Transcript
Speaker: The Gung Fu Crew Podcast, bringing together practitioners of various styles in schools and their unique perspectives to explore the world of Chinese martial arts.
Speaker: Welcome to the next episode of the Kung Fu Crew podcast.
Speaker: This will be interview number nine.
Speaker: So we had with this will be will have been nine full interviews with different practitioners and teachers.
Speaker: And so far, the other eight have been mostly focused on northern Chinese martial arts.
Speaker: The single exception being the interview I did with Ghislain, who introduced Hungar, one of the most famous styles of Chinese martial arts, actually, but also one of the southern styles.
Speaker: All the others were focused on northern training methods.
Speaker: So I thought it would be nice to counterbalance that a little bit.
Speaker: So this episode will also focus on a pretty widespread or very kind of important, historically also important, southern style of Chinese martial arts.
Speaker: My guest for this episode is Philip Le, who is an expert in southern praying mantis.
Speaker: specifically the variation called Guangzai Zhuk Lum.
Speaker: And in my ignorance as a practitioner of northern Chinese martial arts, I always assumed that Cho Ga was just the general term to describe southern praying mantis.
Speaker: But through Philip, I actually learned that there are different variations of southern praying mantis, and this is a specific type.
Speaker: And he actually, even within that, he had access to two different lineages, the Jin Fun Mark and the Louis Jackman lineage.
Speaker: through two teachers, Joe McSorley and John Clark.
Speaker: He will expand a bit on that.
Speaker: But it's quite interesting to learn that there are actually a lot of sub-variations of Southern praying mantis.
Speaker: And of course, Philip has also practiced other stuff like Wing Chun and boxing.
Speaker: He originally learned a lot of the stuff in Philadelphia.
Speaker: I guess you have to practice boxing there anyway, I assume.
Speaker: But we will be focusing on this specific variation of Southern praying mantis.
Speaker: And I hope that you find it as interesting as I did when I conducted the interview.
Speaker: Welcome to the next episode of the Kung Fu Crew podcast.
Speaker: And I'm very happy to have another guest here with me, Philip Le, who is an expert in Southern Chinese martial arts.
Speaker: More about that later.
Speaker: Maybe, Philip, you want to introduce yourself first so that people know who I'm talking to.
Speaker: Awesome and thank you so much for having me here Daniel.
Speaker: Really excited to talk through a little bit about Southern Kung Fu, Southern Prairie Mantis and martial arts overall.
Speaker: So again, my name is Philip Lay.
Speaker: I'm based out of New York City and my background is in Southern Prairie Mantis.
Speaker: It's actually where I actually developed this skill though was in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Speaker: And I bring that up because there is a distinct flavor of Guangzai Juk Lum that comes out of Philadelphia that we'll talk about in a little bit.
Speaker: But yeah, that's me and that's where I'm from.
Speaker: Interesting.
Speaker: So, housekeeping first.
Speaker: Since we're going to talk about martial arts, I think it would be helpful to establish a bit of a frame of reference for that.
Speaker: How would you define, I mean, not in a scientific sense, but how would you define martial arts?
Speaker: Like, what is a martial art to you?
Speaker: Or what, maybe let's rephrase that, what does a training system have to have, in your opinion, to be called a martial art?
Speaker: Yeah, I love this question, and I also always kind of loathe this question a little bit because it's a question I ask myself a lot.
Speaker: I think if I take a step back and academically I think about martial art and the word martial and art,
Speaker: I think like the word kung fu or kung fu, it's made up of two different words that combine together to give a deeper meaning, right?
Speaker: So martial art to me is the deliberate practice of something that is martial.
Speaker: That is to say it's combative in some degree.
Speaker: You're practicing it to have some sort of understanding intellectually but also physically on how to engage with physical conflict.
Speaker: So there's a martial aspect.
Speaker: The art aspect to me, though, is where I think it gets potentially a little bit more subjective.
Speaker: But I think the art to me, where you compare a martial art versus, say, something that you train for in the military or you train in, you know, let's say the police force, what makes it an art is I think that there has to be some sort of
Speaker: historical or cultural aspect to it.
Speaker: And that could be that it's about aesthetics and performance.
Speaker: It could be that it's about combative sports.
Speaker: It could be about keeping a tradition alive.
Speaker: But I think that it needs to have a little bit of that.
Speaker: I'll also say that a lot of times...
Speaker: at least in my kind of framework, it's something may have been martial and combative, and then due to the pressures of society or a particular time in history, it had to evolve, right?
Speaker: Or it had to refine itself a little bit.
Speaker: It had to reflect the culture in the moment.
Speaker: So martial art to me is something that absolutely has to be combative oriented, but also has to live at the intersection of what the culture needs in that moment in time.
Speaker: And you already mentioned the term kung fu or kung fu in Mandarin.
Speaker: Is that also, because it's interesting when you talk to people who, you know, train stuff that came from mainland China, then sometimes they might be closer to wushu as a term or like through the Taiwanese connection would be guoshu.
Speaker: And usually if it comes to Hong Kong or southern China, it might be kung fu or kung fu.
Speaker: Is that also the term or the terminology that you would use?
Speaker: Kung fu or is it...
Speaker: Yeah, I typically use Kung Fu or I say it with my Vietnamese accent, Gong Fu, which is, I like it for a number of reasons.
Speaker: Now, I know, I love the literal translation of Wushu or in Vietnamese, Vautok.
Speaker: So I think that that word really emphasizes the nature of what you're trying to study, right?
Speaker: This notion that you're handling some sort of conflict, right?
Speaker: I do think, though, that like things in anthropologically, things evolve over time.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so just like martial arts evolve over time, I think the word has taken on a different meaning and it's defined as it is, you know, with the more acrobatic performance oriented routines.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So I like to use the word Kung Fu or Kung Fu because I think it has more of that traditional Chinese martial arts connotations related to it.
Speaker: And because of that, I prefer its usage.
Speaker: I also like it because philosophically to me,
Speaker: Kung Fu is a framework on how to train and study combatives, yes.
