Green Dragon Studios

[Royal Dragon]

No intent to be confrontational, just to discuss and critique.

When you watch the spine, it is allways arched back in all of thier movement. They pull the shoulders back, and stick the chest and butt out.

Chinese martial fundementals use a stright spine, round the shoulders, the chest is sunk, and the tail bone tucked under, that's all I was trying to point out.

It was a rebuttal to your comment that thier fundementals are good, when they clearly are not. I meant to make that point, and site reasons as to why I said it.

[lotus storm]

It was a rebuttal to your comment

Uhh--my question or pruningmantis's comment?

thnx---lotus storm.

[Royal Dragon]

I was replying to pruning mantis.

As for the practicality of the selfdefense, most of what I saw would have them eating elbows, or good right hooks. For example, one on the Tai tzu tape had the attracker come in with a very predictable straight punch, the defender blocked it, and almost walked right into what would have been the second punch comming from any common arm flailing fool.

Vertually all the attacks shown were followed by the attacker just standing there and getting beat by the defender. There was no attempt to gain position, and make it so the attacker cannot escape or retaliate against the defender's response.

From an inexperiance eye, I guess it looks like the attaker attacks, and gets beat down, but to my eye, it looks like the defences are so easy to circumvent that they would not be practical, or advisable against anyone not play acting along with you.

Most real selfdefence I have seen will work both at the slow demo speed, and full speed against a resisting opponent. Even going slow, you can see why thye work. You really can't see blatent mistakes, and errors that will get you hit if the opponent resisted in the least little bit. In the apps from the green dragon tape however, vertually all the defenses put the player in imedeate danger if the attacker was determined, and looking for openeings to counter.

You are not supposed to place yourself in a danger zone. You are supposed to position yourself so that your opponent can't retaliate well, even if he wants too. Like thier fundemental body structure, the apps from the green dragon tai tzu tape are also 180 backwards.

[pruningmantis]

royal dragon,

have you ever viewed the green dragon tape called the fundementals of empty hand fighting? even though the information on it was nothing new to me by the time i saw it i thought it gave the most precise explanation of some very basic concepts like staying to the outside of an opponent and penitration of attack that i have ever seen on video. i will say that having experince in both canemasters and green dragon traveler's cane the canemasters stuff is my pick of the two.

[Royal Dragon]

No, I only have the Tai Tzu ones, and my critques should be seen as being based only on that. Although, if they don't have it for those tapes, why would they anywhere else?

[chessman71]

I beg to differ. If thier fundementals are so good, how come their backs are arched, butts are stuck out, shoulders are pulled back and not rounded, and their chests are puffed out, instead of sunken?? Everything I see on the tapes I have is 180 degrees WRONG from good, proper fundemntals of Chinese martial arts.

...

Actually, I found the applications to be highly unplausible, and in several cases down right silly. But that was just one tape, maybe the rest are better.

Not every CMA uses the body principles you've listed here so if some of the Green Dragon forms don't show the requirements that you've listed, then it's no big deal. For instance, the shoulders are not commonly rounded nor the chest sunken in southern styles that I've trained. Granted that doesn't mean the chest should be puffed out like the members of the Green Dragon demo team do, but then that's usually when they are just standing there, not when they are demoing the forms.

Regarding applications, most of them are defenses against punches or kicks, which I found to be pretty plausable.

As you say, your opinion is formed by watching one tape, which is a little unfair to Green Dragon considering they have like 200 tapes on the market. I had about 20-25 at one time and they were a wide cross section of forms and strength programs from all the different levels. Some tapes had great material and performers while some didn't.

Dave C.

[chessman71]

This is just off the top of my head.
The good:
small fire dragon - excellent form and done very well. The best dragon form I've ever seen.
White dragon advanced form -- just a little harder and longer than small fire dragon but still very good.
white lotus continuous plams -- pretty much as good as they always claimed it to be but students need beginning and intermediate WL forms to make it work.
iron buddha strength set -- good with the caveats I gave about using this type of program
iron crutch -- excellent form of the Chinese tonfa
preying mantis bung bu -- famous form done well
small crane fist form -- a good intro to crane movement.
leopard form -- good form also done well, but the slapping the elbow to increase speed was weird and I've never seen any other animal guys do that.

the bad:
the white eyebrow material -- the performer didn't impress me and I found the material disappointing. This might be one that suffered from incorrect body mechanics.
the five animal exercises -- liked some of them but the tape should have had explanations of what the exercises did. More explanation was necessary IMO.
taiji and bagua -- way, way too much residual tension. As I said before, GD doesn't specialize in internal so buyer beware!

BTW, I also saw their shuai jiao tapes, which are not listed in the catalog. They were a solid presentation of SJ basics if you can find them.

Dave C.

[IronFist]

Their "fundamentals of empty hand fighting" tape is pretty good.

Again I like it because he stresses the importance of strength.

The principles and theory discussed on it are all very good assuming that real fighting involves two people standing sideways to each other in "karate" or "kung fu" stances.

