In Wing Chun it's very easy to get sidetracked by chisau. My sifu taught that you should spend 80% training to close the gap, only 20% on chisau. Makes sense. Problem is, chisau is the fun part. You progress quickly and start feeling like a master. Closing the gap is simultaneously frustrating and boring. Also, it requires a partner who understands long-range strikes to pressure test.
100% agree with your sifu - we (Pak Mei NYC) heavily teach gap closing and distance management. Without gap closing and distance management, people lack the tools to play long, close, or sticky. Personally, gap closing and combinations off of gap closing is the fun part for me.
Great video! When I was a kid living in the east bay California, we called the Chinese kickboxing, Chinese boxing. We didn't know any better. But we all wanted to do it. That was in the 70s. I am looking forward to more of your videos.
Another famous example of weapons systems influencing empty-handed systems is Wing Chun! Chain punching goes from situationally useful to frighteningly dangerous once knives get involved. I think you're spot-on when you talk about the focus of TMA on training the specialties. I did some Wing Chun as a kid, then found that I couldn't land anything when sparring other kids at school lol. When I started learning Muay Thai as an adult, I found that even with years and years of rust, the hand-fighting came very naturally to me. The hand-fighting then helped to inform my striking and clinching and the transitions between them. I occasionally find a new way of applying a principle or movement from Wing Chun during sparring. Opponent loves shelling up? They're giving up space and position - press their arms to their body and you have free reign to fire body shots. Opponent coming forward too much? A shovel kick can arrest their lower body movement, and with some luck you'll find them overswinging as a result. My two cents is that the issue with trying to "save" TMA is that in order to make use of Wing Chun at its full potential get and to get it to work outside of the bounds of Wing Chun, you need to spend a lot of time cross-training in something else a lot more complete and versatile (be it MMA, Muay Thai, Sanda, a grappling art etc.), and for most of us it's more practical in terms of time, energy and money to just train in the more versatile art.
@@foursix32 I don't disagree with any of your points however I would say that there are often aspects of Arts that are not trained as much because they aren't the so-called specialties or signature aspects of the art. However a lot of Chinese martial arts has very good in and out or side to side footwork that is extremely useful when walking down an opponent or trying to angle and counter.. at the end of the day those footwork related skills are a huge part of what makes a certain fighting frame viable... So in my opinion coming from a school that spent a lot of time on the footwork and sparring, I think that a different training approach could be applied using the same skill sets and you could get a very very versatile combat system out of it. I suspect given how they had to get people ramped up to fight relatively quickly back in the day that what we are seeing now as the general method of training Chinese boxing is not actually traditional but has become the orthodoxy that is actually less efficient and more meant to keep students for a while
While I’m very much an outside observer, I think the point on “training the specialties” of an art extends to the Japanese TMA, too. For a whole lot of reasons; marketing perhaps principally. But in regard to Wing Chun and needing to control ranges, I think that is difficult to hone when everyone in the room already wants to be at the same range as you. Similarly with some Japanese arts, it seems like these systems were designed with certain inputs in mind. Yet, in our modern, boxed-off environment, many of these systems suffer because they essentially are concerned with defeating themselves. Yet, again, with something like Wing Chun… that just doesn’t really seem to have been the point? Maybe I’m whiffing here. But from where I sit, I think these arts that were designed to defeat common strategies external to themselves suffer in our modern environment where most Wing Chun guys will only every train with Wing Chun guys who-go figure-kind of want similar bout conditions. Obviously, I’m not laying this all at the feet of Wing Chun. I think a lot of martial arts suffer from this-even so-called “modern” martial arts. I just think it’s very noticeable in something like Wing Chun that is very concerned with range control, but never has to learn that skill because the room is filled with practitioners who are happy to fight at Wing Chun range. This is why, in my humble opinion, these arts need to cross train so badly. That way someone can play the role of the grappler who wants to smash into ultra-close range or the long ranger fighter who wants to dance around. Otherwise, you never get the opportunity to really sharpen that fundamental skill.
@@TenguMartialArts hey I appreciate your well-thought-out comment and I will try to give you an equally well thought out response: I think on some level the training of specialties is unavoidable and the more you get good at the specialty the more specialized you get - case in point BJJ which typically lacks the wrestling game that Judo has even if it came from Judo. It means that specialty programs are designed to help you hone a specific skill within the broader context of fighting and that you definitely need to re immerse in fighting as a whole to better contextualize and deploy your specialties... And I agree with what you said, cross-training is a must if you want what you learned to be broadly applicable. 👍👍
@@TenguMartialArts many of the traditional martial arts like you said were designed to fight common external strategies that they had to go up against but since they are not going up against them as often anymore and usually just practice against one another they develop what I call an inbred training situation Now you could argue that something like Western boxing has also become this however because they have a sport that grew out of the prize fighting to accommodate and to even encouraged specialization in punching, it doesn't seem so "bad"... That said pure boxers without a variety of skills tend to not do as well in mixed martial arts, so again, to your point ☝️
I really love this explanation of Chinese Boxing and Chinese Martial Arts. Good stuff. My dream is to take a base of exclusively Chinese martial arts/Gong fu to an MMA match and win.
