I really like how some kung fu styles are modernizing and competing in UFC and san shou style events. People are refocusing on what’s in thier forms and traditional techniques and applying it with good results against BJJ, TKD and kickboxers while staying unique.
Kung fu is for the street and now by modernizing it it’s also for the ring. The sport format increases your skills faster, but you still need qi gong to take you far in the long run. And this is why modernized CMA will dominate MMA in the future. The mixture of unique and superior techniques and the control of qi is unbeatable.
It’s great to see Cung Le do Tiger Pulls Down the Boar in a match. It’s great to see a chinese martial arts master perform traditional kung fu techniques and dominate his non-CMA competition. Cung le is a innovator and has pushed the bounderies of sport styles using his traditional kung fu.
Just watch, in the next five years the Gracie challenge will be retired and the CMA will be the new standard.
jackie chan is now required to give up his hapkido training.
The argument against non-compliance and full resistance fight training generally is a lame duck. especially in context to kungfu where this type of training is important to the development of the fighters skills in the martial art.
There needs to be more inroads that are inclusive to this type of training and updating of methodologies.
If it does not evolve, if it is not flexible and changing, then it is not kungfu simply put.
I still do forms, but not to learn to get better at fighting.
I still do traditional style conditioning exercises, I still do qigong, I still do quite a lot of so called traditional training. But I wouldn’t sell short the methods and training of modern martial arts. Better to include them. Only grows you as a martial artist.
Kung Fu started in China but now belongs to the world. You can partition your techniques all you like: this is kung fu/this is not kung fu - this is traditional/this is not traditional. All you do is shut doors in your own face. And that’s not traditional kung fu. Take the following traditional kung fu aphorisms to heart:
“Bow one’s head, learn arts from a hundred places”
“Learn from one more teacher, one knows one more skill”
Tradition just means we are connected to our past, but we certainly don’t live there. We honor our ancestors by making their teachings relevant today, not keeping them exactly as they were, behind museum gallery glass. Kung fu is only valuable when it is applied - to wushu taolu, to sanda, to your life. It must be vital. Otherwise, you’re just going through the motions.
Sorry to go off on a tangent regarding Austin Powers, but this thread is about selling out, after all…also I apologize for the length of this post, but as you will see it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot since a dojo incident last month…
Mr. cjurakpt, I will address your comments because this is the second time in two months someone got mad at me for not humoring them when they referenced the Austin Powers films…Basically, a girl in class got upset because I made quote signs with my hands (I was actually trying to be like Stephen Colbert, not Dr Evil) but then refused to put my pinky up to my mouth when she told me I had to after I made those quote signs…I will tell you the same thing I told her…
and I’m very upset no one got my Dr. Evil reference on this…c’mon, say it like Dr. Evil would, say it!
8 years ago or whenever those films started coming out, I might have smiled or even countered with a phrase like, “ohhhhh behaive!” However, at this point, I, and apparently most other people reading this thread, had happily forgotten the dark days of the Austin Powers phenomena, which you have just reminded us of, thank you for that.
Would I watch one of the Austin Powers movies if nothing else was on? Sure, and I’d probably laugh at it too…they are funny to an extent, but not because of any creative or comedic talent on the parts of the writers or authors…they are simply willing to do outrageous and gross stuff that is funny to watch every now and then…however, in 2005, it’s a pretty safe bet that if I make quote signs with my hands I’m not doing it because I’m trying to be like Dr. Evil…likewise, your comment that you will give us $1 million dollars was not appreciated, in fact, you are almost as bad as the real Dr. Evil…so by all means, laugh at these movies behind closed doors, but other than that let’s try and forget that they ever happened…OK case closed…
that is an excuse, plain and simple. If you cannot use your principles and modify your techniques, there is a flaw there. Additionally, in the first few UFCs, eye gouges were allowable. you would get fined, but would not be disqualified. if you eye gouged a guy and he couldn’t continue, you still won. I myself have been kicked in the groin in a fight… I didn’t feel it until after the confrontation was done. There have been several pro fights where someone was kicked in the groin. guess what happened? The fight continued.
Do you really think that if eye gouges and groin strikes were allowed that other things such as ground skills would be unnecessary?
if a series of techniques gets incorporated into an art from another art it is not ‘selling out’, as some speculate. to understand this better, or from an historical perspective, try looking at the historical development of various styles within martial arts. specifically i reccommend looking at Shaolin Hong/Hung and Mantis. but to do this you also have to look at other styles in the geographic regions in which the main styles you’re looking at occurred. Shaolin Hong and Hung gar are southern styles which pretty much encapsulate a little bit of everything southern. Mantis is primarily a northern style. the most complicated flavour i see is Mei Hua: it has lots of techniques which seem to have been built on the previous styles and then adds a slow practice method like tai chi chuan in the demonstrations.
so instead of looking at cma stylists as selling out perhaps you need to see it as “what are they including as fuctional methods”?