Speaker: But I think there's a lot of other cultural elements into it.
Speaker: So the word can be utilized more universally to applying...
Speaker: very refined skill or some sense of synthesis to other areas of life.
Speaker: And so I like the term for both its practicality in terms of martial arts, traditional martial arts, but then also as a term on applying Kung Fu to other areas of your life.
Speaker: So let's jump into maybe your own background a bit more.
Speaker: You already mentioned Southern Preying Mantis as a Southern style of Chinese martial arts.
Speaker: I would assume that you didn't start out with that style or was it actually like your first contact with Chinese martial arts?
Speaker: How did you get into martial arts in general?
Speaker: Yeah, you're absolutely right.
Speaker: It wasn't my first contact with martial arts.
Speaker: My history with martial arts goes way back because I grew up hearing stories about my grandfather.
Speaker: Now, I'm Vietnamese, so I'm not Chinese, but I'm Vietnamese.
Speaker: My grandfather, I never was able to meet.
Speaker: He was in Vietnam.
Speaker: I was born and raised in the United States.
Speaker: My parents came here after the war.
Speaker: But I would get to hear stories about my family history.
Speaker: And a part of that was that my grandfather was a martial arts instructor for his village.
Speaker: And he was the one that taught a unique family style.
Speaker: And so I heard about this and, you know, growing up, I wanted to learn it.
Speaker: Unfortunately, he passed away before I was able to meet him.
Speaker: And maybe we could talk about that on another podcast.
Speaker: But I eventually tried to piece together his martial art.
Speaker: But as a part of that and as a part of growing up in a small town in the United States, not having exposure to traditional Kung Fu,
Speaker: But having exposure to these stories and kung fu movies, I wanted to do as much research as I could about kung fu.
Speaker: I also think that there was something about traditional Chinese martial arts that really attracted to me.
Speaker: which was there was this whole system and practice around it where, yes, you could apply application-oriented to it, but there was this transmission, this notion of a living history that you could pass on that was really interesting to me.
Speaker: So I did as much as I could in terms of reading books.
Speaker: I tried to expose myself and meet different martial artists.
Speaker: And it wasn't until I got to university
Speaker: that I had the access and the means to reach out to specific martial arts instructors.
Speaker: And I would say, you know, I dabbled in a lot in my early 20s, but what I stuck with was Wing Chun.
Speaker: And I did Wing Chun for five years.
Speaker: I would say that was my first formal education into the martial arts.
Speaker: I trained it.
Speaker: It was a part of William Chung's style of Wing Chun.
Speaker: So Hong Kong Wing Chun.
Speaker: I did that for about five years.
Speaker: And while I was studying that, I was also studying a host of other things.
Speaker: I was doing a bit of Muay Thai, I was doing a bit of boxing, but I was really interested in trying to make Kung Fu work.
Speaker: There's a lot of great stuff with the Wing Chun I learned.
Speaker: I actually will talk about this in a little bit, but I actually utilize a lot of its basic training to teach my students, right?
Speaker: To get them informed and adapted to Hakka styles of martial arts.
Speaker: But at that juncture in my life, I had a hard time figuring out how to apply it.
Speaker: What ended up happening was serendipitously, I was looking for a martial arts instructor for one of my friends.
Speaker: He was moving into a new area.
Speaker: And so I was like, okay, let's try and find you an instructor.
Speaker: And I came across, this is like a meetup page that was advertising Southern Preying Mantis.
Speaker: And I was like, there's no way that in this part of Pennsylvania that there's going to be a Southern praying mantis instructor.
Speaker: I had read about it.
Speaker: It seemed like in this obscure style.
Speaker: It seemed really cool, right?
Speaker: It seemed like it was a bit of Wing Chun, but it was talking about these different powers and these different structures.
Speaker: So I went to go meet the teacher, and one of the first things he said to me was like, hey, throw a punch at me.
Speaker: And I was like...
Speaker: What kind?
Speaker: And he's like, what do you mean, what kind?
Speaker: Just throw one, right?
Speaker: So, you know, you're younger, you're a little, like, spicier.
Speaker: So I was like, okay, you know, I'll throw, like, a boxing jab.
Speaker: I'll throw a boxing hook.
Speaker: And he handled it.
Speaker: And at that moment, I was like, wow, there is this traditional Chinese practice that is handling...
Speaker: this type of attack that I was having a hard time handling with when I stuck specifically to Wing Chun.
Speaker: And so that's how I got involved into Southern Prairie Mantis.
Speaker: And then you started learning from him as well, along with your student?
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: So then it was actually not a student of mine.
Speaker: It was actually a friend of mine.
Speaker: So then it was myself and two others.
Speaker: Then we started training under my teacher at the time, Joe McSorley, who was in Brumall, Pennsylvania.
Speaker: And he had studied under Jinfun Maaxifu.
Speaker: And that was in the style specifically of Guangzai Zhuklem.
Speaker: So Guangzai Providence, Bamboo Forest, Southern Prairie Mantis.
Speaker: And that's where my studies began.
Speaker: And I studied with him for a while.
Speaker: I was doing it with Wing Chun for a little while.
Speaker: And then I decided, hey, you know, I think it's time for me to transition fully over to Southern Prairie Mantis.
Speaker: I cared about it enough where I was like, I want to get this system.
Speaker: And fortunately for me, I had Joe McSorley as my teacher, but he also had a student named John Clark.
Speaker: And the interesting thing about John Clark was John Clark was studying under Joe McSorley.
Speaker: But he was also studying under Jin Fu Maqsifu's Kung Fu brother, Louis Jackman in Philadelphia.
Speaker: And so he had two different flavors of Guangzai Juklem.
Speaker: And then John Clark took me on as a student as well.
Speaker: And it's through John Clark that I would say that, you know, I have my discipleship and where I got a lot of my foundation.
Speaker: Now, you already mentioned one big reason why you then actually started your journey into Southern Pregmentus, the ability to actually deal with certain attacks or have a tactical framework that works.
