Thursday, December 2, 2010

Kung Fu Fighting!

I'm not sure if I've mentinned this before, but I've started learning my second martial art: Wushu!
Wushu is basically a modernized version of Kung Fu.  I'd say more, but since I've only just started learning it, I'm not that comfortable with my knowledge of it.  Anyway, one of my TKD students has been practicing Wushu for years, since before learning TKD.  The other black belts and I had talked to him to see if he would be allowed/interested to teach some Wushu to the class (since we lost our home school awhile back and are therefore an "unofficial" TKD school, we decided we might as well take advantage of our situation and teach things that you wouldn't normally teach in a formal TKD school).  Anyway, he talked to his Sifu (teacher; see-foo), who gave him permission to teach us.  It was a lot of fun.  It moves very differently than TKD, and it's been a little awkward to learn so far, but I'd like to think I'm picking it up pretty well.

Here's the first form I'm learning.  My student (or teacher in this case lol) taught it a little different.  I looked through a few videos of it on youtube, and this one is the closest I could find to the way he teaches it.
Anyway, that resting stance she does? Where she's basically sitting? Yeah, that was a bitch to learn it's really awkward and hurts your knees at first.  Now that I can do it pretty well, it's kindof fun.  I like to impress people by randomly falling into it lol.
That sweeping arm movement towards the end was also really awkward to learn.  I'm learning my second form now, which I can't find a video of, mostly because my student/teacher doesn't really bother telling us the names of these forms.  He has such little confidence in his pronunciation skills with these Chinese names, that he's afraid he'll accidentally say them completely wrong.

When he teaches, I've tried calling him Sifu, but he hates it when I call him that.  He says that it's not inappropriate to call him that, he just feels weird being called that name since all of his Sifus are much older and way more experienced than him.

I really want to go to a real Wushu school.  My teacher tells me that there's a lot of stuff that he's not allowed to teach, and that you have to go to an actual school in order to learn it

3 comments:

  1. Isn't this the special technique Po used to defeat Tai Lung, the wushu finger hold? :-)

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  2. lol na. you can tell by the lack of an explosion. plus, the person clearly does not say "skadoosh" the thing that i love most about that movie is that tiger (tigress in the movie), crane, snake, monkey and mantis are all real styles of kung fu. i think leopard is also one, but i'm not 100% sure on that

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  3. You can call he "shi ge" or "da shi ge" is similar in the wushu world to "older brother" the first form is "wu bu quan" a standard form for both modern and traditional wushu....and a good foundation drill to practice throughout the rest of your time learning martial arts

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