A Few Thoughts on How You can have Perfection of Form

By Al Case

After forty years of practicing the martial arts, of studying Karate and Shaolin and Aikido and other arts, one thing about learning to fight has become very apparent. This truth is that people who study classical martial arts become better fighters. And, inversely, people who don't study classical martial arts don't always become better fighters.

The very interesting thing about all this is that most people don't really know what fighting really is. People are locked into the bang and pow of such things as reaction time, and they never really open up to the subject of developing intuition. Only through classical forms, such as are taught in such classical martial arts as wing chun or Shaolin, will a person make serious inroads into and start to develop the reality of this subject of intuition.

Most training methods, you see, rely on making muscle, on increasing speed, on being bigger and better and faster. Yet, the sad truth is that the best fighters are not always the biggest, bestest fastest. The best fighters in the world are the ones who see what is coming before it arrives.

Most martial arts training methods in modern times, you see, because they rely on reaction time, have reaction time built into them. Reaction time means that you are moving because something else has already moved, which means that you are moving too late, you are moving after the punch is on the way and nearly there. To not learn to move too late you must train in a classical method, such as Krav Maga or ninjitsu or Aikido, which teaches you to move before the punch is thrown.

Thus, to accelerate yourself as a fighter, to improve yourself on every possible level, you need to study martial methods, such as form training in classical styles such as hung gar and wado ryu, which address you in areas other than just muscle and reaction time. The forms of the classical arts accelerate your ability to fight as I am discussing here. Yes, they sometimes seem unweildy and one does often have to adapt and change what they learn to make the various teachings work, but the benefits are great and far in advance of meat and muscle and bone, and a person will be vastly improved, on an intuitive level, as a fighter.

When you do a classical form, you see, you are traveling down the same street. After a while of traveling down that street you see the same sights. After a while you can predict what is going to happen on that street before you make passage.

This kind of prediction is at the heart and core of the real and true martial arts, and of fighting. The real key lies in building the peculiar silence that develops as you practice your forms, which is available through such arts as Uechi ryu and Goju ryu. In the middle of such profound silence, silence that is spiritual in nature, you can find and define the exact thought that motivates every action.

Nothing in this universe is ever going to move unless a thought moves it first. Thus, the study of the classical martial arts, done with correct forms, with correct training methods, aid the fighter in developing his intuitive abilitiess. Yes, studying forms, such as in Isshin ryu and shito ryu, opens your mind and allows you to build the real qualities of the martila arts that are not found by the fellow who just fights. - 31373

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