Hi everyone, I study under Master Lee in Dallas and was wondering if anyone had any tips for how to keep your legs perpendicular when doing a staff horse stance. I can't get the staff to rest on my legs w/o me holding it. Does anyone know any tricks?
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- Current Mood
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sore
i wonder if any of you can offer any insight into a recurring injury of mine. basically, i have a small tear on the bottom of my right foot that continues to re-open. it seems to be aggravated by twisting my right foot against the floor with the ankle twist that accompanies a straight right hand boxing punch. seen a doctor--- basically recommends that i keep it bandaged throughout practice, so that it does not re-open.
healing is slowed by virtue of my working out barefoot on these very frictiony plastic mats that the tae kwon do people installed into my university's practice room. the TKD club also tells us to work out barefoot because they say that shoes will tear up their mat. it's kinda irritating; my feet are getting more callused, which is nice, but this one tiny but annoying injury has been with me consistently.
oh, and my sifu recommends athletic tape, which does work but tends to bunch up the bottom of my floor and screw with my balance, so i'll usually just rip it off partway throught the workout and ignore the cut. possibly i just don't know how to apply the tape correctly; how does one use it to bandage the bottom of a foot on which one will be working out barefoot?
anyone have any insight into my experience they care to share?
Hello, it's exciting to find other MJLH'ers out there! I used to study under sifu Henry Su in Irving Texas. I got my white belt from Lee's White Leopard in Dallas, but I couldn't take classes there for reasons I'll elaborate on momentarily. My friend David studies there under master Lee, I'll see if I can introduce him here, as he's more knowledgable about the style than I am.
It's hard to say how experienced I am. I have a uniquely terrible physical memory and found myself extremely frustrated by how slowly I progressed as the forms became more complex. My strength, my speed, my coordination and my sparring ability were progressing much faster than my ability to memorize the forms. For this reason, and for the lack of a budget that allowed for membership at Lee's White Leopard, I had to discontinue officially studying MJLH after I got my white belt (which hilariously happened after two or three years of studying. I had been studying in a class at a community college under sifu Henry and didn't have the money to go to Lee's White Leopard and actually get belted for some time.)
I've continued other aspects of training and though I haven't been as disciplined as I would be at a school, I feel that I have progressed over the last year or so by myself. As far as sparring goes, on a bad night, David, a green belt, can confidently defeat me, on a good night I can keep up with Daniel, a third degree black belt. So I'm unsure as to what belt I would be, if it weren't for my terrible physical memory and lack of budget.
I guess that's enough about me. I look forward to seeing what goes on here.
Got my yellow belt on Nov. 19th. I'm pretty jazzed, because for quite some time I felt that would be the first real test of my skills. We started by holding horse stance for 2.5 minutes, went through various punch- ridge hand combinations, did 2-step sidekick, hook kick, and stance punching. At the end we broke boards (pine, heel thrusting kick) did our forms and sparred some.
This past saturday Brandon Kung Fu held an eagle claw seminar entitled "The Principles of Pain." My how accurate that title was. I was a couple hours late (I tried calling to find out when I was supposed to be there, but no one answered.) but still learned a lot about joint locking, and causing maximum pain through minimum effort. Sifu Kenny, Sifu Dean and Sifu Stephan did an awesome job of it.
The coolest part of the seminar was when another student asked him about using chin-na from a ground position such as the Guard. Sifu Kenny happily complied by getting on his back, prompting the student to take the mount, and throw a few punches. Despite Sifu Dean's chiding that they should "get a room!" the student did as told. Sifu Kenny blocked the punches, and through some impossibly quick manner of twising and contorting he locked the student's arms and took the mount- not just a guard escape, but a guard REVERSAL. At which point a student joked "Sifu Kenny 16 seconds by submission!"
All in all, it was a very enlightening class :)
yesterday, i slept through both my first class and a lunch date. the resulting mood inspired me to about an hour of upper-body weight training, which i hadn't tried since starting to learn mjlh a year and a half or so ago. i had given up on the weights because kung fu left me too sore. interestingly, yesterday i wasn't able to lift very much, but didn't feel very sore.
any advice on how lifting can be integrated into mjlh?
My teacher's dont always know the translations for the forms, so i went looking on my own. Here's what i have found for translations of the 10 jing woo forms. The list of names is in mandarin, though i think most of us learn them in cantonese (in brackets). The translations are not the final word or anything, its just what i could find from various sources on the web. If anyone has any teacher input to provide (first or second hand), its more than welcome.
In general, Quan or Kuen can be translated as either Fist or Boxing, though the meaning is generally used as "set of movements" or "Form".
