Just wondering what people think about this.
My take is that Tao Lu are basically combat-specific bodyweight exercise routines. Before there were jump ropes and HIIT routines, doing forms was a pretty good way to develop flexibility, elevate cardio, and build kinesthetic awareness.
But exercise science has become more efficient and forms work is antiquated.
Now, the value of forms is merely to pass on the flavor of the style.
Everyone knows that to use your forms in a live setting, you have to break them down and drill individual movements. If that’s the case, why not start with the individual movements in the first place? You’d eliminate two (or more) years of training time right off the bat.
you do start with individual movements. You can’t learn a form all at once and the rule of thumb is that you get each movement right before moving on to another.
sometimes, it is taught taht the sequence be given and then refined. This is ok to, and is more interesting for the student than being corrected however many times before moving on.
The nature of the form to string together combinations and moves into form makes it no less efficient than anything else out there.
What is it that is more efficient and makes forms inadequate mk?
forms are part of training, but certainly not all, you do have to extrapolate, you do have to drill material taken from within teh form, you do have to do force feedback and resistance training to make any of it work and it all get’s drawn out of form.
form is a teaching method and does indeed include and show flavour of a given style. It could be said that they are a more robust transimission method than one or two selections from another method that doesn’t use form. Which is ok too.
purpose wise, they develop co-ordination and strength , timing etc etc. Although I would admit I still see a lot of people play them mechanically and with not a lot of those three things. But that’s ok, with time and effort, they should by all rights come troi understand the form better and take it out of the pattern dancing realm and into the applicable parts of it.
That’s if they want to bother with the fight aspect of ma which is another cookie altogether.
why do you ask fu pow? at a dark place in your training? 
Kata is to be taken apart and then put back pieces by pieces.
Kata is just another form of practice and not the only practice.
so the point of kata is that it is just a collection of many individual moves in a sequence.
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i always imagined that forms developed back in the days when the knowledge of reading and writing were reserved mainly for the wealthiest or most influential people… i imagine people connecting the techniques from their art into a sequence as a way of cataloging those moves in a way that could be memorized and performed in a standardized sequence.
Yes.
There are names and songs/poems/classics associated with moves and kata.
oral transmission or Kuo Jue;
some are considered “secrets” not to be written down.
Master killer,
I read your posts often and almost always agree with the point you are trying to convey, however when you said this…
[B] But exercise science has become more efficient and forms work is antiquated.
Now, the value of forms is merely to pass on the flavor of the style.
Everyone knows that to use your forms in a live setting, you have to break them down and drill individual movements. If that’s the case, why not start with the individual movements in the first place? You’d eliminate two (or more) years of training time right off the bat.[/B]
I would like to point out that forms, quen, kata, practice will never become antiquated. if so they why are we still doing them 2,600 years after thier inception?
Also properly taught you DO learn the movements individually then when you master or at least become proficient doing them, you string them together will movement.
Just as the person learning english it taught the letters of the alphabet first then words, then sentances. This is the same with form.
In closing why would you want to eliminate 2 (or more ) years off of your training? are you in a hurry to venture down a lifelong path? This is why kung fu today sucks or has been watered down and commericilized. Everyone is in a big hurry to learn and they dont take the time to become good at anything before they are crying to learn more.
Forms are so the teacher can make $$$ off of you and force control over you and make you waste a ton of time without doing any real fighting. :mad:
So then explain why a teacher 1000 years ago would use forms to teach his one and only disciple?
it wasnt for money. it wasnt for control. it was because he knows what he’s doing.:rolleyes:
its just part of the package.
the biggest thing i notice on people who rip on forms is that they actually seem to believe that all people practice is form. that they think there is no resisting opponents, no sparring, no rolling, no fighting.
sure there are schools like that, and even CMA students will rip on that. we know you cant learn to fight from just forms. but we also know the benefits of them.
some people can see the benefits and others cannot. those that cannot will always question. it is human nature to question that which you do not fully understand.
but dont worry, we understand that you do not understand. we will continue to be patient and explain to the best of our ability.
I agree with MK, but in a different way. We drill concepts and applications first to understand the essence of combat structure.
Later on down the line, we train form. This way, when learning the form, you have a language to understand and interpret the form better.
From a business perspective, most adults want fitness, self defense, and stress relief from their training. They don’t want to memorize a lot of vague movements that they don’t really understand.
I love forms and forms training and performance. And I want my students to, as well. But I ease them into our daunting world of forms. I satisfy the fitness and combat needs first, both of which are a lot more primal in nature. Once those needs are being met, then I start teasing them into the world of forms and weapons.
I think it benefits to have a rich and expanded movement vocabulary (through learning forms), but only when you’re mentally ready for it. As my sifu said, “If you eat too much at one time, you don’t digest. It just turns into waste.”
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How do you know they did this? If you look at the remaining scrolls that are still passed down from the Tang dynasty, for instance, that were transferred to Japan, it would appear they were technique based, not form based.
From a business perspective, most adults want fitness, self defense, and stress relief from their training. They don’t want to memorize a lot of vague movements that they don’t really understand.
yeah, they don’t want to do the work of actually learning the form, because that’s hard, but they do want the form.
people i’ve shown and shared with for the most part don’t dig the “fight” aspect and do want the exercise with a difference and the stress relief etc and they want to do form more than to bang for real.
people who want to learn from you, for the most part will follow the method you lay out for them.
forms aren’t $ makers. I would say that if someone wants to make money then that comes down to marketing and keeping an eye on teh zeitgeist.
for instance, you would do better to have an mma school than a tma school simply because it’s more promoted and people want to be associated with something that everyone else has an idea of what it is.
otherwise, despite all the different styles we may practice, to the mainstream, it’s all karate and their brother was a ninja and the gracies would choke us all out etc etc etc.
neihyholt
Forms are so the teacher can make $$$ off of you and force control over you and make you waste a ton of time without doing any real fighting.
May be your teacher did this to you, perhaps this is why you dont understand the importance of practice. i dont charge my students to learn and my shrfu is from taiwan who’s shrfu did not charge, etc. etc. So your statement is a rather sweeping assumption from YOUR expereince. All the applications found in our 5 forms are absolutley fighting based.
I teach 8 step praying mantis are you going to say that system is not combat/fight based?
also what scrolls are you speaking of? it is better to not make statements like these when your lack of experience shows through.
its the same thing.
a technique is form. combine many form together for a sequence. do this solo, or with partner.
any evidence that shows existance of pre desinged technique is showing form.
it doesnt matter when people began to put the form together. probably very early on.
when you practice a technique, we want to feel what can flow out of it, without disruption. least resistance. once you do one technique and find a second of least resistance, you have started sequence.
i can think of this on my own. i am no great master. i am sure other has had same idea.
Ahhh, if only more CMA teachers were like you.
IMHO it’s a question of learning curve. When I took jujitsu, it was a much shorter learning curve, because they actually practice techniques. I can’t remember doing any form longer than about 9 moves in those classes.
IMHO forms are useless. Why do I think this? Because most martial arts have different forms for the same applications. So why even bother with forms? It just seems like a waste of time.
Amen. Forms, if anything, are money losers! I’ve lost many a student in my time because I got them into forms too soon.
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Really? I think wushu teachers would say otherwise. What do they have to teach besides forms?