The Indoor Yang Family System on the Internet

I have just started another blog in which I will lay out the forms and other material in the Indoor Yang Family System:

http://indooryang.blogspot.com/

I have so far put up the first section of the Little Nine Heavens form. I should be able to put up one or two movements each day.

I will still be publishing the books. This will give you the opportunity to work with the material before the books come out, and it will help me to sort out any errors, missing information and to find which areas need clarification.

So far I have published the Wise Hammers form book. It's available from Lulu.com, and also for a much better price from Plum Publishing.

Rules and Fighting: The Paradox of Martial Arts Training

Here is a problem that is faced in every martial art:

1) At some point, you must train realistically (e.g. full-contact.)
2) Realistic fighting is dangerous, so you must either risk serious injury or develop rules.
3) Rules change the nature of fighting.
4) At some point, the practitioners forget that their rules-based fighting isn't real fighting.

Brazilian Jiujutsu fighters (who should be respected for their dedication to full-contact training) forget that outside the ring the ground is a bad place to be.

On the other end of the spectrum, Chinese wrestlers, knowing that the ground is death on the street, set rules so that you lose the fight as soon as anything knees or above touches the ground. For an Indo fighter like me, knees-on-the-ground means that I have two more ranges to fight in before I hit the ground.

Western boxers are famous for breaking their knuckles the first time they punch someone in a bar. Judoka are lost without lapels to grab. Karateka are easily defeated by a little grappling and stalking. HAve I left anyone out?

What to do? The obvious solution is to keep reminding ourselves that we are playing. I make a point to use the word play quite a lot in my teaching. I play the sword and spear, we play sambutan, etc. The Filipinos have a word, Labanlaro (I think), which means "Cubs Playing". The idea being that tiger cubs, for example, play with each other more-and-more roughly until one of the yelps, and then they separate and start over. Then the mother tiger drags home a slightly-injured wildebeast, and they take turns trying to take it down under her watchful eye, all in the safety of the den.

Measurements of Practice

The old masters used to make their students swear to "always wear tattered sleeves."

I swear to always wear worn-out kung fu shoes.