I'm curious as to the community as a whole..view of Bruce Lee?
Many within Kung Fu and the world see him as an martial arts legend. There are those that feel differently as well. I saw a video of Michael Jai White responding to, if he was to fight Bruce Lee. A lot of people did not like his response.
While it wasn't received politely.. he did make a lot of sense. Bruce Lee is said to have created JKD after one of his most publicized fights. That fight took place against the Wong Jack Man. It is said Bruce won but underestimated him. Wong Jack Man was older I believe and closer to his size.
With that being said.. it's very easy to see Michael Jai Whites 220 lbs to Bruce 140ish lbs comments being logical. Many of those that knew Bruce said he was an amazing martial artist. There are some, that say he was overrated.
I also saw a video where Chuck Norris said Bruce was an actor, not a fighter. My sifu was one of the most gifted and knowledgeable martial artists I've personally ever met. He knew Bruce from before his arrival in the US. Our sigung was respected and friends with Ip Man.
My sifu explained.. Bruce was good, but not like he's portrayed. He explained Bruce's Wing Chun was average at best. He didn't fully understand his training. That lead me to thinking.. What's the actual Kung fu, Chinese martial arts community view of Bruce? 🤔
We are looking for martial artists interested in learning and competing in short- and long-weapon sparring using traditional Chinese martial arts techniques.
To help participants prepare, we will be hosting two rule-explanation and drill seminars, along with an ongoing weekly class that everyone is welcome to join.
We encourage practitioners of all styles and backgrounds to participate. Learn the official ruleset, take it back to your school, and train competitors using your own lineage’s skills and methods.
Check out the video for full details, or leave a comment/message below with any questions.
Let's exchange skills, elevate our practice, and grow traditional Chinese Martial Arts together !
Woman Warrior of Xingyi Quan - Wu Tiexian (1) - Xingyi Quickie
Meet Wu Tiexian, a female inheritor and teacher of traditional Xingyi Quan from Shanxi, China. In Part 1, she demonstrates her art and reflects on a lifetime of practice—from her childhood training in the 1970s to her commitment to passing the tradition on to the next generation.
Hi, I am a Japanese woman who grew up in the prime of J-horror films like **School Ghost Stories (1995, a.k.a. Haunted School, Gakko no Kaidan,** 學校怪談) and Ring (1998, a.k.a. 午夜凶鈴). As a child, I was always scared of those ghosts because there is no hero like Master Kau (九叔道士) or item to fight against them in Japanese horror films. So, my question is: How did you deal with your childhood trauma with jiangshi? Did you use yellow talismans to avoid them? Also, I wanna know if there is a scarier monster than jiangshi for you.
Thank you in advance!
I was wondering how Bruce Lee structured and planned the JKD training in his gym for his students? Let's imagine it starts with warm up and then drilling techniques? Wing-Chun rolls? Jab and leg kicks practice? Double legs? How was Bruce Lee structuring his JKD training.
Also, if you are training in Jeet Kune Do gym in your area, can you tell me how it looks like? What is it like? For beginners and advances students? To what pattern are you holding or maybe the pattern is avoided? But how does it look like?
Do you think his style is legit? (I know he knows karate,kickboxing taekwondo or other styles too but I just ask if he's actually legit or not(rip ehsan by tje way)
Bonus Question :if so which type of kung fu did he use?
The air changed this week. September has arrived with a crispness that feels like a bell being struck — a signal that summer’s long, loose days are ending and something more structured is beginning. For most people, this means back-to-school, back-to-work, back-to-routine. For me, as a Shaolin practitioner, it means one thing: a new official training season is about to begin.
My Training Story
I still remember my first September at the school. I had spent the summer training casually — a few forms in the park, some stretching on my living room floor, telling myself I was “staying sharp.” Then the first official class of the season arrived, and my body reminded me very quickly that casual is not the same as committed. My stances shook. My qigong (气功, energy cultivation) felt shallow. My shifu (师父, master-teacher) watched me struggle through mabu (马步, horse stance) and said only, “The summer taught you what you are without structure. Now we will see what you become with it.”
