its paid sponsors, whose products you need!
“Stay ‘unreasonable.’ If you
don’t like the solutions [available to you], come up with your
own.”
Dan Webre
The Martialist does not
constitute legal advice. It is for ENTERTAINMENT
PURPOSES ONLY.
Copyright © 2003-2004 Phil Elmore, all rights
reserved.
Hung Ga Kung Fu: Explosive Power for
Self Defense
By Phil Elmore (pictures by Phil Elmore
and provided in part by Sifu Sharif Bey)
On
a summer afternoon at Seven
Rays bookstore in Syracuse, NY, I had the pleasure of meeting with Sifu
Sharif Bey, the Chief Instructor for the Syracuse Branch of Yee’s
Hung Ga International Kung Fu Association. Though he has been
teaching for six years and officially accepting closed-door students for over
three years, Sifu Bey came to my attention only recently after announcing that
his school was officially opening its doors to the public.
Hung Ga is a Southern Chinese Kung Fu style. As such it has
certain qualities in common with Wing Chun, a
Southern style that I study. Both styles incorporate the idea of the
five animals or five Chinese elements, for
example concepts that incorporate fighting strategies and physical
expressions whose qualities directly counter one another. Characterized
by low, stable, powerful stances, with an emphasis on “tiger”
techniques and extended postures that bring to mind “long fist” Kung
Fu styles, Hung Ga is nothing if not traditional. While there are
many in the martial arts and self-defense community who scoff at the concept
of traditional martial arts for self-defense, Sifu Bey is confident that Hung
Ga provides mental, emotional, and physical benefits that include practical
personal protection.
I met with Sifu Bey and one of his intermediate students,
23-year-old Ireality El. Ireality has trained with Sifu Bey for three
years. Bey, 36 and a resident of the Syracuse area for the last 13
years, has been training under Sifu Frank
Yee since 1987. Sifu Yee travels from China to the United States
four times a year to oversee all testing and the annual Hung Ga tournament,
which will be held this year on September 27 at Fairleigh Dickinson
University’s Teaneck/Hackensack campus.
Sifu
Bey (in white shirt, left, with Sifu Frank Yee) now has about a dozen students
of his own. He began his martial arts training with Tae Kwon Do at the
age of five. Later in life he studied Wing Chun Kung Fu before settling
on the Hung Ga style. According to Sifu Bey, Hung Ga (which means,
literally, “Hung Family”) was the fighting style of a revolutionary
fraternal organization that came into notoriety during the Ming and early Ching
Dynasties. There are at least two different lineages of Hung Ga studied
in the United States today. Yee’s
Hung Ga is the less prevalent of the two, the rarer of the lineages.
So what makes Hung Ga an effective self-defense
art?
“One of the things we emphasize is the total,
uninhibited expression of the self-honest expression of the art,” Sifu Bey explained. “Its
history, medicine, combat, weapons… We want our students to learn why
you are doing what you are doing.” He went on to point out that
Hung Ga, originally, came from a turbulent time in China’s history in which
the possibility of spies and infiltrators was of great concern. The art
was intended as a close-range means of assassination.
“Could someone wishing to disparage Hung Ga then
mischaracterize it as a close-range killing art, a violent murder
system?” I countered.
“Wow,” Sifu Bey chuckled. “That’s a good question.
All martial
arts could be looked at that way, and that’s the honest truth. It’s what
we do with it that makes the difference. We don’t train killers. We train good people.
We train martial artists. Now, we preserve the points of martial
society, don’t get me wrong. In a chess club, if you have a dispute, you
pull the board out. In martial society it’s done a different way.
So we give honor and respect to that and we also preserve that
principle. And that’s what makes the art effective. Nowadays often
you have a separation between the art and what makes the art effective,
because it’s a business. Who’s going to pay 120 dollars
a month to get beat up? But that’s the only way to learn it.”
I
asked Sifu Bey’s student, Ireality, what brought him to Hung Ga and to Sharif
Bey.
“I’ve always been interested in the martial arts in
general,” he told me. “I just happened to be privileged to be
a friend of Sharif beforehand. I was in a period of my life when I
wanted to start training hardcore… I asked him if he would be my Sifu and he
accepted.”
“What benefits have you seen from your training?”
I asked.
“I think it’s great,” he said earnestly.
“Emotionally, I’m definitely
way more in control. …Right now, I’m in a place of calmness where I
can make more rational decisions versus jumping on my emotions. Also
physically, of course, the benefit is obvious. And, mentally, I feel
sharper.”
One of the things that characterizes Sifu Bey’s Kung Fu
instruction is the full-contact nature of the training, a gradual conditioning
process that builds to fairly impressive force used among the students and
their teacher.