11:38 Why can’t they close the gap ? Coming from Taiji and Sanda having moved to Muay Thai, I noticed you don’t want to be the one closing the gap, keep the opponent at bay with jabs and front kicks and they’ll come to you 100% they’ll march forward and overextend giving themselves for a takedown or clinch.
@@Jenjak I would say that there are actually reasons to close the gap and plenty of fighters who are good at it. Usually the changing of postures, the use of fakes and feints, the use of combinations etc.etc. helps to overwhelm, shock, control, or compress the space between you and the opponent...
@@the.wandering.warrior 100% ! that's just one example from my own humble experience... but pressure fighting is a real thing too and I don't doubt there are many other strategies.
These systems were once treated as highly advanced forms of military technology, kept secret, due to their highly effective lethality and power conditioning. In 19th and 20th century China, stewards of these systems were hunted down and killed, forced into hiding, force to flee, or forced to work for the communist party. The systems openly practiced now were stripped of the higher levels of weaponization in the early 1900's in an effort to make these systems more approachable to the general public. Same thing happened with Karate. Mao wanted a cultural export and Wushu was perfect for setting up their youth to perform beautiful choreography for the world; enticing other nations with impressive performances. Southern styles became more prolific as they were visible to the western influence in Hong Kona at the time.
Oh, I have railed against that "puddle profundity" for decades now. There are SO many ways the body can move!! And different choices have profound consequences for what kinds of actions are easy and elegant, or require strain and effort...depending on what you need to do, you organize yourself in different ways!
I didn't know that's what it was called! 100% agree and in fighting there tends to be several ways to organize yourself in order to be better optimized for different types of movement... "there's only so many ways to move the body" YES, and yet, there are SO MANY ways.
@@HardHardMaster absolutely but that in and of itself doesn't help people get good. Digging into the nuances helps people actually get good at the way their body is best for or which ways best set up what they've learned... I understand what the phrase means and I understand where to use it I just find that people typically use it when it's quite unhelpful
Why do we have killing technequie in kungfu im a tiger stylist in kungfu and I notice that half of my strikes there goal is to kill some one I'm curious why they exist ?
@@AllenGray-o2z you should ask your teacher but as far as killing is concerned, if your system was more concerned with combat or self-defense then they are going to prioritize moves that would end the fight quickly by incapacitating or killing the opponent. That said as I've said before in other videos just because you have a lot of killing moves doesn't mean you cannot spar, for example a jab can be practiced instead of jamming fingers into the eyes.. and then finish on light bag work using finger jabs instead of 'safe jabs'. These things can be trained.
@@the.wandering.warrior I don't understand why do we have to kill someone in a empty hand self defense sitaution tiger kungfu some of it's technequies just Want to Rip off some ones throat in a empty self defense
@@AllenGray-o2z there are a variety of reasons and I cannot speak for the history of your art that you are training... However you need to remember that sometimes these people were in gangs, sometimes they were fighting off gangs or bandits, sometimes the form of fighting was not just to defend oneself but also to be brutal, to kill and to scare off your enemies, and there is an element of using brutal force to incapacitate enemies which in combat is practical, we also talking about an era when there was often not very effective law enforcement or that it was extremely brutal as well... And at the end of the day it was a time when many Chinese people were very comfortable with murdering one another over differences such as hometown or language, fighting over things like farmland and water and business rights... It was a very brutal and stressful time to be alive I think...
@@the.wandering.warrior That puts a lot of things into perspective, regarding how we treat these arts and our relationship to our environment. I would imagine that this is one of the reasons Dagestani fighters are ruling the upper echelons of MMA and wrestling. The environment is also part of their conditioning, in a sense.
![Lp. Сердце Вселенной #60 РОЖДЕНИЕ ЛОЛОЛОШКИ [Финал] • Майнкрафт](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/YoR0pAV9FVQ/mqdefault.jpg)
In Wing Chun it's very easy to get sidetracked by chisau. My sifu taught that you should spend 80% training to close the gap, only 20% on chisau. Makes sense. Problem is, chisau is the fun part. You progress quickly and start feeling like a master. Closing the gap is simultaneously frustrating and boring. Also, it requires a partner who understands long-range strikes to pressure test.