Tan Tui (Tum Toy, Tam Toy)- Tan's legs, Tan's kicks, springing legs
Gong Li Quan (Kune Lek Kuen) - Work-strength fist, martial power fist, power training fist, strength boxing
Jie Quan (Jeet Kuen) - section boxing, weaving fist, quick fist form, connecting fist, intercepting boxing
Da Zhan (Dai ? )- big battle fist
Qun Yang Gun, Hu Pua Qun Yang Gun (? ? ? Gwun)- shepherd's staff, sheep flocking pole, shepherding staff, tiger striking sheep flocks staff
Wu Hu Qiang/Qing (Ng Fu Cheong) - 5 Tiger Spear
Ba Gua Dao (Baag Gwaa Do) - 8 trigram sabre
Tao Quan - combination fighting set (2 person form)
Jie Tan Tui - Tan Tui sparring
Dan Dao Chuan Qiang - sabre vs spear
Again, these are only what i could find on the web, but maybe they are helpful. Here's the names of some of the other forms i know of. (not in the 10)
Chang Quan (Chun Kuen)- Long Fist
Beng Bu Quan (Bung Bo Kuen)- crushing step boxing, Burst stepping boxing, crush step, advancing step
Mei Hua Jian (Moy Far Gim, Mui Faa Gim) - plum flower sword, plum blossom sword.
Enjoy!
it's wonderful to meet you all. i've been studying this style for about a year now through the university of southern california kung fu club under the guidance of sifu mar elepano and plan to continue.
hello!
Hey guys, i just thought id introduce myself, though you may have seen me on the martial artists forum already. I've done mjlh for about 3.5 years now, with a club in peterborough ontario.
If you look at that lineage tree link you have, you'll see that it dies close to the top with Chao Sifu in toronto, as he is retired. Well, my teacher's teacher was a student of his, so its not actually dead (though i dont know if its an 'official' branch or not. My teacher has a helluva lot of knowledge stored in there but i dont know if he was actually given the complete lineage etc. Nor do i much care, since i have decades of learning before he runs out of stuff to show me)
You guys mentioned the forms you were doing a while back, so i thought id elaborate on what i have learned, and in what order (approx). ignore the spellings and sound it out; i know they arent properly spelled.
1. Guen li kuen (translation? This was our first form. Love the jumping punch towards the ground, dont you?)
2. Chun kuen ('long fist'? its about 2.5 times the length of guen li kuen)
3. 2 person form #1 (fairly short, about 12 or so moves total for both sides)
4. Bung bo ('advancing step'? - its a short mantis style form)
5. Seroyuen ('small circular fist'?? a very fun form, with a sweep, a hurricane kick, and lots of neat combos)
6. Staff form (dont recall the name, its a very long form, like 1.25 chun kuen's)
7. Moy Fa Gim ('plum flower sword' or maybe 'plum blossom sword'), its fairly short, like the length of the mantis form, and uses the straight 2 edge sword.
8. 2 person form #2 -pretty long, including a really cool inside crescent kick that the other guy ducks under(sometimes untying your shoelace as he goes- heh)
9. Dai Jit Kuen ('Large Intercepting Fist')- still working on this one, its very cool, and very very long. We've done the introductory movements so far, and its about one third the length of guen li kuen, just to say hello!
10. I'm also working on the butterfly swords set. Its long too.
All this is generously sprinkled with Tam Tui forms the whole time. I think we learn all 12, but ive only really gotten the hang of 1, 2 and 3, though ive seen 5 and 7 and a few others. We use it more as a basics drill in class than a form to memorize. Though its really a brilliant sequence of movements when they break it down and show you the applications. It looks boring, but when you start to fight with it you're practically unstoppable. #3 in particular is almost impossible to block, even if you know whats coming and its done in slow motion.
Other forms i know of involve the fan, saber, 2 person saber vs spear, another gim set (Da Mo Gim?), tiger hook swords set, drunken fist(!?!), and much much more. Looking over the list it looks like a lot, but then you think of all there is to learn and its just a drop in the bucket. MJLH has a lot of forms.
It was taught at the Jing Wu institute in china with 10 basic forms as the main curriculum before selecting a major and moving along a specific path. I have only done a few of the first 10 forms! There's so much knowledge there, its just insane.
Anyway, thats much more longwinded than i meant to make it, so i'll leave it at that.
Later.
You know, I was thinking the other day, the way my MJLH club teaches the roundhouse kick kind of makes the name "roundhouse" lack meaning. Allow me to explain-
Instead of the typical method of bringing the kick all the way around, ours starts like a front snap kick, but we turn the hip over as the leg extends. Still working on my accuracy kicking this way, since the aforementioned method is stubbornly ingrained in my muscle memory, but I can see the advantage in the latter. It's not as telegraphed, it takes less space (Sifu Jimmy always remarks that it would be fun to try in a crowded room since if we do it right, we won't hit anyone beside us,) and beginning it with the back leg helps to prepare one for the lead-leg version. The heck of it is, the power generation is a LOT different, since it comes more from the hips than the quads.
My question is- does anyone else train roundhouse kicks this way? Just curious.