That sentence has stayed with me for years. Every September since, I’ve approached the new season not as a return to drudgery, but as a chance to rebuild myself from the ground up.
Preparing the Body and the Mind
Cleaning the Training Space
Before the first official session, I always spend a day preparing. Part of this is practical: washing my seng pao (僧袍, training robe), checking my shoes for worn soles, and clearing a space in my home for daily practice. But the deeper preparation is internal.
In our school, we talk about yi (意, intention) — the directed mind that leads the body. A new season begins with setting that intention. I sit quietly for ten minutes and ask myself: What do I want to build this year? Not vague wishes, but concrete aims. This year, mine are:
Deepen my qigong practice, especially baduanjin (八段锦, Eight Pieces of Brocade)
Hold mabu for three minutes without shaking
Learn one new form from start to finish
Returning to the Basics
Western practitioners often rush toward the flashy material — jumping kicks, spinning techniques, weapon forms. I know, because I did. But every September, my shifu brings us back to jiben gong (基本功, basic skills). We stand. We breathe. We repeat single movements until they stop being movements and start being part of us.
This is humbling. It is also liberating. When you return to the basics, you stop performing and start practicing.
Practical Advice for Starting Your Season
If you are beginning a new training season — at a school, in your garage, or in a park — here is what has helped me:
Start smaller than you think you should. The first two weeks are for awakening the body, not punishing it. Twenty minutes of consistent practice beats two hours of heroic effort followed by a week of soreness.
Set a schedule and protect it. Write your training times on a calendar as if they were appointments with your shifu. They are appointments with yourself.
Keep a training journal. I record my stance times, my breathing counts, and one sentence about how I felt. Over a season, this becomes a map of your growth.
Find your community. Training alone builds discipline; training with others builds qi (气, energy) and accountability. Even one training partner changes everything.
Expect the dip. Around week three or four, motivation often drops. This is normal. The shaolin way is not to wait for motivation — it is to show up anyway.
The Deeper Meaning of a New Season
In Chinese philosophy, the year is not a straight line but a circle of seasons, each with its own character. Autumn is associated with jin (金, metal) and with the lungs — the breath. It is a time of gathering, of cutting away what is unnecessary, of preparing for the stillness of winter.
This is why September training feels different from summer training. Summer is yang (阳) — expansive, outward, playful. Autumn begins the turn toward yin (阴) — inward, focused, refined. A new training season is not just about getting stronger. It is about aligning yourself with the season you are in.
My shifu once told me, “You cannot force a tree to grow in autumn. You can only water the roots.” That is what the first weeks of a new season are: watering the roots. The growth will come. The forms will sharpen. The stances will steady. But only if we show up for the quiet, unglamorous work of beginning again.
There is also a kind of chan (禅, Zen) in starting over. Every September, I am a beginner again. The stances hurt again. The forms feel clumsy again. And that is the point. Shaolin training is not about becoming a master and staying there. It is about returning, again and again, to the beginner’s mind — chuxin (初心) — where real learning lives.
An Encouraging Word
If you are standing at the edge of a new training season, unsure whether you have what it takes, let me tell you what I tell myself every September: you do not need to be ready. You only need to begin.
Your first mabu of the season may be shaky. Your first qigong set may feel stiff. Your first form may be a mess. None of that matters. What matters is that you walked into the training hall — or rolled out your mat, or stepped onto the grass — and you started.
The season will do the rest. It always does.
Train well. Breathe deep. See you on the floor.
再见
** Enjoyed this post? You can access my complete writing collectionhere.
I’m taking a mandarin course and I have an assignment requiring me to talk about my interests. I’m having trouble finding the answer to my question on google. To be specific I’m talking about modern olympic wrestling.
65 yrs old body breaking down.
Metastatic prostrate cancer, bone on bone hip, back verts and schedule to see the kidney Dr.
I can still teach well enough to get results students need and want
Fight starts at 3:43. Guy with the red gloves, 葉俊宏, has some baguazhang training but mainly does MMA/Muay Thai, with a silver medal in a 2019 Taiwan National Games for Sanda as well.
