Change in TCMA, let's do it properly

 

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 .