Speaker: Were there any other qualities in those teachers where you said, oh, yeah, this is actually what I want to learn?
Speaker: Because sometimes that can be very illuminating when people talk about
Speaker: like these kind of models looking at those people and saying, oh yeah, this is it.
Speaker: This is what I want to do.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: I would say the interesting thing about my teachers was at that juncture in my life, they really hit this nice balance between keeping the traditional side alive that they had inherited from their teachers while also really looking at things through a modern lens and a modern framework.
Speaker: So when I was younger and exploring all of my interests in Kung Fu and martial arts,
Speaker: I invariably ended up being very interested in Bruce Lee and his whole notion of how do I apply Kung Fu in the United States against this variety of martial arts and how do I make sure that it works?
Speaker: So that type of very American-oriented way of thinking...
Speaker: was always interesting to me.
Speaker: The thing about Joe and John that I really appreciated was they wanted to keep the tradition alive and they understood the value of those traditions, but they were always pressure testing it against
Speaker: the modern frameworks and the modern sensibilities that were occurring today.
Speaker: John Clark was also trained as a boxer in the peekaboo style.
Speaker: So he knew and still does throw very ferocious attacks.
Speaker: And that was the framing from which we had to apply our traditional skill sets.
Speaker: And that was very, very both exciting for me, but also illuminating for me as I was younger in my martial arts journey.
Speaker: And so that's what really drew me to it.
Speaker: I would say now at this stage of my life, I'm interested in both, but I'm gravitating more towards the idea of transmission, of how to hand off this historical artifact.
Speaker: But there's always going to be this nugget, this little kernel inside of me that's going to want to make sure that I know how to then also
Speaker: have this be a living cultural art versus versus a fossil and and i think joe and john were really good at that so how how did you start out then i mean you didn't obviously didn't come as a complete beginner because you already had some martial arts practice um behind you and and i would assume that there was some was some overlap to the wing chun but how would you start out to to train back then
Speaker: Well, Joe and John have two very different approaches.
Speaker: So Joe would be like, okay, put your hands up and we're going to start throwing punches at you and just do the basic technique.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so that was just very, very, uh, you know, you have blocked learning and then you have random learning, you know, in education.
Speaker: And Joe was very much about the randomized learning.
Speaker: John, uh,
Speaker: really cared about the forms, and he really cared about the fundamentals.
Speaker: And so he was very much about the blocked learning, which is really interesting too, because he's the boxer, right?
Speaker: But he wanted to find a way and a method to bring us up where we were just increasing the cognitive and physical load over time.
Speaker: And I think having the balance between the two actually accelerated my learning.
Speaker: basics were really important to both of them and the most basic thing that you can do in southern praying mantis is hut yi sao begging hands or asking hands right and so whereas wing chun fights from center outwards so you know the very famous wing chun posture that you know you've got your man sao your leading hand up and forward you've got your wu sao back protecting and guarding your center
Speaker: The whole framework around Wing Chun is how do you, from the inside, spring outwards.
Speaker: We have that too, but our posture in Southern Prairie Mantis is much more of a funnel.
Speaker: So rather than having your hands on your center line,
Speaker: You would actually have your hands exposed outwards and having your elbows pinch inwards towards your center lines as inviting a target to your military targets along your center line.
Speaker: And what then you have to train is how do you move your horse, so your footwork,
Speaker: your core and your structure to align the position of your arm and your body to block and parry an attack coming on that center line to intercept it, right?
Speaker: And so that was the foundation of everything that we did.
Speaker: And then based off of that structure, you could then spiral outwards.
Speaker: You could sink with it.
Speaker: You could float with it.
Speaker: You could steal it.
Speaker: You could do a lot of different things.
Speaker: But the whole thing was, how do you, like a praying mantis, have your arms exposed and then ensure that you were able to collapse and vacuum an individual in?
Speaker: And so we practiced ha'i sao a lot.
Speaker: I would say then also we practiced ha'i sao.
Speaker: very fundamental movements.
Speaker: We had our morshu or morsal, which is a grinding hand.
Speaker: It's very similar to the famous wax on, wax off movement.
Speaker: You had your chakshu, which was an inward to outward movement with your palm up.
Speaker: It looks like the famous tan sao, but it's a little bit different where there's a springiness to it and you're trying to kind of absorb power.
Speaker: And then we had our guac shu, right?
Speaker: Which is this almost like button hook looping hand that you would slice down and slice inside the guard and then move it out.
Speaker: So the framework there was, I always tell my students, it's like flipping the pages of a book.
Speaker: You would have your morshu from the outside gate move to the inside gate.
Speaker: From the inside gate, you would flip your palm up to chak shu to the outside gate.
Speaker: And then you would button loop down, your palm would be down again into the guac shu.
Speaker: And so that was those fundamentals that allowed us to control the gates.
Speaker: And that was like, that was day one.
Speaker: The next thing that we then had to work on was a lot of our horse work or footwork.
Speaker: How to connect the body to the ground, how to connect your lower half to your upper half, and extend it out through your arms.
Speaker: And so at first, it was just a lot of what we call walking the horse, very fundamentals.
Speaker: Every Kung Fu style has their version of walking the horse.
Speaker: But then before we even learn the nucleus form, which is Sambo Jin,
Speaker: we then started practicing how to do the swallow and spit movements, right?
Speaker: Swallow and expel movements, the, um, the, the ton.
Speaker: So the, to swallow and then the two to expel.
Speaker: And we would practice that, uh, just stationary utilizing our horse work and our core, and then making sure that we were able to express that out into our arms.
Speaker: I would say that that was like the first several months.
Speaker: Okay, so you mentioned horse work, is that because you, is it connected to the horse stance as a basic foundation or are you actually using more of this, you know, you have different names, Sanjian, Sanjian or Sanxin in Japanese, this basic stance where the body is essentially closed, especially in the legs, is that kind of the... Yeah, it's a very similar stance and so it's very similar to the Sanxin stance.
Speaker: I would say the difference, and I also practiced Gojo-Ru, and I did so because I wanted to see the relationships between Gojo-Ru and Hakka styles.