100% agree with your sifu - we (Pak Mei NYC) heavily teach gap closing and distance management. Without gap closing and distance management, people lack the tools to play long, close, or sticky. Personally, gap closing and combinations off of gap closing is the fun part for me.
Great video!
When I was a kid living in the east bay California, we called the Chinese kickboxing, Chinese boxing. We didn't know any better. But we all wanted to do it. That was in the 70s.
I am looking forward to more of your videos.
Another famous example of weapons systems influencing empty-handed systems is Wing Chun! Chain punching goes from situationally useful to frighteningly dangerous once knives get involved.
I think you're spot-on when you talk about the focus of TMA on training the specialties. I did some Wing Chun as a kid, then found that I couldn't land anything when sparring other kids at school lol. When I started learning Muay Thai as an adult, I found that even with years and years of rust, the hand-fighting came very naturally to me. The hand-fighting then helped to inform my striking and clinching and the transitions between them.
I occasionally find a new way of applying a principle or movement from Wing Chun during sparring. Opponent loves shelling up? They're giving up space and position - press their arms to their body and you have free reign to fire body shots. Opponent coming forward too much? A shovel kick can arrest their lower body movement, and with some luck you'll find them overswinging as a result.
My two cents is that the issue with trying to "save" TMA is that in order to make use of Wing Chun at its full potential get and to get it to work outside of the bounds of Wing Chun, you need to spend a lot of time cross-training in something else a lot more complete and versatile (be it MMA, Muay Thai, Sanda, a grappling art etc.), and for most of us it's more practical in terms of time, energy and money to just train in the more versatile art.
@@foursix32 I don't disagree with any of your points however I would say that there are often aspects of Arts that are not trained as much because they aren't the so-called specialties or signature aspects of the art. However a lot of Chinese martial arts has very good in and out or side to side footwork that is extremely useful when walking down an opponent or trying to angle and counter.. at the end of the day those footwork related skills are a huge part of what makes a certain fighting frame viable... So in my opinion coming from a school that spent a lot of time on the footwork and sparring, I think that a different training approach could be applied using the same skill sets and you could get a very very versatile combat system out of it. I suspect given how they had to get people ramped up to fight relatively quickly back in the day that what we are seeing now as the general method of training Chinese boxing is not actually traditional but has become the orthodoxy that is actually less efficient and more meant to keep students for a while
Also I'm glad you've find usefulness in wing Chun 👍
While I’m very much an outside observer, I think the point on “training the specialties” of an art extends to the Japanese TMA, too. For a whole lot of reasons; marketing perhaps principally.
But in regard to Wing Chun and needing to control ranges, I think that is difficult to hone when everyone in the room already wants to be at the same range as you. Similarly with some Japanese arts, it seems like these systems were designed with certain inputs in mind. Yet, in our modern, boxed-off environment, many of these systems suffer because they essentially are concerned with defeating themselves. Yet, again, with something like Wing Chun… that just doesn’t really seem to have been the point?
Maybe I’m whiffing here. But from where I sit, I think these arts that were designed to defeat common strategies external to themselves suffer in our modern environment where most Wing Chun guys will only every train with Wing Chun guys who-go figure-kind of want similar bout conditions.
Obviously, I’m not laying this all at the feet of Wing Chun. I think a lot of martial arts suffer from this-even so-called “modern” martial arts. I just think it’s very noticeable in something like Wing Chun that is very concerned with range control, but never has to learn that skill because the room is filled with practitioners who are happy to fight at Wing Chun range. This is why, in my humble opinion, these arts need to cross train so badly. That way someone can play the role of the grappler who wants to smash into ultra-close range or the long ranger fighter who wants to dance around. Otherwise, you never get the opportunity to really sharpen that fundamental skill.
@@TenguMartialArts hey I appreciate your well-thought-out comment and I will try to give you an equally well thought out response: I think on some level the training of specialties is unavoidable and the more you get good at the specialty the more specialized you get - case in point BJJ which typically lacks the wrestling game that Judo has even if it came from Judo. It means that specialty programs are designed to help you hone a specific skill within the broader context of fighting and that you definitely need to re immerse in fighting as a whole to better contextualize and deploy your specialties... And I agree with what you said, cross-training is a must if you want what you learned to be broadly applicable. 👍👍
@@TenguMartialArts many of the traditional martial arts like you said were designed to fight common external strategies that they had to go up against but since they are not going up against them as often anymore and usually just practice against one another they develop what I call an inbred training situation
Now you could argue that something like Western boxing has also become this however because they have a sport that grew out of the prize fighting to accommodate and to even encouraged specialization in punching, it doesn't seem so "bad"... That said pure boxers without a variety of skills tend to not do as well in mixed martial arts, so again, to your point ☝️
Awesome content, brother!
