Chinese
martial arts started to change. Under the influence of full contact
competitions in which Kung Fu people started to participate, at first in extremely
low numbers, but as time passes, we can see more and more people are engaging
in those kinds of competitions. As a rule, kung fu practitioners performed very
badly in those encounters. It became
obvious that so called traditional martial arts have little to no martial value
and they became pure art forms.
Why
and how old fighting systems became completely useless in modern day
competition arena was explained in some of the previous articles. What became obvious
to everyone involved in full contact competition is that focus in training in traditional
martial is not compatible with fighting training. Facing this simple truth many
changes started to happen in TCMA community. People started to question
everything, even the untouchable “masters” of the old. Of course this process
is slow and there are still a lot of people locked in all that “tradition”, “original
style”, “pure lineage” and other things used for more than a century to justify
and cover lack of real martial training. On the other hand more people realize the
truth about their previous training and they not only start to question everything
but also begin to change their training approach and focus. While that is certainly a good thing there are
few points we have to be aware of in order to preserve traditional martial arts
in all their fullness of content.
First
thing we have to have in mind is that not all people practice kung fu for
fighting. They are drawn to kung fu for other reasons like health, fitness,
tradition, ect. For these people, training certainly shouldn’t be fighting oriented.
When
we talk about fighting oriented training there is one thing we should be aware.
Over time I have noticed that, fighting training in TCMA looks exactly the same
as in boxing, kick boxing and Thai boxing. These arts were developing and
improving their training approach for a long time in the direction of creating
good fighters. While I do think it is important to learn from these arts
because they have a lot longer experience and have explored many different ways
of training in order to achieve good fighting results, I don’t think it is wise
to copy them completely.
Adopting
training approach is one thing, copying the complete system is something else.
It is easy to fall in the trap of copying these styles because they do offer simpler
and apparently more effective solutions. As rule, kung fu people who work
toward improving their fighting approach, copy kick boxing or boxing completely
not only in training but also in techniques. While I do respect full contact
sports and never have doubt in their efficiency, I do think that TCMA should
develop their own repertoire of full contact techniques based in TCMA foundation
principles of body structure and power generation. We also have to make a clear
distinction between sports fighting and self defense. Sports fighting reinforce
one dangerous belief. In sports fighting, professional athletes get hit many
times, thus people believe that taking a punch in a real fight is something
like a norm. We have to be aware that in sports fighting people who engage the
a match are pretty much equal in terms of physical traits and skills. In random
act of violence there is very little chance that we will encounter someone who
is equal to us in any way. Getting hit, even once can be a death sentence. And
here we come to the point of blocking. While blocking in sports fighting, due
to protective gear and lack of weapons is pretty much ineffective, in real
fight blocking can save your life.
What
we should do is to save the technical content of TCMA in its entirety and
simply adopt better training systems that will allow us to use our traditional styles to their full potential .
