Quote:
Dan Harden wrote:
It is unfortunate that there are those in the martial arts; internal or no, fool hardy enough to think that practicing alone and in push hands or kata prepares them to go up against the former. They are the truly arrogant ones. They do not know their place. They seek to have, what the others have earned, without the paying price. Their first step is to always try to intellectually reduce the value of those efforts. I have seen it in as simple an example as some Iai people who dare to think they were prepared for men who also train the sword, and then freestlying it in armor.
|
I know two different people who claim to have internal strength skills. One of them has only very rudimentary actual skills, but covers the rest of it because he can (well, could) fight pretty well and beat up on a lot of people who weren't really good fighters; this guy has a pretty loud mouth in regard to telling people how good he is (or, was). The other guy has, IMO, pretty good I.S. skills, in the real and technical sense and he's a pretty good fighter. Both guys have been involved in car wrecks in recent years, and the loudmouth can't really fight anymore; the other guy wasn't injured quite as badly, but he's still limited in his mobility.
Let's say some newby wanted to learn internal-strength skills.... which of those two guys should he go learn from. The guy who had a few rudimentary skills and a lot of strength.. or the guy who actually had and understood internal strength? The guy with the actual technical knowledge would be my suggestion. If someone learns actual internal strength, then they can go apply it to "fightin'", qigongs, or tiddlywinks correctly. I.e., it doesn't matter, IMO, how you use it (that's up to you), as long as you're doing it correctly. The story about one guy pushing another guy doesn't tell me much except that "winning" seems to be raising its head as an issue, while I thought that we were still just talking about how to get good information. Unless some person can beat everyone on the planet and can guarantee to teach that as part of their 'martial-art', I'd suggest that the current worry is more about getting good/real information.
FWIW
Mike Sigman