that we each carry with us.
You can watch me fight, and my personal style is very different from my teacher's. Watching us fight, you might think we were trained differently (although there's only a difference in overall skill--in his favor of course) but you wouldn't think that we necessarily trained in the same art. Because what works for me and my limitations do not necessarily work for him. As Shen Ku said the strength of SD is the amount of material. The weakness of SD is the amount of material. It is good and bad. But it works if the person is dedicated.
The part I don't get is once you reach a certain level surely you'd have worked out your preferences by that stage and you'd steer towards a certain path. And SD's curriculum alone wouldn't be sufficient to further you along that path (because its tendency is to give you a small taste of so many things). So it might be a great style for beginners, but for advanced SD students (a lot of whom have posted in the last 3-odd pages) I don't get why you wouldn't gravitate towards a more specific art. Sounds like BQ is supplementing his SD, I know Bruce has (I had a similar discussion with him at one stage while he was still SD), I know you have enough experience to be in the category of student I'm picturing JP. Why don't you guys become e.g. a pure bagua student, a pure taiji student, a pure hsing i student, a pure black tiger student, etc, etc? And to do so would probably require looking outside your SD system and specialising?
I'm thinking of the analogy of SD == high school where you get a broad taste of lots of material, then you go to university/college to specialise in your subject of choice. You could stay at a local community college and supplement your learning on your own (totally possible in the academia analogy), but to get optimal results you could seek out the elite and learn/interact directly with them.
I dunno, I realise it's all opinion and no-one's going to change anyone's mind. I just view things from my perspective and in a good week I'll get 20hrs in and in an average week 10-14hrs and it's just not enough for basically the 5 elements, that's pretty much what I concentrate on in solo training. Couple of animals to mix it up sometimes and some "qigong" exercises. I couldn't comprehend trying to advance my WC significantly and I could possibly have access to a tiger system and a monkey system as well if I begged. Not possible IMHO, I'd have to drop something to learn something else. But it obviously works for you guys.