Martial Arts and Aging

There is no guarantee that martial arts can make you live longer. We can only hope or the best. But some of my teachers were still teaching in their 90’s and my Tai Chi teacher Master Raymond Chung taught until age 105. Classical Martial arts are something that you can do all your life.

Tai Chi and Wing Chun

We also teach Tai Chi as a supplement for our Wing Chun program. I find that the Tai Chi helps in the relaxation, smoothness and flow of Wing Chun. If you understand both arts then you will actually see close relationship between both martial arts.

We find that Tai Chi is a pretty good link between Wing Chun and the MMA style grappling or Iranian type of wrestling or army combat type of take-downs. Tai Chi also has all the kicking, punching and joint locking but it is more in the grappling end of the spectrum.

So I look at Tai Chi and Wing Chun like the Yin and the Yang where Tai Chi represents the Yin and Wing Chun the Yang. Sometimes Wing Chun practitioners are a little too robotic and have no clue about the grappling world. Tai Chi is an easy way to learn something about this other world and also helps in the relaxation and is something you can do for a lifetime for health reasons when you no longer can do those high flying kicks or fight 20 people at a time. age seems to catch up with everyone.

When my Hung style teacher was in his 60’s, he told me that he should have started learning Tai Chi but he never did. He still kept teaching Hung style until he was in his 90’s. My Tai Chi teacher Master Raymond Chung was still teaching Tai Chi until age 105.

In our senior level of Wing Chun, we like our students to not be too narrow minded and understand also other arts. But when they are beginners, one art is plenty to concentrate on.

If you look at various Wing Chun schools then you will see that more and more schools are also incorporating Tai Chi into their programs including Europe’s largest Wing Chun organization that goes by the brand name of WT. For weapons most also incorporate Escrima or Arnis. These days MMA, wrestling and Judo ideas are also drifting into the Wing Chun art at the advanced levels because that is a weakness in wing Chun which usually did not show up in street, police or military combat..

One of our best ever female students Yvette Wong from the 1980’s whose Wing Chun was actually praised by Wong Shun Leung, the main teacher of Bruce Lee, started out with our Tai Chi program and did lots of pushing hands. This helped her to relax and cope with a room full of tough martial arts guys who all were proficient in various martial arts in the 1980’s.

One martial arts master when he did Wing Chun with her said “I thought I used to know how to fight.” He had a hard time handling her stuff.

We produced a Tai Chi tape just to teach the basics of the Yang style Tai Chi form in 1987. We got good reviews about this tape and it sold more than 200,000 copies in the USA. We are currently remaking this tape and want to produce the rest of he series. Also we will come out with downloadable Wing Chun videos, eBooks and DVDs as well. Those are our ambitious goals.

 https://evolve-mma.com/blog/heres-how-training-martial-arts-can-slow-down-aging/

See globaltaichi.com to order this video.

https://www.globaltaichi.com/

Aging

No matter how good your martial arts was, how many years you have learned and how many masters taught you, eventually your body is on the decline and you cannot do a lot of the things you once could do.

You can still keep up with young people who don’t know how to fight because you can often predict what they will do.

I find at age 74, the speed doesn’t change that much, the strength isn’t too bad, good enough for a good punch or chop and all the knowledge is still there.

My Hung style teacher James Lore told me that his teacher save a town in Northern Ontario with his bamboo pole when 15 people tried to burn the town down. This guy happened to have been a stick and Butterfly knives Master. He put all 15 people into the hospitable. He was skillful enough to take them all out yet at the same time not cause major life threatening injuries. So a true Master of his art.

For me I injured my knee already in my Karate days by tearing my ligaments so already my kicking hand limitations. Then as you age I find getting up and down the floor is not as easy as before. Often the knees get worn out. So one has to adapt his fighting style to use whatever is left to use.

But an old timer still can pass on what he knows and what he previous generation had taught him so as to keep an art alive and in tact. If nobody does this then eventually everything would just turn into mixed martial arts and all the various styles might just die out. So eventually what is there left when there are no more classical styles and all the ring fighters are over the hill too?

When you get older you tend to go more to the philosophical side of the martial arts. That’s why people like Musashi, finally retired and started writing down all of his life’s thoughts.