[QUOTE=Kymus;1231886]I think there’s too much imbalance. Lots of forms and memorization, but little in the way of application. :mad:[/QUOTE]
It depends on the teacher. You don’t have to teach forms as the way you have taught. You can teach application only. You can always avoid this mistake in your generation. Of course you don’t have to tell your teacher, “Sorry that I don’t teach the forms that you have taught me.”
What will a praying mantis teacher teach if he doesn’t teach form? He will become a Sanda teacher. What will a WC teacher teach if he doesn’t teach form? He will also become a Sanda teacher. Sometime when people said, “This is not WC, …” To me, as long as this is “combat”, that’s all it matters. As long as your fist can land on your opponent’s face, why do you care about anything else?
Certainly not everyone focuses just on forms and memorization, but I think that more time should be spent with drilling, 3 levels of practice, and sparring.
Forms provide a way for a student to learn and memorize a variety of techniques; many times the forms themselves help the student practice the application (albeit without an opponent, but you get the idea).
Indeed one can stop the cycle; take what their teacher did and just throw it out there in a different way.
Ever so slowly, I think I’m starting to see more people in the TCMA community do this.
[QUOTE=Kymus;1231893]
Ever so slowly, I think I’m starting to see more people in the TCMA community do this.[/QUOTE]
Maybe this forum will aid the revolution, our words will be a catalyst for change! The Shaolin Temple will erect a Steele for Bawang and put it next to his mother’s Steele!
I think there’s too much imbalance. Lots of forms and memorization, but little in the way of application. :mad:[/QUOTE]
if the source is wrong, you can never practice it in a realistic manner. if the root is rotten, the whole tree dies.
a move called ground cannon in tai chi where you punch someone on the ground, they teach it as punching the feet. no matter how many thousands of times you try to practice punching someones feet, it will never work.
Forms are part of Chinese Boxing. Even the so-called ‘formless’ systems have forms. The problem in many schools is the proportion of time and effort spent on learning and training them and the belief that they are anything more than they actually are, which is essentially a catalogue of techniques and a display of trademark characteristics of a particular style.
At a certain level of training they can be dispensed with entirely, but I believe it is our responsibility to preserve and transmit them as part of the corpus (or at least the responsibility of a teacher). If we remove taolu, qigong, archaic weapons and strength/power training methods and apparatus – what is the point of practicing Chinese martial arts? Unless of course you are Chinese and practice them because they are your indigenous methods…
Stripped down to the bare bones, i.e. training the mechanics and application of punch, kick, grapple, there are arts such as Muay Thai, Western boxing and wrestling which are far more effective. Why bother training gongfu/wushu at all if it is only these things we are after? Why not just be honest with ourselves and drop the practice of TCMA and train one of these arts instead?
Personally, I believe it is not gongfu that needs revision but the minds of some of the people that teach and practice it (or at least talk about it).
The proliferation of forms in the Ming was centuries ago. Do we throw away everything between then and now, particularly seeing as that the majority of what exists today actually arose in the Republic era and later? Now that’s some high powered LARPing!