Training Dilemma

[Tebori]

Hi,I have recently found myself pondering the ethics(or perhaps integrity?) of my own training and was really wondering if anyone has felt the same:-
I have been training in traditional martial arts for most of my life(i'm 46 now).Not long after getting my black sash in Kung Fu,i had surgery for cancer and my confidence took a dive.I didn't feel up to going back to classes so i have just been training/practicing everything i know by myself(for the past 10 years or so).
During the lockdowns i started watching other styles/techniques and this is where i feel my diemma.
If(as an example) i started training from watching You Tube in tonfa which i have never used before but i feel the techniques have a good carry over from unarmed techniques,i have an 'internal argument'.

The pros-I'm only training for myself.I'm not claiming to be something i'm not or teaching people my 'made up' art..

The cons-Coming from a traditional martial arts background of having instructors and training being structured,i feel like a fake or fraud...Like i have no business doing something that was never taught to me in person..
Sorry for the long post but i was hoping for other peoples insights..

 

[mograph]

All pros for you -- good on ya for maintaining your training.
I think that the cons only arise if you present yourself as something you're not.

Look at what you are learning, not as a credential, but as an exploration. Your direct experiences with the information you are receiving are perfectly valid: you see a technique, you try it, you examine your response. You don't jump to presenting yourself as having acquired this skill, or as "training" for the last 10 years, but you look at this as a journey, an experiment, an exploration.

If you reconnect with the martial world in person, you don't have to add this experience as a credential -- you can say that you trained X years to get your black sash, but after an illness, you felt it was better to stay home and explore, evaluate, and reflect on your own.

Nobody of any worth would think less of you for this.

 

[Gerry Seymour]

Here's my usual thought on this: if you have a foundation to build on, you can learn from videos and such. I've even managed to learn from drawings in books, where the principles involved were familiar enough to me. Mind you, you may not be learning the principles the person in the video is using - you're mostly going to be leveraging the principles you already know, rather than adding new principles. But that's fine if those principles work with that movement. For instance, if I saw some Long Fist material online and thought it looked interesting, I might find I can make the movements useful with the principles I know. From what I've heard, LF uses some significantly different power generation from what I'm used to, so I'm probably not going to be learning actual Long Fist, just adapting their movements to use with what I already know.

However, learning something you have no foundation for, without help of an experienced instructor/partner, is a recipe for mis-learning that can actually make it harder to learn useful principles. So someone with no striking experience trying to make sense of a striking video might make a real mess of what they're doing. It's possible they'd do fine, but the problem is that they are unlikely to know if they're off track until after they've created a bad set of habits. Beginners don't typically "see" the right things - they often focus on bits that don't matter (or at least matter a lot less) and misunderstand what they're seeing, so misuse the movements.

 

[Tebori]

Thank you both for your replies!..I appreciate the different perspective.

 

[Buka]

Welcome to Martial Talk, Tebori. Hope you enjoy it here.

There isn't a "how to" manual on how to navigate the Martial Arts world. Everyone's experiences are different. Don't sweat the nonsense. Just enjoy the ride, learn anything and everything you can and have fun doing so.

 

[Tebori]

Thank you!..Appreciate it..

 

[isshinryuronin]

i started training from watching You Tube in tonfa which i have never used before but i feel the techniques have a good carry over from unarmed techniques,i have an 'internal argument'.

Commendable that you are introspective in this regard. The fact that you are questioning the ethics shows that you have the ethics. Many would not even consider the issue. A rare trait, indeed.

Concerning the tonfa, I have a couple of concerns. Being an Okinawan weapon, it is usually practiced in conjunction with Okinawan (and now, Japanese) karate. As many of the body mechanics and movement principles differ between karate and most kung fu styles there will likely be little carry-over, although there will be some. An option would be adapting the traditional tonfa style to better blend with your kung fu style (just don't name this after yourself and give yourself a master rank in you new system ).

