Pole form, spin, choreography?

[Nobody Important]

Yes, thanks for the vids NI! ALL of them look like they could be just variations of the same method! They all have pretty much the same biomechanic or dynamic. But I also do see a lot of commonalities with the Tang Yik pole. But if you look at the Tang Yik footage, other than a smaller pole, the thing that sets it apart is the biomechanics. Tang Yik looks very fast and crisp compared to all the others because he uses his entire body and especially his legs to power the movements. In the other pole forms they are powering the movements almost entirely with the arms. Watch how often the pole is held away from the body. Compare that to Tang Yik and you will see how he rests the pole on his lead thigh and uses his legs to provide the majority of the power to the movements. He does not have the pole held away from the body nearly as much. In Tang Yik pole all of the wide sweeping motions you see in the other forms are viewed as excellent opportunities to strike their hands with a direct blow!

Agree, but would say that concerning biomechanic performance, the videos I chose were for clarity of movement not skill. If you have time search YouTube a bit, you'll run across some fast & lively performances.

 

[DanT]

Why should it be so simple though? Many use it only for conditioning and treat the pole really as some kind of weight lifting. If that's the purpose, then yeah it can be very simple! And that's also why they use such a large pole. But that huge pole is rather impractical for real fighting. Here is some footage of the Tang Yik Pole:

When you treat the pole as a real weapon, it isn't quite as simple! ;-)

My wing chun is relatively very simple, in contrast to longfist or luohan palm or cha fist which are very complicated systems. Either way, I enjoy wing chun primarily because it's simple. Three short hand forms, a wooden dummy form, one short weapon and one long weapon. I believe that the 6.5 pole form really emphasizes this. I think wing chun in terms of combat techniques is relatively simple, with a couple of hand techniques and a few kicks. In my opinion, wing chun is rather like boxing: only a couple techniques but you can do them so fast and powerful and crisply that it doesn't matter. Actually in sparring I only do these techniques 95% of the time because they're all i need:

Straight Punch
Pak Sao
Lap Da
Tan Da
Front Kick
Round Kick
Side Kick

With the staff it's the same, once you rock at 5-6 techniques, that's all you need most of the time. My sihing told me once "Kung Fu has thousands of techniques. Pick ten." I think there's a lot of truth to that.