angryclown
Jingang
This guy's been around for quite a while. I got the impression that he went to China or Taiwan, he got what he got, and just kind of does his thing. While I don't necessarily love his gongfu, he doesn't seem to be an outright bullshitter like a lot of the folks that come up.
No he is not the worst, not even close, and I did not get any sense he was full of shit either. It's just, this stuff has already been created and structure-mapped. It looks like he (or whoever he got it from) just tried to invent it out of an idea rather than any lineage or structure. He has an idea but no particular line of power (jin) going through the body at all. That being missing we could say "oh no big deal, hell find it" but he won't. The dedicated practice that does not have that is a detriment to even finding anything like that because it endlessly re-patterns the lack of it.
This stuff is already well mapped out in XYQ and Chen Taijiquan.
angryclown
Jingang
I read it more as a devolution of technique that's easy to fall into as an art gets further and further from actual fighting usage. Like weight shifting to generate power is great, but if you can shift your weight to generate power, then fajin driven by shefa is not really necessary. Fajin by itself is great, but if you have to shift weight to generate it, then it's too slow and takes too much room, which again kind of negates the purpose of short power. But separating them is hard and counter-intuitive, so without the impetus of context-specific fighting it's easy to lose sight of the purpose and drift to something easier.
Six of one, half a dozen of the other, I suppose.
Six of one, half a dozen of the other, I suppose.
That reads accurate. For most of these arts there is no real lineage left. That in combination with no longer any of the original combative theater means it can all erode to dust, but that is after it oxidizes and is hollowed out.
angryclown
Jingang
One of my self defense teachers talked about how all training is flawed-- if the goal of martial arts is to hurt people, and you're not hurting your training partners, then there are deliberate "flaws" in your training that you need to be aware of. Once you're aware of the flaws, you should be deliberate about which flaws you're introducing into your practice so that you're not inadvertently making yourself ineffective should the time come to ever actually use the stuff.
This is part of the reason I try not to be too critical of stuff I see without knowing the context; however, based on the description in this video, it does seem like these guys are unaware of the flaws they're putting into their applications for the sake of practice, and as a result I think it has problems (as evidenced by the times when the teacher stops to explain something and the student continues punching the air). Distance matters, and is probably not one of the areas that should be easily compromised in application practice.
This is part of the reason I try not to be too critical of stuff I see without knowing the context; however, based on the description in this video, it does seem like these guys are unaware of the flaws they're putting into their applications for the sake of practice, and as a result I think it has problems (as evidenced by the times when the teacher stops to explain something and the student continues punching the air). Distance matters, and is probably not one of the areas that should be easily compromised in application practice.