Next, there are the usual considerations in learning something new from a video with no feedback from a qualified teacher. The negatives are magnified with weapons as there are subtleties and nuances above and beyond empty handed MA. These nuances will not be recognizable in a video, the result being techniques not being as effective as desired and an increased chance of losing control the weapon, especially upon contact.

Feel free to work with the tonfa, just be aware you will not be using them properly (IMO 20-25% "error" rate?). As Mograph said, as long as you don't present yourself as "knowing" the tonfa, you have no reason to feel guilty.

 

[Gyakuto]

Do whatever makes you happy, Tebori. As long as you don’t subsequently go ahead and try and teach it or profess to being part of a particular school, give yourself a grand title etc, then what’s the harm? Enjoy it!

Many, myself included, value being part of an official school, recognised and steered by a head organisation and receiving direct teaching and having my examinations ‘validated’ and regulated and thus having that rank directly comparable with others around the world. But if that’s not important for you in the art of tonfa then think no more of it and enjoy yourself.

Absolute best of luck!

 

[skribs]

The three biggest issues with learning from videos are:

1. You don't have a coach to give you structure.
2. You don't have a coach to give you feedback.
3. You don't have a partner to give you feedback.

Now, these points are different for someone who is already fairly experienced in martial arts, compared to someone who is just starting. I would also consider someone who did three years of this as a kid, and then a year of this and a year of that as an adult to be "just starting", because you never really got a foundation in an art. But if you've got years of experience in a single art (and maybe multiple arts on top of that) then you have a much better foundation. Of course, there is a caveat that if the arts are different enough (like say Capoeira and Sumo), even with decades of experience in one, you're still "just starting" in the other.

On Point #1, most beginners don't know what to work on. They want to work on strength and speed before technique. They just want to do the most fun or flashiest technique. On top of that, there's tons of things you could be working on, and they won't know what to focus on. This is a big reason why it's important for them to have a coach that tells them what to work on and how to work on it. As someone with experience in learning (or especially teaching) martial arts, you can focus on what skills you want to work on, instead of getting lost in the sea of endless techniques.

On Point #2, an experienced person knows a lot of the basic physics involved in martial arts. You know how stances work and how to adjust your stances. You have the coordination to control your entire body through a technique. A lot of these apply to a new martial art, especially if it's got a lot of similarities (like Taekwondo and Karate). Someone who starts TKD or Karate with no experience is going to struggle to get their stances correct without feedback. Someone who has done Taekwondo and watches a video on Karate stances should be able to have a correct stance right away (same for a Karate guy watching a Taekwondo video). After that, it's just a matter of building the habit, which is something an experienced martial artist should also be well-versed in.

On Point #3, that's where it starts to fall apart.

 

[Tebori]

Thank you everyone for the indepth replies..
The reason why i used tonfa as an example to explain how i am feeling,is because i believed it to be something that could be more adaptable:-
1)-A lot of the basics in the style of Kung Fu i practice are very similar to Karate so thought it would lend itself well to tonfa techniques.
2)-There seems to be more variety of performance in tonfa whether it's traditional or an American police officer using a PR24 baton....I guess my thinking here was 'There are different ways of doing it'.

In contrast,i wouldn't even contemplate watching some videos on Iaido and picking up a Katana.

This all started because i learned the first dao(Chinese broadsword) form when i got my black just before i had surgery.There is nothing online for other Dao forms in my style so started looking at other Chinese styles.....This is what lead me into questioning if it was right to 'steal' something i was never taught directly.

 

[Gerry Seymour]

Thank you everyone for the indepth replies..
The reason why i used tonfa as an example to explain how i am feeling,is because i believed it to be something that could be more adaptable:-
1)-A lot of the basics in the style of Kung Fu i practice are very similar to Karate so thought it would lend itself well to tonfa techniques.
2)-There seems to be more variety of performance in tonfa whether it's traditional or an American police officer using a PR24 baton....I guess my thinking here was 'There are different ways of doing it'.

In contrast,i wouldn't even contemplate watching some videos on Iaido and picking up a Katana.