Speaker: But I would say with ours, it's a similar stance, but our emphasis was on creating this springy dynamic tension versus this more...
Speaker: the tension is springy versus being more of a hard tension right not the iron body exactly and so and so the idea was how would we be able to be in this stance and then also be able to then do the the swallow the coil inward and coil outward motions between our legs the ground our core and then our upper body
Speaker: And I would assume that Swallow and Spit Out have specific tactical dimensions as well, because everything else you also mentioned, like all the hand movements, it's quite interesting, everything already relates to how you would actually use this against someone else, against an opponent.
Speaker: I would assume that the same is true for Swallow and Spit Out.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: So this concept is extremely exemplified within our form Sambojin.
Speaker: So three-step arrow.
Speaker: And it pretty much comprises the entire form.
Speaker: And you'll see this in other Southern Prey Manta styles as well.
Speaker: But it's the notion of being able to coil in and coil outward.
Speaker: Now, the way that I think about forms is a lot of people think that they're a catalog of techniques.
Speaker: They think it's an encyclopedia.
Speaker: And while I think that's somewhat true, I think there are different forms for different purposes.
Speaker: And Sambo Jin is an interesting one.
Speaker: And it has a lot of similarities to other Hakka styles or, like, say, the San Shin form or the Tensho form, where...
Speaker: It's really about the attribute training that you're trying to do, the skill development and the attribute, versus say, the actual application, even though there are actual applications in there.
Speaker: What I mean by that is,
Speaker: In three-step aero, you have a lot of this swallow in, taking in, this vacuuming in, and then this expelling or spitting outward.
Speaker: And you do this motion so that your body gets used to essentially power generation.
Speaker: It's knowing how to recruit the right muscles and the right dynamic tension to create power, to create velocity in a short distance in a short amount of time.
Speaker: Over time, there's a lot of kung fu in the micro movements related to that swallow and spit.
Speaker: So you have things like when you coil in, you might not coil in to the full distance when you're applying it as you would in a form.
Speaker: But you develop it to such a degree that at any moment you can spring forward and have violent intensity in short distance, a short amount of time.
Speaker: And that's what you're training.
Speaker: And so it's similar to modern sports science where you train the big expression of it and then you whittle it down and get it smaller and smaller and more refined over time.
Speaker: The form teaches you that.
Speaker: I would say the thing that it allows you to do is it allows you to create immense velocity from inward to outward.
Speaker: And I'm not talking about chi or anything like that.
Speaker: I'm talking about physical dynamics.
Speaker: It also teaches you this idea of what I call spindling.
Speaker: So when you make contact with another limb or body,
Speaker: You're using the turning of your own limbs, the radius and the ulna, and you're using that, you're expressing that through your core, through your footwork.
Speaker: And because you're spindling your arm, your arm is actually making more contact surface area across the object that you're striking at or the object that you're defending against.
Speaker: And you actually have more contact time in a shorter velocity with the other individual.
Speaker: And the form teaches that as well.
Speaker: So you mentioned the form, like singular, are there any other, like is there only one form or do you have also like a lot of forms, would you go then through kind of a progression of different forms?
Speaker: Yeah, there would be a progression.
Speaker: So you see a lot of other practitioners who are from the Jinfung Mach lineage, their techniques are so soft, they're soft, but they're very deadly and they're very precise.
Speaker: The flavor of Guangzai Zhuk Lum that I practice, we strive for that, right?
Speaker: We strive for that ultimate softness and we strive for that precision.
Speaker: But what I really liked about Louis Jackman was that he was a smaller man.
Speaker: And being a smaller man and having a smaller frame, he had to do as much recruitment as possible for as much power as possible.
Speaker: And I'm a smaller individual, right?
Speaker: Like, I'm going to use...
Speaker: I'm 5'7", I'm 140 pounds.
Speaker: Yes, I exercise, but on the scale of things, I'm a smaller individual, so how do I do that recruitment?
Speaker: I followed Louis-Jack Mann's
Speaker: side a little bit more just because his flavor was more interesting to me.
Speaker: And I say that because to answer your question more directly, he had a progression of forms that I really appreciated, which was Sambo Jin, which I know both Louis Jackman's version and I know Jin Fun Mak's version.
Speaker: And they're both similar with small little details and differences, probably based on preferences.
Speaker: And then through Louie Jackman, I learned some butt names, so 18 points, which is much more quick.
Speaker: It's using a lot more angular movements to cut angles, whereas Sambo Jin is very much straightforward, forward and back, forward and back, right?
Speaker: Because they're training different things.
Speaker: Whereas Sambo Jin is training the swallow and spit,
Speaker: 18 points is really training the sink float and then the torque going side to side.
Speaker: And then Louis Jackman taught us four additional sequences, which he called seam quinn.
Speaker: So seam quinn is essentially the monk's seam's fists.
Speaker: And there were four sets to that that made up one long form.
Speaker: And there you learned other specialized skill sets, learning how to expel certain things outward really quickly and then cut inwards and turn.
Speaker: You had things that were now involving a little bit more kicks.
Speaker: You had things that were involving a little bit more of stretching outwards, movement, pulling in, right?
Speaker: A lot of like that kind of clinch type of technique.
Speaker: And then he had another form, Seimoon, so four gates.
Speaker: And that was the progression.
Speaker: Of course, you also had weapons.
Speaker: Our main weapons were the snake pole and the butterfly sword.
Speaker: So that was the sequence.
Speaker: For me, I...
Speaker: appreciate forms as a methodology to learn and i i really appreciate it as a mnemonic and a way to transmit but i if i had to be honest i gravitate towards certain forms because i feel like they have the nucleus or essence of the style and those are the ones i train the most and then i'm very big on application work
Speaker: And when I think of southern Chinese martial arts, I immediately also think of a lot of specific conditioning.
Speaker: And I don't know if that is because in the beginning you also said you were focusing more on this kind of spring equality and less of this hardening the body or this iron body idea.
