Tag: kung fu

Should You Learn One Style or Many?

Before I came to Liuhebafa, I was training in Bak Mei. I loved it—in fact, at the time it was all I wanted to learn. But then my teacher told me he wouldn’t teach me more Bak Mei until I learned Liuhebafa. Among other things, he told me learning Liuhebafa would make my Bak Mei better. It didn’t make sense at the time, but now it does. Although it depends on your goals and your resources, following are some of the reasons why I think learning more than one style will make you better:

  • To compare and to contrast can yield great results in your personal development and in the understanding of your style(s). You may understand fast better if you understand slow. You may see circles where you used to see lines. You may feel powerless when you’re actually very powerful.
  • Unless you’re only expecting to fight people from your style, you better know what other styles do. This is one of the big reasons why traditional martial artists have often fared poorly in freestyle bouts with MMA fighters. If you think your style has it all, I think you’re going to be very surprised when someone hits you with great force from an angle you never expected or gets out of your rear naked choke by slightly adjusting their alignment in an imperceptible way.
  • The way I’ve learned traditional Chinese martial arts, the different styles represent different methods/types of power generation. Sometimes these methods/types contradict each other. But sometimes they can actually complement each other. This is probably the primary reason my teacher told me Liuhebafa would make my Bak Mei better.
  • You’ll engage with new people who likely have different perspectives and different attributes. You’ll see both the strengths and the weaknesses of your style—if you keep an open mind (see the last bullet).
  • By learning something new, you keep yourself open. And vice versa. This may be the biggest reason to learn more than one style. Think about it this way: if your style’s founder hadn’t been open-minded, you wouldn’t be learning that style right now.

So you might be asking yourself why, as a Liuhebafa teacher, I’m advocating learning different styles. The answer, it turns out, is a little complex: I myself continue to train in other styles, and I even sometimes teach them to my students (for very specific purposes). I also learn about other styles from my students, who have come from backgrounds such as tai chi, Burmese Bando, judo, kung fu, aikido, and kendo. I exchange ideas, occasionally fists and feet, and the rare chokehold with my wife (who trains in Hung Gar and Choy Lay Fut). Also, when I can, I try to push hands and play with people from different styles—and even with non–martial-artists, who sometimes surprise me.

If you have the time and resources and you want to get good overall, my advice would be to find one style that works best for your mind, body, and soul and then specialize in it, making it your primary style, while continuing to learn other styles, whether casually or formally. You may end up sticking with your primary style your entire life—or, like me, you may someday have a new primary style that fits you better than your previous one. Either way, I think you’ll find that staying open and learning new things will make you better. That is what I’ve found has worked best for me. It’s also why the way I teach and train Liuhebafa is different from many other teachers.

The Best Way to Increase Your Power

Want to increase your striking power? Physics tells us that momentum (in other words, striking power) is equal to mass multiplied by velocity. Thus, to increase your power, either you increase your mass or you increase your velocity.

Of course, ideally you’d increase both. By applying proper mechanics, which is how we train Liuhebafa, you will indeed increase both. But, in theory and in practice, I’ve found that the best way to increase power is by focusing on applying those mechanics with the goal of increasing mass rather than with the goal of  increasing velocity.

So why do we focus on mass rather than velocity? Again, physics (and biomechanics) gives us the answer: the amount you can increase the mass in your punch is many times the amount you can increase the velocity of your punch.

I found an interesting online article from Scientific American entitled “Pro Boxer’s Punch Carries Heavy Weight,” which shows the difference in speed (in essence, velocity) and force (in essence, momentum) between world-champion welterweight boxer Ricky “The Hitman” Hatton and a non-boxer. It turns out Hatton is twice as fast: his punches averaged around 25 mph and his fastest punch was 32 mph compared with the non-boxer’s best attempt, which measured 15 mph.

What’s really interesting in this study, however, is that Hatton’s force was measured at 10 times the average person’s. Let’s assume that Hatton weighs the same as the average person (Hatton fought at about 147 pounds and the average adult in Europe weighs about 156 pounds). Because his speed is twice the average person, his force should be twice that of the average person.

So how did Hatton manage to instead hit with 10 times the force? Simple: he used much more of his body’s mass than the average person uses. Most people (including many martial artists from what I’ve seen and felt) tend to punch only with their arm. A 150-pound person’s arm weighs on average about 8 pounds while their trunk (torso) weighs on average about 72 pounds (see here and here). It’s not hard to figure out (or to feel, if you were fearless enough to let Hatton punch you) that an average person punches with only around 8 pounds of mass whereas Hatton—who engages his arm and body—punches with something closer to 80 pounds of mass. (Note how nicely the math works here: Assuming Hatton and the average person have the same punch speed, Hatton would have 10 times the striking power just based on his ability to get 80 pounds of mass into his punch compared with the average person’s 8 pounds.)

When I teach Liuhebafa, I always focus on the impact that proper mechanics will have on engaging more mass. Although proper mechanics will also increase velocity, I don’t focus on it because, as we can see, it does not contribute to striking power as much as mass does.

Naturally, there is a way to increase your mass without applying proper mechanics—you simply eat more. But I suggest the only time you focus on that is after a good training session!