The Traditional Process

I have recently realized yet another genius aspect of the traditional process of teaching. Everyone pretty much knows that its good to warm up before practicing and part of that can be meditation. Usually the reasons given are for the benefit of the practitioner.
For instance its good to get yourself focused and your chi flowing through meditation. You need to stretch out and warm up to prevent from pulling something. You need to do horse stance and basics before you can learn moving. You need to all move in this drill that is simple before learning forms. You need to learn forms before learning to fight with these techniques. etc.

The childish argument against this is, "What a load of crap I just want to learn how to fight, lets start out with sparring." "Teach me the sword or that cool looking weapon whose name I can't pronounce now."

A more adult argument against it is that you should warm up while doing movements that more directly prepare you for fighting than "dancy" moves, or just sitting around with your eyes closed.

While I have rebuttals for the individual training argument, I often will warm up my own way when I practice myself to "cut to the chase" or when teaching a kids class because forcing them to meditate doesn't really help me.

However, I recently see how these warms ups, are far more beneficial when training an army, or village. This came when I had a thirty something group of semi- rowdy children at the school who were all beginners. When I started following a modified version of our warm ups suddenly everyone could follow along much easier and the group was easier to teach. Even though they weren't really meditating, or really working out that hard. Here's a list of the steps for the individual perspective and then from the perspective of the teacher.

Step one: Meditation
Individual: First you must focus your thoughts and prepare for the practice you are about to do mentally and physically, warming up your organs and blood flow.

Teacher: A group first needs to learn to sit down and shut up before you can teach them anything else. Other wise they will talk, fight, knock things over, hurt themselves etc. The longer you can make people sit down and shut up the more disciplines they are. Especally if they have to hold a painful position.


Step two: stretching and calisthenics.

Individual: classic warm up.

teacher: Now make them do a bunch of stuff that everyone knows how to do already and is somewhat difficult. These excercises also makes them stronger and flexible without really teaching them anything, Its hard to teach weak stiff people how to fight. Its easier to teach strong flexible people how to fight. Make life easy for yourself.

Standing Basics:

Teacher:
Now make them strong and train them standing so they don't bump into each other and can pick up the movements fairly easily. If the can't even move together standing still, they won't be able to move together running and walking. The group needs to learn to move as a unit in order to fight another group as a unit. Moreover, if you keep it simple they will be able to train like this by themselves without supervision within no time.

Walking basics:
This is essentially the equivalent of marching, except they train the body to fight ambidextrously at the same time. They also learn to move forward and backward as a unit.

Group forms: Now they can do complicated moves together. This should not be difficult if they really passed the basic levels.

Sparring and sparring drills: The proper high level drills are difficult to teach and will easily end in full on fighting and arguments among students if they are undisciplined. Furthermore, if they can perform drills well but are weak and of low endurance they still won't be that effective in a real fight. They must be broken down and built up through the previous training before they can appreciate the drills. Not only this, if they never fight, they will also not really understand the drills that well, or sparring that well either and will take it as a game with points and rules, instead of as a field test where both participants collect information to help with their training and understanding. Since this is the case, Just make rules regarding about students behavior. I.e. Students are brothers that are not allowed to speak loudly with each other let alone, argue, fight or kill one another. This way they can train and hit each other without the intention of killing each other. Furthermore, More experienced fighters can fight in a controlled manner with beginner students training them, in a way just as the predatory animals do with their young (wolves, etc.) At the same time they can benefit from a young beginner coming at them wildly without fear and understand that even if they are unable to make a good strike that a more experience fighter might be able to in a given situation. Besides, in the wild, Tigers rarely fight Tigers, Tigers attack prey.

Fighting: if this was a village or civilian type army, before during and after this training they would already be fighting in the way they knew how from instict and experience. The excercises they train will simply make them more effective.

Running a Kung Fu School.

Running a traditional Kung Fu school of a Traditional and Unique art is like carrying around a Jade Treasure the size of a Boulder. You hold something valuable
but it weighs you down. And then if you happen to drop it, well cracked Jade only does bad for you.
Okay so the analogy doesn't necessarily work but this problem/goal/dream has been on my mind perhaps for ten years. At the old school, the overhead was way too high, but we kept the school a float in the hope that we would one day have more people, and also we needed a place for our stuidents to practice, to get better, to learn as much as possible to possibly pass on the art. (That is as much of it as possible)

We closed down/moved to a new location with a much lower overhead. However, we are still not breaking even but in fact paying into the school since, we are now a school of instructors and no students to be trained. Even the children I train that are related by blood to my Sifu, do not have what it takes (so far) to pass on the art. Yes they are children, but they are actually getting worse and not better at the Kung Fu aspect. though they are getting bigger and stronger.

I tecah many people through workshops and outside classes. These workshops benefit them /the student but they learn for themselves and not for the school so they are not really part of the family. Moreover, These classes do not pay and even oif the did, would not be able to cover overhead.

I was thinking, none of the fantasy kung fu novel masters have schools. They always save lives moving from town to town. Then I thought again. No, they do have schools, on their mountain or whatever, and (especially in Siu Ngo Gong Wu) they all go crazy or die terrible deaths due to the difficulties of runing a school. Students betray them, other schools try to start wars with them.
But at least they have students.

If all we were teaching was some regular Kung Fu that I see everyone else teaching, I would not even be interested in teaching I think.
It is beacsue I don't want this art, this real art, that I never have seen anywahere else, to die out. If I had the money I would pay people to learn if they had the right heart. But I don't, and I need to make money for the school and it would be nice to make some for myself as well.

Other people do it, whether it is Yoga, or Personal Training or whatever.