Speaker: But is there any specific conditioning in terms of hardening the body and then also strength training?
Speaker: I know a lot of this stuff made it over to the Okinawan karate team.
Speaker: but I don't know what role it plays in Southern praying mantis.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: I would say for our style, the conditioning was less about making your body hard.
Speaker: It was more about knowing how to maintain this outward pressure, even if there was pressure being applied against you.
Speaker: So we would get into our horse, right, which is similar to that San Shin stance.
Speaker: And similar to how you see practitioners in Gojo Ru, they stand in this stance, they stand really hard, and there's like,
Speaker: They get hit, they get kicked, to maintain their stance.
Speaker: We had a form of that, but it was less about making the body hard.
Speaker: You would get in that stance, you would get into your bigger hand posture, your hut yi sal, and you would have your partner push against your structure.
Speaker: They would push against it to make sure that you were stable and you were connected to the ground and you could still issue force and not overcommit where if they let go, you would topple.
Speaker: And then you would practice that structure moving forward, having that pressure applied and moving backwards and having that pressure applied.
Speaker: And could you maintain that pressure?
Speaker: Now, because this is an auditorial experience,
Speaker: our listeners can't see, but when you have your arms out in beggar hand posture, if you don't have the right structure, it actually feels like there's just a gap between your elbow and your body.
Speaker: And so it's very easily collapsed.
Speaker: So what this does is it trains you how to focus on your scapula, to relax your rotator cuff, right?
Speaker: To gauge your lats in the right way, to make sure that there's right amount of tension in your hands.
Speaker: to make sure that there's right amount of tension in your forearms, to make sure that there's the right amount of tension in your legs.
Speaker: But then also maintain a springiness to it so that it's not just a dead static energy.
Speaker: So that's one.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: No, I was just mentioning this really interesting because there are actually similar exercises in our line of Chen style Taiji.
Speaker: Because there's also this basic idea of you have to keep your structure in your upper body when you move your legs, because if you don't, then the upper body collapses and then you lose balance and all of that.
Speaker: But I find it really interesting because I'm pretty sure there's no direct historical connection between Southern praying mantis and Taiji Tuan.
Speaker: And then one is grouped as this internal style and then southern Chinese marshals are usually like, oh, you know, it's this hard external style.
Speaker: But actually, even there are a lot of similar ideas, which is really interesting.
Speaker: So it's kind of arbitrary to group them in one category and the other one in another.
Speaker: Yeah, I think it's fascinating, though, because I love, again, about the culture and the history and more about the anthropology of it, right?
Speaker: So they probably are very similar, and I would imagine that they are, but they evolved independently because as human beings, humans are trying to find novel ways to solve problems.
Speaker: And it's kind of like you see in nature, like convergent evolution, right?
Speaker: Like two different organisms might be evolving in different environments, but then have to
Speaker: converge and kind of have similar evolutionary practices.
Speaker: So it's a similar thing here.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it's, I mean, I'm reminded also of the episode we did on Hungar where Gisela mentioned this idea of reinforcing the structure.
Speaker: So a lot of practice where you then actually, yeah, essentially practice to keep your structure even against pressure.
Speaker: And even then, I was already kind of reminded of some stuff that we do.
Speaker: And maybe it's just really trying to get to the same point from maybe different ends, because in Taiji, obviously, you would try to focus more on the relaxing part and less maybe on the hard resistance.
Speaker: But it seems to have a similar goal.
Speaker: And like you said, I find it also very interesting that cultural ideas are sometimes quite similar, or maybe the idea itself spread and it was incorporated into a different framework.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: I mean, I see myself doing that too, right?
Speaker: So other conditioning methods that I will utilize, some of them more traditional and then other ones I've just thought up because I was trying to think of ways to teach my students.
Speaker: So for instance, you know, when I talk about horse work and I talk about that springiness,
Speaker: I'm looking for that buoyancy even though that buoyancy doesn't exist.
Speaker: So I tell my students, imagine you have just a ball that's sitting on the surface of the water.
Speaker: You push that ball in and it
Speaker: expresses itself outwards, right?
Speaker: It's very buoyant.
Speaker: And so you have those big exercise balls that you see in the gyms.
Speaker: I tell them, imagine that you're sitting on one of those and you're squeezing down and inwards on it.
Speaker: And that pressure of that ball is pushing outwards and up.
Speaker: And you want to have that constant buoyancy so that if something's pushing on you,
Speaker: it's compressing against that ball.
Speaker: If you need to express something, you're expressing it and you're using the energy of that ball to express out.
Speaker: Another thing I'll do is I'll actually get an exercise band and I'll tie it to a fixed structure.
Speaker: And then from there, I'll create tension with my arm holding onto the band and do the coiling exercise from Sambojin so that I actually feel that coil.
Speaker: And then when I have that tension coiled up, I let the band
Speaker: pull me.
Speaker: So I release the tension and I let the band actually pull my arms out.
Speaker: So now it's teaching me to build that tension, but then also to relax at the moment that I want to express that.
Speaker: So there are exercises like that.
Speaker: And then of course we also have hard body conditioning.
Speaker: We do, you know, three star, which is very popular in different styles.
Speaker: You know, you strike up, you strike low, you strike up again on the other side of your arm.
Speaker: The one variation we do with it, though, is the three hands that I had mentioned to you, the basics in the beginning, the Morshu, Chakshu, and Guakshu.
Speaker: We'll do three-star that way so that we can practice the stickiness of our bridges, of our arms.
Speaker: And so it's less of a clash.
Speaker: But it's more of meeting the arm, sticking with it, and doing the three-star motion.
Speaker: And so you're then developing this notion of the sticky bridges that southern styles and specifically Hakka styles are very famous for.
Speaker: And since you mentioned something like elastic bands, that already sounds like a creative way of including some kind of resistance training or strength training.
Speaker: Are there also traditional or very specific exercises for strength building?
Speaker: I mean, some styles use stone locks or heavy poles or something like that.
Speaker: Is there anything like that?