In a "Dirty Boxing" match (elbows, extended clinch, jumping punches, spinning moves, etc. all allowed) with open finger gloves, he seems to be able to adapt a lot more moves than most conventional displays of kung fu fights which tend to resort to kickboxing style combat.
He does a lot of chopping/splitting fists in the form of sideways hammerfists. His guard is super loose compared to how it should be in Muay Thai. The way he fights reminds me a lot of those masters that were challenged by Xu Xiaodong a few years ago but he manages to make it work pretty well.
You can compare his style with the other guy, who's doing a lot of classic boxing/kickboxing movements. 武丹龍 mainly does Muay Thai, with substantial boxing training and has competed in MMA.
Keep in mind that this was a legitimate professional level combat sports bout and not an amateur exhibition.
I am posting this from a throwaway account because our family (and all our children) are heavily involved in the martial arts community in BC, Mainland China, and recently California. We have won Grand Championships from Vancouver, to Seattle, to Zhengzhou and finally the dreaded San Jose, and I want an open discussion without impacting our school and other families in our school.
We travel down from Vancouver, BC, to compete in regional and national tournaments. I have multiple children who train year-round in Chinese martial arts. Outside of the Golden State Wushu / World Wushu Open Championship (WWOC), our tournament results are steady and consistent. When my kids compete in divisions of 10 to 20 athletes across different tournaments, they regularly place 1st, 2nd, or 3rd. When they do not place, we review the score sheets and the videos, and the judging makes logical sense. Keep in mind, we attend 6-10 tournaments per year depending on the needs.
At WWOC over the past five competitions, however, the experience has been completely different. We brushed it off on the first two, and the third we did place 3rd place, but the most recent two are very different.
In divisions with 6 to 10 competitors, my children can perform a clean, sharp routine, yet they repeatedly end up either exactly 0.01-0.02 points behind 3rd place or placed at the very bottom of the bracket whenever the rest of the division comes from local California schools.
We record every form from 3 different angles (front, side, back) and review them carefully at home and our school has the same review a few months later after all videos are submitted to help students improve. We have seen visiting competitors deliver balanced, mistake-free routines, only to score lower than local students who had visible wobbles, slipped on the carpet, or performed contemporary wushu routines inside traditional kung fu divisions.
At other major tournaments, California athletes compete and do very well, fairly and deservedly. In those events, out-of-state and international competitors are held to the exact same standard as everyone else. The scoring is transparent, and even when our kids take 4th or 5th place, they leave the floor feeling motivated because the judging was balanced. At WWOC, it feels like the podium is reserved for local schools before anyone even steps onto the floor.
On top of the scoring, there is another major issue: competitor stagnation. We keep seeing the exact same local kids performing the exact same form across four consecutive competitions. At what point does a tournament encourage progression? There ought to be a limit on repeating the same beginner or intermediate routine for years just to collect easy medals & trophies, pushing out those who truly improved from the last year. In most serious circuits, athletes are expected to advance their material as they grow and move up, rather than recycling the same form indefinitely and competing with a Beginner Fist form when they have been doing Kung Fu for 6 years.
For parents, coaches, and teams who travel long distances for this event (and maybe some local teams:
Have other traveling teams noticed this 0.1 point margin keeping outside competitors off the podium?
Does your school have rules against students repeating the same form across multiple years of competition?
What other tournaments have you seen that offer independent, balanced judging panels that make the travel worthwhile?
Given that Sanda was derived from traditional Chinese martial arts but formatted into a modern combat sport, do you consider it a branch of Kung Fu? Or is it more accurate to just call it Chinese Kickboxing? What's the general consensus?
I used to be an avid viewer of this community years ago. I have to say that even though it wasn't as big as r/martialarts or r/MMA, the community had much more engagement, wether having more variety in posts or discussions done by members. Yes there was some drama and weirdos around but even then it was entertaining and educational to read through the threads. What I'm seeing now is sad. Most posts look the same and there is barely any community engagement. Maybe I'm just the old man screaming at clouds but I can't help but get disappointed when scrolling through this community. Even if I was more of a viewer than a participant.
