Kung Fu, Once Central to Hong Kong Life, Is Waning

More seriously, a couple of observations:

1. Most styles of kung fu require dedicating years of practice before one can be called skilled. Compare this to Systema or Krav Maga where one can become a killer very quickly and you can expect people with little time to train to prefer these more modern martial arts. This says nothing about the depth of these martial arts, just the way they are organized and taught. As a concrete example: one of the first block I learned in Flying White Crane Kung Fu is actually very difficult to use in a street fight. Once you're good with it though, the opponent is in a very bad situation. With Krav Maga, the first block you may learn is usually very basic, very effective to block a punch, but you get less counter-attack possibilities.

2. Most of us do not need to fight for our life so of course, martial arts are waning as a whole.

3. MMA is very popular and most Kung Fu styles are not suitable for MMA: again it takes time to become an expert and many techniques cannot be used in a MMA ring (can I put my finger in your eye? what about using pressure points while you are tackling me on the floor? can you hit the neck with a spear hand?).

4. Kung Fu masters are usually very secretive and they sometimes die with most of their knowledge, especially if they do not find someone suitable to transfer that knowledge.

5. Finally, a sibling comment mentioned youtube. Many kung fu schools hesitate to use Youtube and when they do it, they usually do not show the best they are capable of. When I was training, I remember a master asking to only capture the movements of the upper body and hide the footwork :-)

It's impossible to overestimate the role MMA/UFC has had on martial arts in the past 20 years. The internet has allowed that knowledge to spread far and wide, but UFC #1 dramatically changed the face of martial arts forever. Before that, you could argue about which one was the "best". After UFC #1, it was pretty clear how dominant Gracie jiu-jitsu was if you wanted to win a fight.

All the traditional martial arts have a place. Simply analyzing the phrase "martial art" should give you some indication of its intent: discipline and beauty. Most traditional martial arts schools are on the decline and, for those that aren't, the caliber of student they get is nowhere near as high as it was 25 years ago. Point sparring tournaments are a shell of their former selves.

MMA and, to a lesser extent, BJJ are more a fighting system than a martial art. There's no bowing, there's little formality, there aren't any forms, and it's ruthlessly focused on the practical.

Toward that end, if you want to learn how to fight, study american boxing for punching, muay thai to lean to kick, and BJJ to learn how to grapple.

If you want a "martial art", then you're probably looking for something more traditional. You can learn decent self defense in them, but there's a lot of non-practical stuff you learn as part of the package.

I've done many martial arts, but I'm not here to debate whether Kung Fu is effective. It's not, but there is no reason why it cannot be. What makes a martial art effective is simply having a large population of skilled practitioners. It can be institutional support like Judo in Japan, or wrestling in the US. Or it can be effective marketing like BJJ.

Anyone with real fighting skill can tell you that an art's effective has little to do with its techniques. Technique is only a starting point, that practitioners constantly improve upon. What is needed is a large number of highly competitive and athletic bodies to constantly test and improve on. It's brute force algorithm 101. Nothing can replace experience when actually fighting, because you don't have time to think.

Kung Fu will lose every time, unless they get institutional support, because you have practitioners who not only have questionable methods, they know nothing about building athletes either. Step on a wrestling mat or BJJ practice and compare the intensity versus a Kung Fu class. There's your answer right there. There is no 'kung fu' in Kung Fu.

I've got nothing against Kung Fu. I've learned some interesting concepts. But, similar to Aikido's flashy technique, I am able to put them to use from being a master in another art. Whereas its practitioners cannot.

Maybe a "high level" many year practitioner can do it, as they will tell you it takes many years, but that to me just tells me they are doing this the wrong and slow way. Even Olympic martial arts have shown that countries like Japan are far behind modern science in competitions. One can only image how backwards some random Nth generation guy in your neighborhood is.

Again, nothing against Kung Fu in theory, and maybe it had its heydey at some point, but a lot more needs to be done to save any of it. And it won't matter what style or what not - everyone is different even within a style.