I suppose the material could be extrapolated and applied to any fighting scenario (ie, facing head-on like boxers), but the examples given in the tape are all with sideways stances.

They also kind of assume that your opponent will throw a punch and leave it out there. I hate to say Green Dragon falls into this cliche, too, but if I remember correctly (the examples I'm thinking of), they do. One of the examples shows Sifu Allen's "opponent" throwing a punch and Sifu Allen knocks it away really hard showing how you can knock your opponent off balance and make him cross his own centerline thus exposing himself, etc. Good points, good theory. However, it probably wouldn't work against a trained attacker (read: boxer).

People have said this tape has more info than you would learn in a year at a "normal" school. I may agree. There is some good stuff on there from a TMA perspective. I'd rather spend one day at a MMA gym, tho.

[IronFist]

Wow, this thread died.

[chessman71]

Well, I have some further thoughts I'd like to add.

More reasons not to overuse tension forms:

1. headaches -- when I did the iron buddha strength form for a year, I got the most intense migrains. What I thought caused them was the prolonged, maximum tension that I tried to squeeze out of my muscles. For one thing, it constricted my breathing patterns but it also seemed to GREATLY increase the blood pressure in my head. Needless to say, that was very uncomfortable and often resulted in splitting headaches. I wonder if long-term practice might contribute to high blood pressure.

2. lack of legwork -- the GD stregth forms all seemed to emphasize upper body development to the detriment of the lower body. I know stances were meant to make up for that, but stancework supplemented with lower body strength training works best. Stance work is static, not dynamic so it is very limited. Adding deadlifts and squats, or at least hindu squats and lunges, will greatly increase your leg strength.

3. interferes with proper technique -- several of the moves from each GD strength form seem to come right from fighting techniques found in the fighting forms. Doing these moves WITH extreme tension runs counter IMO to doing the techniques correctly. Basically, you are spending time inducing tension into techniques that should be done without that tension. That's a very bad idea and in my case, led to me doing some techniques incorrectly.
I now try to keep my strength training and martial arts training separate so that they don't contaminate each other. If I mix the two, it's to build a special skill or power but I'm always very careful when doing so.

4. residual tension -- I hate to keep harping on this but IMO GD strength forms build tension that doesn't go away easily, as someone who has watched their videos can easily tell. Those people look as stiff as boards!!
I agree that strength and power are needed to make the material work but outside of bodybuilders (who also spend a lot of time tensing up), I've never seen that amout of tension in someone who lifts weights or does bodyweight exercises. Being stiff like that runs completely contrary to CMA principles (which I now realize is what Royal Dragon meant) and is to be avoided even in southern styles like hung gar, let alone taiji.

Taking these complaints into account along with the ones from my previous posts, I now consider Chinese strength sets to be supplemental training at best.

Properly done weightlifting and bodyweight exercises IMO are VASTLY superior because they have 95% of the benefits of tension forms, loads of benefits that tension forms don't have, and none of the drawbacks.

Dave C.

[Royal Dragon]

I often wondered if the tension sets found in some martial systems were more a result of a LACK of avaliability of the traditional stone locks,than anything else.

I have footage of a Tai Tzu guy doing our San Zhen set with the locks, instead of emptyhand and lots of tension, and it just seems to me that that is how the set was originally designed to be practiced.

Also, as for the head aches, I see how that is possible. We use a specal breathing sound when we do ours that prevents that. Also, we donot tense the head area, that stays relatively relaxed. Only the arms, and torso tense.

As for the residual trension, yeah I noticed that too. THAT is why I rarely practice that set. I lose my softness if I do it too much more than once a week, or once every other week. I at best only run through the set 3 times, and then move on to moving forms like 4 doors, or Cutting Slice. That seems to help too.

[pruningmantis]

have any of you guys seen the green dragon version of the eight drunken immortals form? i recently purchased it for my godson who wants to start learning it and i just wanted to share some opinions.

[chessman71]

Interestingly enough, I have seen their version of the eight drunken immortals and I thought it was pretty good. What surprised me was that the performer looked strong like most GD people but he wasn't stiff. If I'm not mistaken, it was the same performer that did their monkey forms. So my guess is that he specializes in doing the more "flexible" type material that they have.

The drunken form itself was quite good, it has all the standard moves you would expect and, as always, was broken down in ways that actually allowed you to learn the form. That was what made GD special IMO, you could actually learn the form from the videos.

Hope you enjoy the tape.

Dave C.

[Ho Chun]

[QUOTE=chessman71]. What surprised me was that the performer looked strong like most GD people but he wasn't stiff.


Isn't this how all Kung Fu people are suppose to be??

[chessman71]

[QUOTE=Ho Chun]

. What surprised me was that the performer looked strong like most GD people but he wasn't stiff.


Isn't this how all Kung Fu people are suppose to be??

Maybe you should try bothering to read the thread before you make inane comments. If you do, you'll understand what I meant.

Dave C.