This all started because i learned the first dao(Chinese broadsword) form when i got my black just before i had surgery.There is nothing online for other Dao forms in my style so started looking at other Chinese styles.....This is what lead me into questioning if it was right to 'steal' something i was never taught directly.

My suggestion is to stop thinking of it as "stealing". If the information is out there, it has been offered to you. Some of the staff work I teach is adapted from other arts (and some even from videos). I am clear with my students that I am not a master of the staff and will not make them one. The purpose of the staff work I teach is to give some exercises to practice fighting with larger sticks, etc. (I also teach some FMA-derived stickwork) and to provide some movement exercises that involve more upper body than my other kata (because of the weight of the staff). Students don't really care that it's not a traditional weapon system.

 

[Buka]

Thank you everyone for the indepth replies..
The reason why i used tonfa as an example to explain how i am feeling,is because i believed it to be something that could be more adaptable:-
1)-A lot of the basics in the style of Kung Fu i practice are very similar to Karate so thought it would lend itself well to tonfa techniques.
2)-There seems to be more variety of performance in tonfa whether it's traditional or an American police officer using a PR24 baton....I guess my thinking here was 'There are different ways of doing it'.

In contrast,i wouldn't even contemplate watching some videos on Iaido and picking up a Katana.

This all started because i learned the first dao(Chinese broadsword) form when i got my black just before i had surgery.There is nothing online for other Dao forms in my style so started looking at other Chinese styles.....This is what lead me into questioning if it was right to 'steal' something i was never taught directly.

Oh, by all means, steal anything and everything! Just make sure you have a qualified someone advise you that you are utilizing (stealing) actual Art, and not a reprint of Dogs Playing Poker printed over a poster advertising a yard sale.

 

[Flying Crane]

Thank you everyone for the indepth replies..
The reason why i used tonfa as an example to explain how i am feeling,is because i believed it to be something that could be more adaptable:-
1)-A lot of the basics in the style of Kung Fu i practice are very similar to Karate so thought it would lend itself well to tonfa techniques.
2)-There seems to be more variety of performance in tonfa whether it's traditional or an American police officer using a PR24 baton....I guess my thinking here was 'There are different ways of doing it'.

In contrast,i wouldn't even contemplate watching some videos on Iaido and picking up a Katana.

This all started because i learned the first dao(Chinese broadsword) form when i got my black just before i had surgery.There is nothing online for other Dao forms in my style so started looking at other Chinese styles.....This is what lead me into questioning if it was right to 'steal' something i was never taught directly.

May I ask: what Chinese system have you studied?

I will also say that if you still remember your dao, perhaps the better way to improve is to break it down to fundamentals and work your dao in that way. Understand the basics and get creative in how you practice them. Keep practicing your form, but learning additional dao forms may not be the best way to improve your skills with it.

 

[Tebori]

Thank you everyone for such good advice.
Flying Crane-The art i study is Lau Gar.

 

[Flying Crane]

Thank you everyone for such good advice.
Flying Crane-The art i study is Lau Gar.

I don’t know much about Lau ga, so I cannot comment on its methods or power source and such. But this is something I’ve been working on with the dao, in my own training. I used to isolate sections of the form to practice as basics, but i realized they wasn’t really it. I needed to break down to the very basic cuts, and specifically and deliberately graft them onto the foundational method for the system at large. It took a little thought, but really was quite obvious once I zeroed in on it.

People think that learning a form is learning the weapon. It isn’t. Even understanding the application of the movements in the form is not understanding the weapon. At best, youve got a very limited view of a series of specific defenses to very specific attacks. But it needs to be much wider than that. And unfortunately, that is often how the weapon is taught, through the medium of the form and little else.

Fundamental cuts, stationary and with movement, done from the body, not just the arm and shoulder. Figure out how to make the techniques done with a full-body connection. Later, the form can be used to elevate the athleticism and as a way to shorten and quicken the movement. But you need to understand the full-body connection first, in a way that is consistent with the Lau Ga overall method.