chinese martial arts

You are currently browsing articles tagged chinese martial arts.

UFC® 104: Rogan breaks down Velasquez vs. Rothwell

Cain Velasquez in the Octagon

YouTube has a lot of great martial arts videos these days. And it’s interesting to see all of the “I’d like to see that guy in the octagon” comments. Or, “you have to wonder how’d they do in a UFC bout”.

I think we are losing track of the many different reasons people decide to study martial arts.  We may also be losing track of who our possible opponents might be.

If you want to be successful in the octagon then you better be strong, fast, fit and trained in a well balanced assortment of martial arts before you even step foot inside.  That’s the current pinnacle of martial gladiators.  If gladiatorship is your goal, then follow that path.

If kicking and punching is your thing, just about any martial art can help.

If increasing your power, peace of mind and a healthy body interest you, along with punching and kicking and self defense, then one would do well to consider studying Tai Chi or Ba Gua from a qualified instructor.  Internal martial arts like Tai Chi can certainly help a mixed martial artist or any kind of athlete with concepts like “rooting”, “fa jin”, and “tai chi body”.

If surviving in a tough part of town against armed opponents is your goal, well, martial arts can help, but I haven’t seen Iron Shirt chi kung stop a bullet, so that’s an entirely different requirement that martial arts can’t entirely remedy.

Most likely, any person you’d have to defend yourself against with your martial arts, is going to be under the influence of alcohol with not a lot of training.  Octagon level fitness, strength, speed and skill aren’t required to stop drunken Joe at the local pub.  Fortunately, many of the people with a lot of training have learned self-control and discipline along with their martial arts, so you’re not likely going to face a highly skilled martial artist in the street.

If a person you have to defend yourself from has studied some martial arts, then you start to measure fitness, speed, strength, depth of study, type of martial art, etc to differentiate who is the better fighter and who is going to win the confrontation.  By the way, if your fight lasts longer than 30 seconds that person knows at least as much as you do.

However, if you even have to throw a punch, in a sense you’ve already lost — lost control of the situation and anything could happen.  My goal is always to control the situation like one of my old teachers did in this blog post:  Last Fight. For me, free beer from an adversary without throwing a punch is the ultimate victory!

So, for all of you who look at martial arts and artists on YouTube, and think, it looks good, but how would they do in the octagon, the answer to that is probably they wouldn’t do well.  And that’s okay.  That’s likely not their goal.  Their goal is likely to improve their health, to be able to keep themselves and their families safer for having martial arts and to share what they’ve learned.

Practice hard,

David

September 25, 2009 by David | 4 comments

Throughout martial arts circles, you’ll often see and hear debates about grappling and ground fighting. In one recent example, a Wing Chun proponent talked about some grappling moves in Wing Chun (WC).

A Brazilian Ju Jitsu (BJJ) person immediately went on and said that’s not grappling. Grappling has sweeps and counters and holds, etc. that clearly were not part of what was what the WC person was talking about. He went on and on about how there is no grappling in WC.

In my opinion, it’s all in the definition or semantics. To me, the BJJ person’s definition sounded more like “ground fighting” than “grappling”. It sounded like he was describing BJJ. It sounded like the BJJ person was saying, if it’s not BJJ, it’s not grappling.

Perhaps one needs to look at the word grapple, and it’s definition (from Dictionary.com): to seize another, or each other, in a firm grip, as in wrestling; clinch.

By this definition, grapple, or grappling, stands aside a bit from ground fighting. Does Wing Chun have movements where one “seizes another in a firm grip”? Sure. Is Wing Chun ground fighting? Heck no. Are there throws and grappling in Ba Gua, Tai Chi and most Chinese martial arts? Absolutely.

However, if one wanted to focus on grappling and ground fighting in Chinese martial arts, I think someone would need to study Chin Na (locks) and Shuai Chaio (wrestling) to get close to Judo, JJ or BJJ. Interestingly, Robert Smith in his book “Chinese Boxing: Masters and Methods” wasn’t very impressed with how Shuai Chaio people on Taiwan stood up against his Judo. He said the art had stopped evolving where Judo hadn’t.

I found an interesting post in a forum by a guy who has studied both of the Chinese arts above and has tried them against some BJJ guys with only limited success. Again, we have no way of knowing if this guy is any good or if the BJJ guys he’s going against are any good, but it’s an interesting perspective on the topic and he sounds like he knows what he’s talking about:

Yeah, I do shuai chiao. Its basically wrestling. I also do chin na, which is pretty much kung fu submissions…leg locks, wrist locks, kneebars, armbars, chokes, etc. Sorta like judo or sambo but without the wrestling (which is why you need the shuai chiao background as a supplement!). Most kung fu schools only do standing wrist locks for chin na, though.

I can usually beat bjj blue belts about 50% of the time on a good day, but I have a lot of trouble with bjj purple belts. Been grappling in kung fu for about a year, but have been doing chin na and kung fu without the shuai chiao wrestling for about 7 years.

The chin na and chinese wrestling combination works well in the street. Probably not more effective than judo or bjj or whatever in mma competition, but it does work in the street. Comparitively, its pretty unorthodox, almost Sakuraba-esque, so it is possible to catch intermediate level grapplers with some subs, but I definately get my ass handed to me almost every time I roll with bjj brown belts.

Also, not all kung fu schools grapple. In fact, most don’t. Kung fu grapplers are at a disadvantage right off the bat. A lot of schools already teach a metric ****ton of material anyway. Add on weapons, all the damn chinese names and translations and different pronunciations and spellings, internal sytems, chi gong, etc. to the classic stand up kung fu in addition to TWO styles to learn to grapple effectively, it can get a little hectic to keep up with, especially when you’re trying to concentrate on your san da/san shou skills too.

You gotta understand that the shaolin temples weren’t teaching just thier own stuff. In fact, a great deal of the material taught there was from elsewhere. Thier whole philosophy was if it works, we’ll use it. So you wind up with hundreds of styles being practiced there and picked apart and analyzed and refined, some kinda suck, others kick a lot of ass.
But yeah, there’s grappling in kung fu.

The thread goes on a bit if your interested in reading it: http://www.subfighter.com/forum/viewtopic.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=19326

There you have my two cents on the difference between grappling, ground fighting and the Chinese martial arts that focus on these elements.

Ciao amici,

David

September 30, 2007 by David | 3 comments