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Just out of curiosity, what are your favorite shaolin staff forms? What form would you consider most essential? I just like watching these forms, have been working stick a bit lately, though from a wudang style, but much common ground, of course.
Hope everyone is having a good holiday. I'm stuck at work.:mad:
I've always been partial to yinshougun. I learned qimeigun but didn't practice it much and have since forgotten it.
There are so many forms, it is hard to pick. Really there are entire subsystems of staff. For example YinShou Gun and QiMeiGun both have (or had) 6 forms each, YeCha gun has many. They represent different staff types and different strategies.
Nowadays it is all a bit mixed together. The most popular forms are Yinshou gun yilu, Yinyang gun and Qimei gun yilu. All 3 are good, but I would suggest YinYang gun is the most essential and also the simplest. Its techniques are more frequently used than the techniques in Yinshou gun and Qimei gun is specifically for a shorter staff. That being said I prefer Yinshou gun as a form.
All vary dramatically form school to school, clan to clan.
There are many variations. Variety is the spice of Kung Fu. If we liked standardized forms, we would do Japanese martial arts.
One of my previous Shaolin monk coaches, Yan Fei, had some extra lines in yinshougun. I never quite mastered those. I could repeat them, but not with the force that he could. That lesson got by me, even though I was under him for several years. The yinshougun I do is pretty standard Songshan fare.
If we are entertaining forms outside the Songshan curriculum, I would add BSL's qimei staff. I haven't practiced that in years but it was my very first Kung Fu weapon form, so it's burned into my marrow.