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: So you'll see from most Southern Prairie Mantis styles, they'll do things like having a barbell or some sort of
Speaker: heavy pole that you stand in your stance and then you rest the pole on your arms and then you do the swallow and spit on it so now not only are you doing resistance training with your arms and making sure that you're standing in essentially a modified squat position where you're doing this motion you're also then conditioning your arms right um the the the
Speaker: the exercises where you're holding on to heavy objects right very famous in the gojo ru styles holding the jars we'll do that too so that we for our mantis hands we you know we're developing nice tension there um we will also then uh do your your your horse work where um we don't always fight in say uh traditional marble right like traditional traditional wide horse stance
Speaker: But we will get into those stances and we'll transition those stances into other stances so that you're getting dynamic tension and you're getting dynamic workout with your legs.
Speaker: I will say, though, beyond all of that, then there is essentially...
Speaker: I don't know if we were considered a qigong, but we practice it as such.
Speaker: We call it SIPS.
Speaker: So you would, when you're practicing Sambo Jin, any movement where you're swallowing inwards, you're doing the tan, you pull in and you inhale deeply, and then you hold your breath.
Speaker: As you expel out, your breath is still held.
Speaker: And then the next time you do the swallow, you inhale a little bit more.
Speaker: So what you're doing is by the time you do four of those sequences, you've been building internal pressure in holding that breath and sipping more of your air in.
Speaker: And then when you're done that sequence, you expel that air out.
Speaker: And the idea there is that you're working on your diaphragm, you're working on the musculature of your body where you're having that bubble, right?
Speaker: That kind of buoyancy to your body.
Speaker: with that tension.
Speaker: And then in addition to that, because of my proclivities for modern sensibilities, I also make my students train, you know, the HIIT training and things like that, like adding in a little bit more of the modern combatives to things.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Makes sense.
Speaker: And since you already mentioned applications or that you are heavy on applications, I really like that training.
Speaker: I found it already interesting to learn that a lot of the stuff, even the basic stuff that you do in the beginning already has a direct application or an expression in partner work.
Speaker: What would the progression on the partner training side look like in Southern Praying Mentors?
Speaker: How would students move from basic exercises to more, I don't know, competitive applications or even sparring?
Speaker: I don't know what is included in the curriculum.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: So I would say that everything is about adding degrees of variability.
Speaker: So when you're a beginner, you want to reduce that as much as possible.
Speaker: And I think this is a hot take, but I think a lot of martial arts and a lot of traditional martial arts get stuck in that first spot, where you've reduced so many variables that you're either doing it in the air, or you're just doing it in forms practice, or you're doing it in prescribed partner drills.
Speaker: And we get stuck there.
Speaker: Now, I say that, but I also feel that a lot of styles are stuck there because it's so important.
Speaker: And so you have this interesting tension in modern times where...
Speaker: folks overemphasize that training or they completely de-emphasize that training.
Speaker: And I think it's so important.
Speaker: And so for me, typically what I take my students through is a very similar thing that my teachers took me through, which is the development of Hutt Yi Sal.
Speaker: So your beggar hands in its alignment to your body and your structure, doing the pressure exercises on that, and then just taking one of the techniques,
Speaker: that we had talked about.
Speaker: So we had those three hands.
Speaker: There's many more, but morshu, chakshu, guakshu.
Speaker: We use that as a framework because, again, it covers the circular motions, it covers the swallowing motions, it covers the slicing motions, and it covers inside gate, outside gate.
Speaker: But we'll pick one of those and we'll have people practice them in contact, meaning there is no space between them, right?
Speaker: They have bridge to bridge.
Speaker: Over time, you then increase the distance, increase the speed, increase the velocity, increase the intent.
Speaker: Another exercise that we'll do is really, and you see this in styles like Tai Chi, I'll just have students have their hands touching at the forearms.
Speaker: And one person will, from the outside, circle their bridge to the inside, and the other person has to follow and now go to the outside.
Speaker: And so if you were just to watch it from a distance, you would see that it would just look like these two folks are just circling their limbs and staying in contact.
Speaker: But the idea there is that now they're learning how to read the direction and intent of their arms.
Speaker: Then, after they get that stickiness, they're used to following and receiving and listening to their partner, then you would introduce the motion of, okay, you've got this circle.
Speaker: One person circles in, the other person circles out.
Speaker: That person then circles in, the other person circles out.
Speaker: Then you introduce, not randomly, controlled, one person circles in, the other person slices forward.
Speaker: And so now you're introducing another variable.
Speaker: You have the circular motion, now you have the linear motion.
Speaker: And then you randomize it over time.
Speaker: And that's with contact.
Speaker: Now you combine that with ha'i sal, but now you create distance.
Speaker: So you have the idea of beggar hands where you've had contact and you're covering your center.
Speaker: Now you have the exercise where you're circling and following.
Speaker: Now you have the exercise of somebody is slicing in on you and you deflect.
Speaker: You add that distance now and you have people train that.
Speaker: Then over time, you add in other skill sets, other hands, other techniques.
Speaker: And then invariably you get to a point where you then say, okay, let's randomize this a little bit.
Speaker: Let's play this with...
Speaker: traditional praying mantis techniques now let's play this with the jab cross let's add in a hook let's add in you know a kick let's add in an uppercut let's add in a like a long fist long-ranged attack and so you start playing and mixing these things up so that people have
Speaker: a laboratory to mess around with.
Speaker: And it's at that stage then that I introduced sparring.
Speaker: Now I'm of the philosophy though, when I was younger, I liked to spar hard.
Speaker: I liked the feeling it gave me.
Speaker: That's why I really enjoyed boxing and Muay Thai.
Speaker: But I feel like sparring should be playful.
Speaker: It should be an area where you're experimenting things with a trusted partner and you can spar hard,
Speaker: But the idea then is, what are you trying to get out of sparring hard?
Speaker: Is it you want to work out?
Speaker: Is it that you're trying to see if you can pressure test yourself a little bit more?
Speaker: Or is it you're trying to test out your techniques?
Speaker: And depending on all of those, you turn the dials and you customize the dials of what that sparring session should be like.
