Sifu Freddie Lee Kung Fu Demo
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So Al came into train for a few months. He said he liked to spar, he even asked about going into competitions. I told him we don’t enter competitions at this school but that we do spar. He did some no contact and light contact sparring with a few of the students and he said he really enjoyed it. I asked him if he wanted to try it with me, he said yes. This is our first video sparring together. I made a little more contact with him than I normally would make with someone I sparred for the first time. But he was the 3rd out of the 3 that I tried it with. After this sparring, he never came back. I still don’t know what it was, but I assumed it was too much for him and after re-evaluation, I decided that contact sparring was just too risky for the school and hurt the business too much, these experiences in addition to injuries that have occurred between students had made me come to this conclusion.
Ever since, we have focused very little attention to contact sparring and focused much more attention on combat drills for better preparation to gain proficiency with sparring and with the wooden dummy phoenix form training. All the forms and all the combat drills are the basic requirements to prepare a student for competency in contact sparring, but because many students do not have the loyalty and commitment to learn these basics, very few will be ready and prepared to demonstrate safe sparring to an advanced level.
It is like hiring an employee for your company to work but nobody lasts for longer than 2 years, anything that you teach to the employees is just the basics, nobody stays long enough to learn the ins and outs of the company. When there is such a lack of loyalty and commitment in the employees, the employer knows not to invest too much time or money into the employees.
With the way this world is today, there is a strong lack of loyalty and commitment in everything that we do. Relationships come and go, friendships come and go, employment comes and goes, and with that so does those who show interest in the Martial Arts. People think they can just become great overnight. When they encounter unexpected struggles, they quit.
As a teacher, when I encounter these sort of students over and over again, it really takes away my motivation to teach. I would rather keep the deeper teachings to myself and find other ways to profit such as from personal fitness training. I’ve come to accept that the general public will never be ready for the deeper teachings of the Martial Arts; these teachings will always remain hidden and underground.
A very small percentage of the students I encounter will be here for the long run, who will be here till the end, a vast majority will just come and go, a vast majority will just do their own thing, a vast majority will just represent themselves, a vast majority will just exploit what they are capable of exploiting. Therefore I will not give them anything to exploit, because I know how the vast majority of people are, they will only be shown the basics and that is it, the deeper teachings will only be shared with the very few who show their loyalty and commitment over time.