This is more a commentary on martial arts capabilities, which is less relevant in a world where physical danger is increasingly rare. While I strongly advocate for practicing it (I have been a student of Wing Chun for 3 years now), it makes perfect sense why Asian millenials don't find it very important.

Before the web, you would pretty much only learn about whatever martial arts were available in your area. There was no objective truth. In the absence of evidence, comparisons between martial arts were done on a subjective level: does it look cool?

Now, anybody can look up kung fu on youtube, and if they do they'll see that it's a bit shit, compared with the others. No sane person is going to dedicate years of their life into learning something that is a bit shit.

In general the world has become a lot more factual in the last 25 years.

They date back thousands of years: some scholars claim 2000 while others claim 4000. In either case, it wasn’t martial arts at that point. It started as health exercises that we now call Chi Kung (Qigong). They developed into martial arts later when people became intrigued by the stronger, healthier bodies and quicker reflexes of the practitioners. In particular, military-minded people saw the potential benefits and contributed greatly to the development of Chinese martial arts.

Another major contributor was the famed monks - both Shaolin and Daoist (Taoist). As they traveled around Asia, they accepted challenges and worked out with martial artists from other cultures. What they learned was incorporated into Chinese martial arts. So, mixed martial arts is nothing new, it’s been happening for hundreds if not thousands of years.

Martial arts competitions were considerably more brutal than they are currently. They didn’t wear gloves and anything went. Deaths occurred and sometimes people were handicapped for life. Even training was much more brutal. My instructor’s master recalled training on a beach in China. When they practiced throws, people landed on rocks periodically: no head gear or padding.

As someone mentioned already, kung fu is a generalized expression meaning any endeavor that requires prolonged, conscious effort to master. So, a skilled software engineer would be said to have “good kung fu”. I’ll keep to the popular use of Kung Fu even though it’s not completely accurate.

Chinese martial arts divide into two major classifications - Internal and External. What we call Kung Fu is a collection External styles. There are thousands of them, many of which are similar. The Internal ones are Bagua, Xing Yi, Tai Chi, and Liu He Ba Fa. Other than Tai Chi, the Internal ones are lesser known, although Jet Li showed elements of Xing Yi and Bagua in his movie “The One”. Again, there are probably hundreds of Internal styles.

In this era when people use their bodies less, what will preserve Chinese martial arts are the health aspects from which they derived, not their application to MMA.

In 2006, the Japanese men's team placed 3rd (behind Korea and the US) in the World Kendo Championship, and it was the end of an era. It was the first time in the event's history that those guys didn't come in first.

Japan is still a Kendo powerhouse, but it's not like it was.

Kung Fu has a bad reputation, mostly for beeing fake and not effective. Personally I think a lot of instructors _are_ fake, but there are some which really know their stuff. The thing is, most "americanized" kung fu is not nearly as good as "original" kung fu. And even "original" kung fu will lose when sparring with, say, a Muay Thai guy. A lot of videos you see of Kung Fu guys fighting on a ring, they seem to just do Sanda (which is basically chinese Kickboxing). So much for traditional martial arts!

I think the lack of sparring really hurts traditional Kung Fu, you can't just close yourself in your own little work and just do Chi Sau (Wing Chun) or Tuei Shou (Taiji) or whatever your style does. Sure, it's good to practice that, but learning a martial art without sparring with people of different styles is like reading about riding a bicicle and never actually ride it.

I've practiced Taekwondo (both ITF and WTF), MMA (Muay Thai + BJJ), some Wing Chun and now I'm doing Taijiquan (Yang). Out of all of them, MMA is by far the most effective, but it's not like my time with other martial arts was wasted. They give you some tools you can use to adapt to your own style. I think the most valuable thing I learned in MMA was sparring with guys with different backgrounds (Boxing, Karate, Kick Boxing, etc), you learn to be smart and adapt to your opponent, it gives you more tools.

