Damn you Brian,
I haven't done that exercise in years, tried it just now (after reading your post) and gave myself a cramp. You have to be flexible, especially in the calves and quads, to do that correctly (back foot planted firmly on the ground), and years of running and not enough stretching have taken a lot of that away.
As for the Lotus kick - very useful in tournaments both the spinning back and forward (outside to in) versions. Fast (much faster than a round house), great for parrying front, back, and round house kicks, and easily done with the leading leg. Problem is that it is not that powerful though, and opens up the body. I used to move in on that kick with my elbows in to protect my side, and use a jab, hook, cross combination to soften up opponents for take downs.
And that is a very accurate description of how many (if not most) Chinese teaching is done. No fancy names, no fancy rituals, just "So this, do that" and a stick that whacked you when you screwed up. For tournaments, we were given some simple instructions: " Never can block everything. Very much keep on punching. Very much like animal." Worked pretty well. Only once in a while would we be instructed to use a specific stance to counter an opponents strengths (like using very low defensive stances against tall, kicky opponents.) The names we had were quite evocative though: Wild Animal, Plant pitfall and trap ( which had a double fisted punch, sort of a Streetfighter II move). Now that I think about it, I guess that my sifu (incidentally, he trained the same place that Jet Li trained) taught us a lot of Southern techniques as well.
Tokyo. Damn man - smashing some dudes eyeball? That is some impact. Who are you? George Foreman?
Fok.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Brian SD
Kind of a scary story, Tokyo. Nice move, anyway.
LA Guy, I think we just called that horse stance, but a wider one
My teacher would have us do back stances (the classic Jackie Chan fighting stance, where all the weight is on the back leg, and both feet face forward and knees are at about 60º angles), then lift the front leg, go down into a sit, and come back up. Kind of like one-legged squats but much more balanced.
She'd also take a southern staff and swing it about a foot above ground and we had to jump over it and do Lotus kicks (the aerial backwards spinning outside kick, slapping the opposite hand). I caught it a few times and had some nasty bruises from that, but I'll be damned if I didn't start getting some sweet jumps on my Lotus kicks. :P
Im not really sure of most names except for the five stances and the kicks. My teacher only spoke a few words of English, such as "go fasta!" "mo powa!!" and "1 2 go! sweep!" and then "you go school after this? maybe you go sleep." If she was going to teach us a new technique she would usually just say "do this one."
