Thursday, August 21, 2008

Too traditional for san shou?

The other evening I was having a discussion with one of the more senior fighters from the school where I train at about the place of traditional kung fu in competition san shou. He was of the opinion that in my particular case, that I was (inappropriately in his mind) approaching competition fighting from the stand point of a traditional kung fu practitioner. To me this seemed like a fair enough criticism based on the fact that most of my martial arts experience has been in the realms of traditional kung fu (originally chang quan and hong quan, but more recently Choy Lay Fut).

I started training san shou at the same time that I started training choy lay fut (before then I had no experience with full contact fighting, suffering from what some people would term "classroom syndrome"). The "classroom syndrome" I refer to is where one gets used to light contact fighting in an environment where one is unlikely to get injured. The danger in this is that one is tempted to over-estimate their martial skill, and as a result may end up in a dangerous situation that they are unable to truly handle. Full contact san shou was thus a breath of fresh air into my martial career, and also a bit of a wake up call for me. However, my intention was to bring my past knowledge of traditional kung fu to bear in my san shou training and I believe to a large extent I have been successful in this.

However, the fighter I was debating with seemed to feel that there should be more distinction between traditional kung fu and san shou. Now, from my chang quan days (which for me was my formative experience in martial arts) I became used to fighting from a "cat stance" / "false-leg stance" with the hands held front and centered, and this has carried over into my san shou as my preferred fighting stance. The other fighter, coming from a Choy Lay Fut background had a preferrence for a more side on almost horse (sei ping ma) like stance with the hands held in a more boxer like position with hands closer to the body typically protecting the sides of the head. I believe there are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches, and learned the hard way that no matter which approach you choose, probably the most important thing in san shou is to keep your hands up at all times.

I will probably continue this line of thinking and moving into some more in depth comparisons of ideas between what I was taught in traditional kung fu classes and what I have learned from personal experience on the lei tai.

- Nameless

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