Speaker: Yeah, and that seems to be a big of, for a lot of Chinese traditions, that seems to be one of the weaker points that this playful technical sparring is not even, like it's not really a part of it.
Speaker: You either go all the way or you don't do it at all, which is then what most people get stuck with.
Speaker: They don't do it at all because, I mean, people don't feel comfortable, like really fighting, like really going into heavy, hard sparring.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: and for me again because i i appreciate combining these modern sensibilities um you know my students cross train in other arts uh my one he does jujitsu he also does uh muay thai i studied muay thai and i wanted to see if my techniques could work in a muay thai environment and it does and i my my belief is that these southern styles especially hakka styles
Speaker: they're clinching arts, right?
Speaker: When you're doing Qi Sao, you're essentially in a pre-clinch range.
Speaker: And some of these techniques, if you're hooking in hand, imagine if you're hooking the neck with it, right?
Speaker: So these things, like, you have to experiment them in different environments.
Speaker: And, you know, I would take them into a Muay Thai gym, and I'd be courteous.
Speaker: I wasn't, you know, trying to be an upstart of, like, oh, like, I would actually train and be a good student in Muay Thai.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But then with trust, you then try out certain things, right?
Speaker: You try out certain guards.
Speaker: And a lot of times you see overlaps, too, of how they catch a kick.
Speaker: And you're like, oh, I saw that from the 18 points form.
Speaker: That makes sense now.
Speaker: Or you see, oh, when I collapse my arms and I drop my elbows, that's fantastic defense against a Muay Thai teep.
Speaker: Oh, I'm practicing judo.
Speaker: This particular grip right here,
Speaker: This works when you have clothing, but if you don't have clothing, our mantis hands works really great at hooking a limb.
Speaker: And so, you know, I push my students to think about things in that way, and then I make sure that they understand that the reason we're doing it in a traditional way, though, is that there are ways and methodologies of learning that is specific to this style that you're only going to get through this style.
Speaker: And then how it manifests when you're playing or practicing out in the world
Speaker: is another story, but to develop the techniques, you want to utilize the frameworks that give you those results.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, makes a lot of sense.
Speaker: Now, one thing that I'm also really interested in is you mentioned this idea of qigong or like really breath work as part of the training.
Speaker: And in one of the other episodes, Byron Jacobs, when we talked about Xingyi, he mentioned the term gongfa.
Speaker: like the method to build gung, it's not that easy to translate actually, I mean it's the same gung as in gung fu, I believe, but it's hard to directly translate it.
Speaker: But it seems to me that it's very much integrated into this idea of power generation.
Speaker: Now, sometimes people also have this idea, okay, there has to be like a separate health part training, like you also do like health Qigong on the side, but then some methods it seems to be integrated, but always with this idea of, like I said, power generation in mind.
Speaker: And the same seems to be true for these more, let's say, spiritual, I'm using air quotes here, listeners can't see that, but like spiritual ideas like mindfulness training or introspection and stuff like that.
Speaker: what role do these aspects play in Southern praying mantis?
Speaker: Are they integrated?
Speaker: Do you have separate training traditions for this?
Speaker: Is it even an issue or a topic or is it more like, yeah, it's optional?
Speaker: It's a great question.
Speaker: Historically, Shin Gong and Qi Gong were all integrated with Gong look, right?
Speaker: So strength building, like all of those attributes were built in.
Speaker: To be honest with you, though, a lot of that wasn't emphasized through my Philadelphia lineage.
Speaker: A lot of my Philadelphia lineage was about the combatives.
Speaker: How do you make this work?
Speaker: Which ways can you express this to shut down things in a street fight?
Speaker: What would it look like against modern fighters?
Speaker: What would it look like against...
Speaker: other ethnic martial arts.
Speaker: And so it was really a lot about that.
Speaker: You hear stories, right?
Speaker: You hear stories about Jin Fu Mak practicing some Xing Gong.
Speaker: You hear stories about how, you know, people say that the originator of the style, Sam Dat, you can like invoke him into your hands.
Speaker: But my lineage and my branch in Philadelphia, we never focused on those things.
Speaker: And so
Speaker: I would say the most we got into it was more of this qigong aspect, but it wasn't to cultivate qi in the Taoist sense of longevity.
Speaker: It was more about how do you generate breath and expression so that you could express your art in the greatest way and the most efficient way as possible.
Speaker: Now,
Speaker: I think whether it's subconsciously or whether it's by virtue of kind of my own philosophy, I do pair my own training with like a more health aspect.
Speaker: And I wouldn't say a spiritual aspect in the sense that like, it's going to get people to conjure up the idea of like old school Kung Fu spiritual, spiritual Kung Fu.
Speaker: But, um,
Speaker: Things like meditation is very important to me and something I, you know, provocate to my students.
Speaker: The idea of enhanced mobility training, right?
Speaker: You're contorting your body into these very dynamic and efficient expressions.
Speaker: that are great for combat, but not necessarily great for everyday life, right?
Speaker: You're pulling your scapula forward, you're like hollowing out your chest, everything that today they say like, oh, the computer, you know, tech neck hunched back, like, that's great for something pregnantus, if you're honest about it.
Speaker: That's a joke.
Speaker: Obviously, you would have to train the inverse of a two to have that spring.
Speaker: But my point is that these techniques put your body into a way that's very efficient for the outcome that you're trying to do for your art.
Speaker: But you need to supplement that with other things to make sure that your quality of life is
Speaker: in addition to the pleasure that you get from your art, carries forward as you get older.
Speaker: So I'm very big on strength training.
Speaker: I'm very big on cardio fitness.
Speaker: I'm very big on mobility.
Speaker: And then I'm very big on meditation.
Speaker: Interesting.
Speaker: It seems to be a bit different traditions have found or have maybe attempted to deal with that issue in different ways.
Speaker: Because Taiji and these so-called internal martial arts are usually...
Speaker: This is where people say, oh, you know, we have such great health benefits.