@@Ryuuken21 🙏
I really love this explanation of Chinese Boxing and Chinese Martial Arts. Good stuff.
My dream is to take a base of exclusively Chinese martial arts/Gong fu to an MMA match and win.
In "self-defense" the assailant closes the gap. The defender's response is more like an ambush.
@@danielkaspar4572 exactly! 💯
Cebu City mentioned!
@@johnl2648 PILIPPINES 🇵🇭 PILIPPINES
11:38 Why can’t they close the gap ? Coming from Taiji and Sanda having moved to Muay Thai, I noticed you don’t want to be the one closing the gap, keep the opponent at bay with jabs and front kicks and they’ll come to you 100% they’ll march forward and overextend giving themselves for a takedown or clinch.
Except if hey are better than you at this game… then you’re f***ed 😅
@@Jenjak I would say that there are actually reasons to close the gap and plenty of fighters who are good at it. Usually the changing of postures, the use of fakes and feints, the use of combinations etc.etc. helps to overwhelm, shock, control, or compress the space between you and the opponent...
@@the.wandering.warrior 100% ! that's just one example from my own humble experience... but pressure fighting is a real thing too and I don't doubt there are many other strategies.
Butt scoot into your opponent is the latest style.
@@JettoGospel 😂
@@the.wandering.warrior yes funny but unfortunately true.
These systems were once treated as highly advanced forms of military technology, kept secret, due to their highly effective lethality and power conditioning. In 19th and 20th century China, stewards of these systems were hunted down and killed, forced into hiding, force to flee, or forced to work for the communist party. The systems openly practiced now were stripped of the higher levels of weaponization in the early 1900's in an effort to make these systems more approachable to the general public. Same thing happened with Karate. Mao wanted a cultural export and Wushu was perfect for setting up their youth to perform beautiful choreography for the world; enticing other nations with impressive performances. Southern styles became more prolific as they were visible to the western influence in Hong Kona at the time.
Oh, I have railed against that "puddle profundity" for decades now. There are SO many ways the body can move!! And different choices have profound consequences for what kinds of actions are easy and elegant, or require strain and effort...depending on what you need to do, you organize yourself in different ways!
I didn't know that's what it was called! 100% agree and in fighting there tends to be several ways to organize yourself in order to be better optimized for different types of movement... "there's only so many ways to move the body" YES, and yet, there are SO MANY ways.
What's meant by it is there's only so many ways joints can be manipulated and only so many ways to punch or kick.
@@HardHardMaster absolutely but that in and of itself doesn't help people get good. Digging into the nuances helps people actually get good at the way their body is best for or which ways best set up what they've learned... I understand what the phrase means and I understand where to use it I just find that people typically use it when it's quite unhelpful
Why do we have killing technequie in kungfu im a tiger stylist in kungfu and I notice that half of my strikes there goal is to kill some one I'm curious why they exist ?
@@AllenGray-o2z you should ask your teacher but as far as killing is concerned, if your system was more concerned with combat or self-defense then they are going to prioritize moves that would end the fight quickly by incapacitating or killing the opponent. That said as I've said before in other videos just because you have a lot of killing moves doesn't mean you cannot spar, for example a jab can be practiced instead of jamming fingers into the eyes.. and then finish on light bag work using finger jabs instead of 'safe jabs'. These things can be trained.
@@the.wandering.warrior I don't understand why do we have to kill someone in a empty hand self defense sitaution tiger kungfu some of it's technequies just Want to Rip off some ones throat in a empty self defense
@@AllenGray-o2z there are a variety of reasons and I cannot speak for the history of your art that you are training... However you need to remember that sometimes these people were in gangs, sometimes they were fighting off gangs or bandits, sometimes the form of fighting was not just to defend oneself but also to be brutal, to kill and to scare off your enemies, and there is an element of using brutal force to incapacitate enemies which in combat is practical, we also talking about an era when there was often not very effective law enforcement or that it was extremely brutal as well... And at the end of the day it was a time when many Chinese people were very comfortable with murdering one another over differences such as hometown or language, fighting over things like farmland and water and business rights... It was a very brutal and stressful time to be alive I think...
@@the.wandering.warrior That puts a lot of things into perspective, regarding how we treat these arts and our relationship to our environment. I would imagine that this is one of the reasons Dagestani fighters are ruling the upper echelons of MMA and wrestling. The environment is also part of their conditioning, in a sense.