ninthdrunk-
I’m talking consistently in use, not once in a while this move comes out, but I mean the bread and butter movements. However, THAT discussion gets a little muddied once you’re talking principles. For instance, my style is largely made up of two forms(individual forms) of footworks and three forms(individual forms) for handwork, which contain the core principles, and a myriad of variations thereof. As such, I constantly pull off different applications using those, but almost always it’s a combination of those, with few exceptions.
So yeah, it’s good that certain moves come out once in a while. However, once in a while is a lot different than mastery. And odds are those moves come out once in a while because you are well set up due to the things you have worked to “perfection”.
As for a master, I’ve met a lot of them, and I’ve never met one who simply fought like a kata full contact. I’ve also never met anyone, master, grandmaster, even pope, who was equally proficient with all aspects of their style- everyone has things they’re better at, even “masters”. And just about every student I’ve ever seen has certain things they are good at because of mindset, body type, or what have you, and once they were trained, they were better at that aspect than their teachers, assuming they had good teachers.
One member had a quote in their sig a while back, I believe it was a DaVinci quote, which was “poor is the student who does not surpass their teacher”, or something to that extent. In his field, DaVinci was a far greater master than most of the martial artists called masters are in their respective fields, so I’m willing to bet he’s right. The goal is to find how the style shines in you, not your teacher.
Now, a good master knows how to teach different body types the style, but he or she can never be that different body type, and likewise should not use the style as if he or she were, just as students whose bodies are drastically different than their teachers should find the way the style works for them.
However, 20 is probably a bit of an arbitrary number. Still, learning ten hand sets is too many for my taste. If someone doesn’t know enough about fighting to teach others from one set, either their understanding of that set is insufficient, or that set could be more comprehensive. My personal taste is that I can think of no reason to have a set that doesn’t encompass fighting in as comprehensive way as possible, except historical preservation, which I leave to others. For self awareness/personal growth types, they’ll learn more from studying one thing of great depth than many shallow things. So, aside from one comprehensive form for each type of fighting in the style(open hand, various weapons), nothing else is needed, imo.
As an example, there are external forms that were recently(last 10-15 years, my guess) made to lead to the core form in my style. That’s all well and good, the core form can seem confusing, but if, instead of working on those external forms, the students were just working on the core movements, the chi kungs and the footwork, they’d be better at the core form than those who first do these external forms, because the external forms only give the appearance of being the style, and only someone who understands the core form can give them more than just that appearance, and if they understand the core form to that extent, they could just make their own external forms, and don’t need them, and never needed them.
As for two man sets, never liked them. Again, another unnecessary step between forms and actual practice, imo. However, some are neat to watch.
EDIT: the reason I don’t like two man sets is that most of the ones I’ve seen have the annoying tendency to have moments when one of the practitioners should clearly have broken the other, but didn’t. As much as they teach applications, I think that these long chain of offensive failures must carry with them some disadvantages as training methods. Since we fight how we train and all. However, some, like chin na flows, I do enjoy.
