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Most times arts don't fit together. You take the circular hands of kenpo and try to put them atop the linear stances of shotokan, and you are going to get an uncoordinated mish mash. Or, the jabs of boxing might fit with wing chun, but the round house power punches don't fit at all.
And, occasionally, there are going to be arts that do fit together easily. You can put aikido together with the martial arts of pa kua chang, but it is going to take logic and discipline to categorize individual techniques. And, this leaves the developer with a problem of how do you teach the resulting artt without confusing.
That all said, one day I was taking an Aikido class, I was a beginner in that art, though I had seven years of kenpo and karate and a dabble of wing chun. So they asked me to partake in randori, which is the multiman freestyle aikido employs. It was a sad experience.
I didn't want to give them my punches, karate had taught me to lock my stance down, and the result was that nobody could throw me, and the give and take of the randori exercise wasn't working. I hold fault with no one, it was mixing claymores and corkscrews, and one could argue they should have been able to make their art work, but I should have been able to work with them. Interestingly, after class things became interesting.
One of the higher ranked black belts, name of Paul, came up to me and wondered where the breakdown had been. Lower black belts kept their distance from me. Paul wanted to learn, and that was the sign of a higher level belt.
So I explained about locking down the stance, and we looked at that in conjunction with aikido techniques, and how things could have been different. Nothing was working though, until I asked him if he had ever heard of sticky hands. He hadn't, and when I showed it to him the lights began to go on.
Wing Chun, you see, has stances that are higher and more mobile, and we spent hours figuring out how to get the feet to go fast enough to keep up with the aikido centrifugal action. Slowly, we figured out how the feet were supposed to cross or circle in time with the attack. We began to explore higher techniques, Paul excited because of all he was learning, I was grinning because I was getting a super advanced lesson in higher Aikido concepts that the other fellows in the school, the lower black belts, would have died for.
It takes logic to put arts together, and very few people are successful at the endeavor. I succeeded wildly, and this because I always seem to run into people that are willing to look a little deeper, and willing to share what they learn. If you think you know it all, if you're proud, if you look down on other students, then you will never open your mind and be able to ingest all the wonderful truth that flows so freely in the universe.
And, occasionally, there are going to be arts that do fit together easily. You can put aikido together with the martial arts of pa kua chang, but it is going to take logic and discipline to categorize individual techniques. And, this leaves the developer with a problem of how do you teach the resulting artt without confusing.
That all said, one day I was taking an Aikido class, I was a beginner in that art, though I had seven years of kenpo and karate and a dabble of wing chun. So they asked me to partake in randori, which is the multiman freestyle aikido employs. It was a sad experience.
I didn't want to give them my punches, karate had taught me to lock my stance down, and the result was that nobody could throw me, and the give and take of the randori exercise wasn't working. I hold fault with no one, it was mixing claymores and corkscrews, and one could argue they should have been able to make their art work, but I should have been able to work with them. Interestingly, after class things became interesting.
One of the higher ranked black belts, name of Paul, came up to me and wondered where the breakdown had been. Lower black belts kept their distance from me. Paul wanted to learn, and that was the sign of a higher level belt.
So I explained about locking down the stance, and we looked at that in conjunction with aikido techniques, and how things could have been different. Nothing was working though, until I asked him if he had ever heard of sticky hands. He hadn't, and when I showed it to him the lights began to go on.
Wing Chun, you see, has stances that are higher and more mobile, and we spent hours figuring out how to get the feet to go fast enough to keep up with the aikido centrifugal action. Slowly, we figured out how the feet were supposed to cross or circle in time with the attack. We began to explore higher techniques, Paul excited because of all he was learning, I was grinning because I was getting a super advanced lesson in higher Aikido concepts that the other fellows in the school, the lower black belts, would have died for.
It takes logic to put arts together, and very few people are successful at the endeavor. I succeeded wildly, and this because I always seem to run into people that are willing to look a little deeper, and willing to share what they learn. If you think you know it all, if you're proud, if you look down on other students, then you will never open your mind and be able to ingest all the wonderful truth that flows so freely in the universe.
About the Author:
Al Case has researched martial arts for 4O++ years. A writer for the martial arts magazines, he is the originator of Matrixing Technology. You can learn about Matrixing, and how to successfully combine arts, at Monster Martial Arts.
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