Speaker: And my impression is that they tended to try to kind of solve the conflict that you mentioned within the system.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Maybe sometimes the problem is that you lose one and then you kind of because you focus on the other exclusively.
Speaker: But it seems some other traditions have also gone the way of Southern Pregnant is what you just mentioned, saying, OK, so this is for the combative part.
Speaker: But maybe we also need something to then kind of balance it out.
Speaker: And I find it quite interesting that you have different approaches to a very common problem, I guess, or a very common issue.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: And that's what I had mentioned earlier when you asked me to define my definition of martial art, right?
Speaker: at certain point in time it was more valuable to make a particular area of a practice more emphasized so health might have been more beneficial to people at that time versus the combatives right or you look at the spread and evolution of karate do like the formalization of that into a national system was more important to them at the time so they systematized it and standardized it and then you have things like um
Speaker: you know, uh, wushu that, that, that surfaces up the modern wushu that surfaces up and it had a particular need.
Speaker: And so depending on the time, depending on the need, these arts morph, they change, they evolve.
Speaker: And so the existential question I always have is then how much can you change or remove before, you know, the art is no longer what the art was.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: And so it's something that I wrestle with a lot, and that's why I try to preserve the traditional side as much as possible and then be very clear about what I'm adding in or what my contribution is and make that very, very distinct, right?
Speaker: If you're gonna write a dissertation
Speaker: You're going to be very clear on citing your sources and then making clear where you're making your hypotheses and you're making your contribution.
Speaker: And so I think it's the same thing and same responsibility for martial artists, especially traditional martial artists who are trying to pass this down, to have the same type of rigor.
Speaker: Yeah, that totally makes sense.
Speaker: And it's a great segue into the last question that I always ask at the end of each episode regarding where maybe the community of martial arts in general, maybe more specifically Chinese martial arts, or even the subculture of the style, maybe in this case, Southern Prairie Mantis, where would you hope it's moving towards?
Speaker: What are you hoping for in terms of development of these communities or these subcultures?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's hard.
Speaker: So, you know, I think it is a great segue.
Speaker: I think we live at a time where traditional martial arts and Kung Fu is definitely facing the Theseus paradox, right?
Speaker: Like how much of a ship can you rebuild and shape and change before it's no longer the original ship?
Speaker: And so that's a question that I think
Speaker: all the right practitioners are asking.
Speaker: My hope for the future of Kung Fu is that people realize that there's a lot to offer there, both from a combative perspective, but also from just a mental, social, and philosophical framework.
Speaker: Southern praying mantis is all about building a bridge and then determining how you want to express
Speaker: the transmission of your intent through that bridge.
Speaker: And so, you know, we talk about it and we talked about it earlier through the four powers, the four ging, right?
Speaker: You have fo float, chum sink, ton swallow, to expel.
Speaker: And, you know, you do all of those things.
Speaker: And so philosophically for me,
Speaker: and I work in product design, I'm a product design leader, I tell my designers the same thing.
Speaker: A lot of what we're doing is we're trying to build relationships with the products we're building, the designs we're doing.
Speaker: Are you trying to receive right now?
Speaker: Are you trying to uplift something?
Speaker: Do you need to push something forward?
Speaker: Do you need to have something more grounded?
Speaker: And so these frameworks that are seen as either esoteric or antiquated have a lot of value.
Speaker: I'll say in terms of the physical culture in and of itself, my hope is that more and more through rediscovery, right?
Speaker: You see a lot in modern martial arts now, techniques that are similar or like we were talking about convergent evolution, right?
Speaker: People discovering or rediscovering traditional techniques, working in combative sports.
Speaker: I'm hoping that,
Speaker: That's actually a good thing, that it brings awareness that there is this ancient technology, or if not ancient, at least historic technology, that has provided some of these answers.
Speaker: And can we reexamine them with an open mind to see how it advances us forward?
Speaker: I also hope that traditional practitioners have an open mind to say,
Speaker: There's a lot of progress that has been made in sports medicine, sports science, and in combative sports.
Speaker: And can we take some of that to sharpen our own historic technology, our own historical culture?
Speaker: And that's my hope.
Speaker: By virtue of being Asian American, by virtue of practicing this art in Philadelphia and having a very distinct American Philadelphia flavor of Guangzai Juklam, I'm a little bit biased towards finding a modern path forward where we're evolving this practice and maintaining the richness of its history and going deep there, but then also being open to innovate as we move forward.
Speaker: That's very nice.
Speaker: I think that's a lofty goal.
Speaker: Hopefully this episode will help spreading that message.
Speaker: I think it's very nice.
Speaker: Yeah, nice is one thing.
Speaker: Let's see if we can make it happen.
Speaker: I think a lot of the other guests that you've had on your podcast are aiming for something in a similar vein.
Speaker: And I think it's a very noble pursuit.
Speaker: I think that...
Speaker: They are pioneers in using the platforms we have today, using the constraints that we have today to try and express and share and teach and pass on these arts.
Speaker: And you have to tip your hat to those teachers and those experts that are doing such a thing, right?
Speaker: Because it's, again, it is a living art and it requires people in order to keep it alive.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: And I think, again, another great segue, because hopefully in the second season, we might have time to talk about some of these more specific challenges and then issues in more detail and more depth, maybe also with some of the others and maybe also with new guests.
Speaker: But hopefully I can get to invite you back.
Speaker: Yeah, I appreciate it.
Speaker: I look forward to that.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Excellent.
Speaker: But thank you for the insights and for sharing your wisdom this time already.
Speaker: And yeah, then talk to you soon.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Likewise.
Speaker: Thank you so much, Daniel.
Speaker: And thank you for everything that you're doing in keeping interest and the arts alive.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Thanks for listening to this episode.
Speaker: I hope you had a great time.
Speaker: The next episode will air next month.
Speaker: And until then, feel free to check out our Instagram account, where we also feature some of the people we talk to, other practitioners and teachers of Chinese martial arts, and anything else that might be interesting in the world of Kung Fu.
Speaker: Thanks, take care, and hope to meet again.
