Martial Arts Wudan
Can anyone give me advice on studying kung fu in china?
I’m looking at going to china for a year to study kung fu on Wudan Mountain, iv’e done other martial arts before but would like to hear whats its like from someone whos done something simmilar
youngaristotle3 – are you taoist yourself or are you just studying the martial art purley, lol and thanks for the correction, i never new it was actualy called gong fu.
I’m doing something similar to that. My gong fu teacher is from Wu Dang, and my sister and I, along with some other students of my father, are studying from him. It’s hard the first few, well, weeks! Don’t stop! Don’t take a break longer than a day! We just took a three day break and started again, and we wanted to barf our guts out. Well, not trying to scare you off, sorry. You have your basic hard core training: frog jumps, splits, duck walk, kicks (oh yes, lots of kicks), and forms! Forms are fun, but time-consuming if you don’t pay close attention, and I mean close attention. But if you got a can-do, lets-go attitude, and don’t wimp out like us, you’ll do fine. Hope you do well on Wudang.
Wudang Kung Fu Ji ben Chuan or Wudang Kung Fu Basic Fist Set
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Wudang Taijiquan (Tai Chi Chuan) 108 Form – YMAA $27.99 … |
He Was Crazy…And He Studied Korean Karate With Me.
[I:http://www.aikido-judo-karate.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/AlCase7.gif]I doubt whether most schools, be they Kung Fu or Wudan or Aikido or whatever, have ever had a crazy guy in their school like Mud Car. We called him Mud Car because that’s what it said on the license plate on his car.That car, more than anything else, summed up Mud Car.
He had tied parachute webbing across the insides of his car because he felt that that material was best for holding his car together on the inside. He had fire extinguishers fastened to every surface on the inside of his car. He had a dial on his dashboard to give extra power to his tail lights, and he turned it whenever he faced away from the sun so that drivers behind him could see when he braked.
This was just the surface of Mud Car, though. The most impressive thing that Mud Car did was commit to memory the times of all the stop lights in the whole town of San Jose. He could travel across that large town without ever having to stop for a light.
Unfortunately, when it came to the karate, he was just as crazy. He couldn’t stretch his limbs, couldn’t control what his body was going to do, and, because of this lack of control, it hurt to work out with him. Just being in his presence you could feel the firecrackers in his mind exploding into the universe.
One day he interrupted the instructor to complain about a pain in his leg. “It doesn’t hurt me that much, but it keeps nagging at me, do you know how to make the pain in my leg go away?” My instructor looked at me with murder in his eyes, I suppose he didn’t want to look at Mud Car because he would kill him, and he blurted, “Hit your leg with a lead pipe…that’ll make the pain go away.”
I suppose the ability to drive other people insane is the deciding point in this matter of whether a person is goofy or not. Because of this Mud Car never made it to Black Belt. He just didn’t have the mental maturity that is the mark of a black belt.
One day, however, a new instructor came to the school, and Mud Car was promoted to Black Belt within a month…and then he left the school. He had achieved his goal, and that was all he wanted, and the new instructor knew that was the best and most efficient way to get rid of Mud Car. Yet, I missed Mud Car.
He was crazy, but so is the guy who attacks you on the street, so if you could last a session with Mud Car without getting injured, you knew your art was effective. Furthermore, there was a shift of standard here, for Mud Car was promoted because he could drive people nuts, not because he was good. Finally, I think that is where the True Art started disappearing…schools, even schools like Tae Kwon Do or Kenpo or classical karate, did not administer soothing discipline to the insane, they just promoted them to get rid of them.
If you want to go crazy through the martial arts…drop on by Punch ‘Em Out. If you want to go sane through the martial arts…try Monster Martial Arts. 2
How a Study of Speed Relates to Good and Rare Martial Arts
[I:http://www.aikido-judo-karate.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/AlCase11.jpg]Whether you study Karate, Kung Fu, or that rare martial art from Faroutistan, speed is vitally important to the martial arts. If you are going to be successful in freestyle, you must be faster than your opponent. Even in the doing of your forms, speed gives a certain efficiency that is necessary to the successful martial artist.
That said, there is another way of looking at this subject of speed, a way which embraces the entire martial arts and is the mark of your progress over the decades. This is a side which relates to the speed of what is happening inside your head and in your day to day life. I am talking about the speed at which your art is conducted.
The beginner is blown out by the fun of the martial arts, and he races breakneck through his forms. He spends hours tweaking his form, studying the angles of his limb so as to maximize speed of launch. Usually, this process takes about three years, but it can take longer, or lesser, depending on the individual and the art he is studying.
Remember when I remarked about spending hours going over your form? This is the beginning of the middle student, this is where he first starts to understand that the art is more than just good times and gotcha, but a real live window into the soul and potentials of humanity that were hitherto undreamed of. This is the start of developing self awareness, and this is where the student first starts going slower and starts looking at what he is actually practicing.
This middle level is worked on by all of the hard artists, they spend hours doing their forms and studying how to be efficient in motion, and motion eventually reduces to a virtual study of Tai Chi Chuan. Whether the student engages in actual Tai Chi, or just slows his movements down so he can best examine and fix them, is beside the point. What is important is that the student is actually looking and perceiving, not just doing mindlessly.
Awareness you see is an a funny item. Anybody can become aware through the simple process of looking. Thus, this thing called awareness is free, and it is the point to all life.
Without awareness life could not be. Or, one could say that life is relative to the degree of awareness that the looker builds. Thus, the value of the martial arts, as they go at ever slower rates, is that they create more and more opportunity for looking.
That all said, I do not recommend stopping your studies of speed until you, personally, have reached a point which is satisfactory and obvious to you. Live, go fast luxuriously, for you should give full throttle to all stages of learning the how to of combat, even and not matter if you are studying a rare martial art. One should not give up youth to old age.
Al Case has studied martial arts over more than 4O+ plus years, and he is not slowing down. Come on over to Monster Martial Arts and find his free ebook. Or, better yet, head over to Five Army Tai Chi Chuan and see him put out a candle from over a foot away.
