CHANGE IT UP!

 By Phillip Starr

A while back, one of my senior students was practicing with a group of other martial artists from various styles. One of them had been training in a popular southern form of gong-fu and my student tried to practice basic 1-step fighting with him. The hapless fellow had a lot of difficulty deflecting a quick reverse punch and a lunge punch devastated him. “That’s not how we do it”, he said. “We stand in front of each other and don’t drive in.” And as I later explained to my student, that was the problem. “That kind of practice teaches them to defend against persons trained in their style, but it’s very difficult for them if the person comes from another style…or no ‘style’ at all, as in the case of boxers or just ordinary streetfighters,” I told him.

Unfortunately, this same thing is exactly what most of us (traditional martial artists) do; when we practice applying our defensive techniques; the attackers fire out straight punches as they’ve been taught to do…which is nothing like what they’ll encounter on the street. So, why did our forefather practice in that way? The main reason is that it gave the aggressor additional practice with his basic techniques. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line REALISM was tossed by the wayside.

Nowadays, most “traditional” schools have their students engage in 1-step fighting in which the attacker employs ONLY traditional technique. The receiver learns to defend herself against such attacks, which of course, she’ll never see in the street. And believe me, the application of basic blocks/parries is considerably different when applied against boxing-type attacks. Because I taught my students how to do this, I was labeled as “untraditional” many years ago. I reminded the naysayers that our forefathers were PRAGMATIC and trained in the same way many moons ago.

If we hope to teach students how to survive on the street, it’s essential that we do this. To the instructors out there – if you don’t know how to do it, don’t get flustered…go outside the box and LEARN! Then pass what you learn on to your students!