retraining your martial art for fighting.
this isnt a tma v mma thread...this is a thread about adjusting your martial art for fighting... how many of you do pad and bag work, that isnt just kickboxing? but actualy practicing the movements from your form? i practice xing yi chuan, and have so for the last 6 years..my sifu taught way different, he asked me did i want to learn xing yi to teach to fight or for health? i said to fight but i would like to learn it for health as well. so he started me off for the first two months doing nei gung, san ti and these basic xing yi exercises. then i learned the five fist, but he wouldnt let me move on to learn the next fist until i could accurately apply the one ive been working on...so it took me a while to really learn it... wasnt until i started doing heavy bag work at home actually using the techniques, pi chuan, beng chuan etc...that i started realizing how they can be applied in a real life situation.
once i learned all five fist, my sifu use to make me do alot of bag work using all the five fist but in combos like boxing, learning how to flow from one move to the next, he always told me that xing yi was relentless and the fighter didnt stop, you cant thing of what is the next move or application(he never taught me applications) you just have to react to the situation.
ok there is the back story...but the question is how many people train this way in kung fu? learning to actually use what you've been training all along for? ive totally eliminated forms from my training...i just do basics from different styles ive studied, like chain punching, and kicking from wing chun, the ten hands from hung ga, stepping movements from lung ying, and pole training from lung ying, and then i do the five fist, and some of the animals i know, then with my body all tired i do about 40 mins(with breaks) of bag and if i have a friend pad work. and some sparring.
whats your regimen? what do you train kung fu for?
The Hung Sing Choy Lee Fut system
Hung Sing Choy Lee Fut has a very limited amount of forms and was created that way because they all trained to fight to the death in revolution after revolution from 1851 to the present. Why did i mention this? Because the system i teach was truly designed for combat. That the system wasn't designed for the betterment of our health.
Yeah, we used pads, focus mitts, and do bag work. We use them for development of individual strikes that are strictly from our system. We also use them for the development of the combinations found within our forms. Our forms combo's aren't made up of guess work but are based off of personal experience passed down from generation to generation.
The single regular strikes we work on are:
- Chop Choy's (lead and reverse)
- Sow Choys (aimed at your head, side of neck or back of neck, including striking limbs.)
- Upper cuts (long and short)
- Kwa Choy (horizontal, vertical and diagonal and spinning)
- Kup Choy (Stamping fist: vertical and horizontal)
- Elbows (all directions)
Knee's: (Rising and double)
*** All combo's contain these single strikes.***
We have a good number of open palm techniques as well. I don't place much stock in joint locks too much, but we have them. Hung Sing Choy Lee Fut doesn't like to kick too much but we have a few good kicks, nothing too fancy.
Under my sifu, we sparred ALOT. We were encouraged to spar at 50-75% while gloveless, other times we used gloves. my sifu always wanted us to spar realistically as opposed to KUNG FU sparring. We did alot of 2 man spar forms where once the form was completely memorized we executed our techniques full out and it was an unwritten rule that if you got hit, don't get mad at them, it wasn't their fault you got hit. i still keep that tradition alive today with my own students.
While most of my students aren't interested in pursuing a fighting career they still train to handle what ever comes at them where ever they may be at the moment. we often spar in our street clothes to keep the level of realism. the only time we wear uniforms is during street performances.
I'm not a big fan of too many animal hands but i DO love the Tiger Claw. I never used it to scratch like i've seen so many others do. i use it to rip and tear at what ever flesh i come into contact with be it your forearm, bicep, tricep, neck, or whatever.
I get my students to spar and we've even had a few styles come through especially wing chun to spar. i found it hilarious when the wing chunners would call out to their classmate what to do against CLF. Then my students let em have it CLF STYLE and they weren't able to handle it. Part of this is because i tell my students "unless they legitimately stop or drop you, keep fighting and do your thang". Outside of my club, my students are involved with other styles including MMA/BJJ who are meeting together to test out their fighting methods. This i'm proud of.....not once have any of my students ever come back to me and say "sifu, that sh1t you taught us doesn't work"....not once!
but like i've stated before, my students aren't interested in a career in sport fighting. they go to college and are working to get their degree's. One of my students is going to school to be a doctor or a surgeon or something like that which is the reason he doesn't want to sport fight but he does love to fight.
I do post some stuff on video on my youtube channel, but its always just the surface of what i teach. most of those videos are recorded the same day i taught them a new technique. I like to keep our more advanced stuff quiet and never record those. I come from a school that preferred to stay in the shadows where you would never see what we trained or used until it was too late.
I've had students whose lives were on the line and effectively used our gung fu. I've also had students who moved on to muay thai and enter their first official matches and win their first time out. all in all, i will always love my style and highly appreciate the knowledge my sifu passed down to me. sorry if i went all left field....
