Recently I’ve been training a lot of a short drill-like form that Phil Duffy taught me years ago. It’s a little sequence that contains about 8 or 9 basic Choy Li Fut techniques (depending on how you count them) and runs in a loop so you can just keep doing it over and over. If you wanted a good introduction to Choy Li Fut, that’s it. There’s pretty much everything you need in there to get proficient at something that at least resembles Choy Li Fut. There are no complicated animal methods or anything too fancy, just practical blocks, deflections and strikes done in a CLF style and using the basic Choy Li Fut stances.
And then I started wondering about what it would be like if a person only ever practiced that little form, but drilled it intensely every day over and over and also spared the techniques for a year. I wonder how good you could get if you just did that? I think you’d actually get pretty good! You’d need other conditioning drills, of course, and stretches, but you’d definitely have the essence of something.
And that got me thinking about the whole concept of simplicity in martial arts. Quite often we make martial arts overly complicated, especially in Chinese internal styles. There are basics to master first – fundamental principles of body movement, posture and breathing, that all need to be coordinated together with the internal elements like mental intent, jin and calm focus, etc. Then there are long forms to master, and then other forms on top of that. And that’s not even touching on the techniques you need to master. And push hands and weapons forms. It just goes on and on. It’s like Tim Cartmell said in our recent podcast conversation (and I’m paraphrasing him here) “in some of these styles you do so much body work that you forget the other guy is actually going to throw a punch!”
The heavy sparring emphasis I’ve experienced in BJJ has taught me that martial techniques can’t be too complicated if they’re going to stand a chance of working when the rubber hits the road. A six move combo to sweep somebody, pass their guard and choke then out is pretty unlikely to work in sparring just the way you drilled it in practice because no plan survives contact with the enemy. What works in real life are techniques and strategies that hit that sweet spot somewhere between the level of “too dumb” and “too complicated”. Those sorts of techniques, drilled to become second nature, have a real chance of working when you need them to. That’s the simplicity you want to aspire to in martial arts, and to me that’s the real power of martial arts like Choy Li Fut – they have enough subtly to make them interesting, but not enough to make them too complicated and impractical.
When I get time over the weekend I’m going to film my little mini Choy Li Fut routine and put it in the Patron’s area, so you can check it out there.