I think devoting your whole life to a single style, it's nice if you want to just use it for health and as hobby, but not effective in a fight. I've never met a guy who practiced a single traditional martial arts style and was able to spar with Muay Thai, Kickboxing or Boxing guy, but I don't live in China, maybe there it's more common. Anyways, my point is that you need to actually fight to be proficient with any martial art, not just Kung Fu.

It seems that everyday on HN there are articles showing examples of how cities are becoming increasingly unaffordable - this one makes me feel really sad.

Let's start with some history: Judo was never heavily practiced historically, because you had a sword. Judo techniques were used as a last resort in case you lost your weapon. In a society where the peacekeepers carry weapons, you are at a serious disadvantage with any kind of unarmed combat, be it BJJ (which I practice, for sport), Muay Thai (which I practiced briefly and is effective in 1:1 situations in a stand-up and clinch), even Krav Maga (I tried this), or Chinese martial arts.

So here's an argument for why certain martial arts are "better" than others, depending on the situation and the era you live in:

Kendo/sword martial arts - you are likely going to war. The Chinese martial arts fall under this category, where you can quickly use certain forms to train thousands of troops at once to be "more ready" in general warfare than your enemy. Your troops will have slightly more conditioning, and practicing forms lets you have a 1:many trainer to student ratio. Even if the martial arts are not the best for close quarter 1:1 combat, or ground fighting, it makes no sense to spend time training your troops for these situations if the odds are VERY stacked against them in a wartime situation.

Krav Maga is a great martial art to teach for modern, urban self defense because the movements are basic. If you might end up in a bar fight, for instance, Krav Maga teaches something called stacking, where your goal when you have to maximize your chances of getting away from multiple attackers is to quickly subdue one attacker, then using head control, using that attacker's body to defend your own while you create space so you can escape. There are more advanced techniques that teach knife or gun defense if you are caught off guard, but it should be noted that you are probably at a disadvantage unless you are highly skilled if someone with a weapon attacks you! Training Krav Maga takes a bad probability of survival and turns it into a less bad probability.

Back to Judo: judo and karate took off as effective when peacekeepers could not carry weapons, and had to learn to effectively do their jobs without weapons. The key here is that society had to chance so that weapons were only carried by the warrior caste.

Filipino martial arts - unarmed, sticks, knives. No swords or spears, because this isn't what they went to war with. Surprisingly effective now, because you are likely to have a cane or umbrella, and you will have a slightly better chance defending yourself against a knife attack, which a modern attacker is more likely to have than a sword or a spear.

Now where does Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, which many people talk about, fit in? Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is an extremely effective martial art for one-on-one, unarmed confrontations. For children, if a bully throws you to the ground and gets on top of you and starts to hit you, you can escape and get away. If ONE PERSON attacks you in public without a weapon and you both go to the ground, you can probably subdue or escape if you have practiced BJJ. If two people attack you, or if it's one group on another group, BJJ is probably not so effective. I saw a version of MMA on TV that was effectively a 5v5 team fight, and it quickly turned into who could tap or KO a another member first, then it became a 5v4, and 5v3, and so on. The effectiveness of BJJ in group fights is greatly diminished - now we are back to martial arts like Krav Maga where you might have learned to group fight or even the Chinese martial arts.

BJJ and Muay Thai have really taken off because of MMA/UFC. The rules used to heavily favor BJJ practitioners, who in that particular environment, thrive. Karate practitioners were not traditionally used to ground fighting, and the Jiu Jitsu fighters would stick to their strategy of taking someone to the ground and quickly submitting them. UFC is a 1:1, no-hitting-eyes-or-neck-or-groin fight. No stomping. In the early era of UFC, there weren't any rounds. This GREATLY favors BJJ practitioners, who can simply hold someone indefinitely on the ground and tire them out. If you've never grappled before, even if you are in great shape - HOLY MOLY prepare to get wiped out in minutes.

Many of you may disagree with some of the details of my interpretations, but the general spirit of my argument is this: different martial arts thrive in different eras because society changes. Claiming one martial art is better than another without adding context is disingenuous.