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Those of you who are familiar with me may remember that I practiced Hung Gar Tiger/Crane kung fu for several years. There were a number of things about the style that I like, and I did learn a lot of useful things at that school, but in this thread I will explain why it is a very impractical way to learn to fight.
To start off it is horribly bloated with techniques. There are many low-percentage wrist locks and implausible kicks (among other things) that simply do not work against a resisting opponent. In addition the techniques are presented in dozens of (frequently redundant) combat applications that must be memorized. This requires the student not only to learn how to do the throw, lock strike or whatever, but also to learn the choreography of the application. The result of this is that the student must spend hour after hour of training time learning low-percentage moves and irrelevant choreography in order to practice the portion of the curriculum that could conceivably be applied in an actual confrontation.
Another problem is that the traditional weapons forms are required. No one uses spears, broad swords or chain whips in the modern day. Even if people did there is no actual fencing or sparring done with these weapons; just forms. This aspect of the training is only useful for impressing people who don't practice martial arts in demonstrations yet it accounts for a huge percentage of the curriculum.
In addition the forms are freqeuntly counter-productive For one thing the motions in kung fu forms frequently have so little in common with the technique they are meant to represent as to be of no use in learning the actual technique. Even worse though students are required to memorize stagnant sequences that may last several minutes. This is choreography and while it's of great benefit to dancers to the martial artist it is nothing but a work out at the best of times(if you're lucky, it's not always strenuous enough to count) and frequently is nothing but busy work. These forms were invented to teach students to fight, but now they have become the end goal; students no longer care if they can fight so long as they can perform the sets to their teacher's satisfaction.
Even more than the nuts and bolts of the system I'd like to address the attitude of the people I was training with. When I got to the school there were many serious athletes, but as time went on those of us who were athletic and wanted to learn to fight drifted away from the school due to the problems I listed above. After a while most of my classmates were either very young or out of shaped middle aged people. They were not motivated to push their conditioning and they had no intention of ever getting hit. This meant that I had no one to work with that could give me a challenging sparring match- and my teacher told me as much when I pressed him on why I hadn't gotten a chance to spar in so long. In fact when I would speak up about wanting to spar I was told that I just wanted to show off and that I had a big ego- my current coaches praise my work ethic for wanting to practice. This may be the single biggest reason why I won't be going back.
To start off it is horribly bloated with techniques. There are many low-percentage wrist locks and implausible kicks (among other things) that simply do not work against a resisting opponent. In addition the techniques are presented in dozens of (frequently redundant) combat applications that must be memorized. This requires the student not only to learn how to do the throw, lock strike or whatever, but also to learn the choreography of the application. The result of this is that the student must spend hour after hour of training time learning low-percentage moves and irrelevant choreography in order to practice the portion of the curriculum that could conceivably be applied in an actual confrontation.
Another problem is that the traditional weapons forms are required. No one uses spears, broad swords or chain whips in the modern day. Even if people did there is no actual fencing or sparring done with these weapons; just forms. This aspect of the training is only useful for impressing people who don't practice martial arts in demonstrations yet it accounts for a huge percentage of the curriculum.
In addition the forms are freqeuntly counter-productive For one thing the motions in kung fu forms frequently have so little in common with the technique they are meant to represent as to be of no use in learning the actual technique. Even worse though students are required to memorize stagnant sequences that may last several minutes. This is choreography and while it's of great benefit to dancers to the martial artist it is nothing but a work out at the best of times(if you're lucky, it's not always strenuous enough to count) and frequently is nothing but busy work. These forms were invented to teach students to fight, but now they have become the end goal; students no longer care if they can fight so long as they can perform the sets to their teacher's satisfaction.
Even more than the nuts and bolts of the system I'd like to address the attitude of the people I was training with. When I got to the school there were many serious athletes, but as time went on those of us who were athletic and wanted to learn to fight drifted away from the school due to the problems I listed above. After a while most of my classmates were either very young or out of shaped middle aged people. They were not motivated to push their conditioning and they had no intention of ever getting hit. This meant that I had no one to work with that could give me a challenging sparring match- and my teacher told me as much when I pressed him on why I hadn't gotten a chance to spar in so long. In fact when I would speak up about wanting to spar I was told that I just wanted to show off and that I had a big ego- my current coaches praise my work ethic for wanting to practice. This may be the single biggest reason why I won't be going back.
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