“We do a controlled manner of contact,” Sifu Bey
explained, telling me that new students are not simply beaten and bruised
after they walk through the door. “It’s not
conducive to the learning experience to just jump in and start
contacting. You can do that without any training. You can just go
throw blows, throw punches and kicks with somebody. We have a
progressive, a very closely observed progression, of skills that we work up to
a point before we start doing certain things in the way of contact. We
keep it the old traditional way. Nowadays, unfortunately, that has
become a bad word, because most traditional schools have lost that traditional
fighting skill. As a result they have great looking forms and good
explanations, but no usage.”
The benefits to his methods, Sifu Bey explained, are
immediately apparent. “I took them to a Karate tournament about a year and a
half ago,” he says of his pupils. “I told them, look, I’ve got to put you guys in
Brown Belt division [even though they were beginning and intermediate
students]. They cleaned house. Our standards are a little bit
higher. As far as fighting, they scared the living daylights out of most
of the people there. So it was assumed that not only do we spar hard,
but that we hit each other hard. Nothing could be further from the
truth.”
What
his students do, in fact, is condition their arms and legs by hitting trees
and by using each other in performing various drills. While sparring is
indeed a part of their their training, it is the drills on which they count to
impart certain elements of combat experience. The drills are done
without distractions and additions that Sifu Bey considers impractical
such as padding.
“You won’t experience padding on the street,” Sifu
Bey laughed. “It would be nice, but you won’t.” He went
on to explain one of the basic drills in which his students engage, the Three
Star Drill. He demonstrated the drill with Ireality. The two men
struck the “three star” target points, their forearms and shins
slamming into each other. Sifu Bey explained that once the student gets
past the basic conditioning phase, the Three Star Drill allows him or her to experience
full contact combat with a live opponent, without pads and without fear of
harm. “It teaches us one big thing you hear a lot of people [in the
martial arts] lacking,” Sifu Bey said. “That’s the ability to unload.
Contact is not the norm if you are training to pull. If you’re training
to pull, no matter how hard you try to hit the guy in real life, you’re going
to pull. With this drill, there’s no pulling at all. It’s a live
body, bone to bone, muscle to muscle.”
All students, Sifu Bey told me, are started very
gradually. “If it starts to hurt, we ease up.” His
students have experienced very little in the way of injury, though of course
there is the usual bruising one would expect from hard training.
“It’s the old, traditional way,” Sifu Bey reiterated.
“It’s very controlled not because we’re scared of people getting
hurt, but because you can’t progress when you’re injured.”
I pressed Sifu Bey regarding Hung Ga’s application as a
practical self-defense art. He explained that the style’s fundamental
principles involved the development of explosive power through good
foundation. “Our kicks are our stances and our stances
are our kicks,” he told me, demonstrating another drill in which he
and Ireality in low horse stances attempted to push and pull one
another with their legs, moving from the horse stance to the “bow
stance.” The objective for each partner is to collapse the other’s
structure. “He has
to be able to absorb my power and direct it into the ground so he doesn’t lose
his structure,” Sifu Bey explained. Losing one’s
foundation, he elaborated, means losing the platform from which strikes are
launched.
Hung Ga, as Sifu Bey told me, is characterized by the
following:
- Strong foundations and the development of explosive
power, both “hard” and “soft” - The use of various sounds for the generation of certain
types of power
low, gutteral sounds for heavy lifting or deep striking, higher sounds for
jumping, etc. - A heavy emphasis on bridging principles
Hung Ga teaches twelve bridging principles, which are
principles for closing with an opponent (often with the forearms).
“A bridge is a connection between you and the opponent,” Sifu Bey
explained. “A bridge is a method of crossing through your
opponent’s ‘doors’ while keeping your own ‘doors’ closed.” Both
“hard bridges” and “soft bridges” are used where
appropriate. The bridging drills in which Hung Ga practitioners engage
are similar to Wing Chun’s chi sao (“sticky hands”) practice,
substituting bridging techniques for the touch-reflexes of Wing Chun.
Speaking
at greater length on Hung Ga’s low stances, Sifu Bey again spoke of the power
of the style. “We are sometimes characterized as a ‘slow
style,'” he admits, “but our emphasis is on foundation first,
then later speed. Stances are training methods to train methods of
movement, but they’re done in static postures. In reality, our kicks are
our stances and our stances are our kicks.” He went on to
demonstrate a concept shared by several styles that of “shadow
kicking,” attacks made with the legs that are not perceived as such until
it is too late.
“But how,” I asked, “does this translate to
self-defense pragmatically?”
“Our system, as opposed to some other systems,”
Sifu Bey responded, “is more
skill oriented as opposed to technique oriented. We could show a
collection of techniques to anyone through the Three Star Drill. We
could show them [the various hand techniques]. We
could show that to anyone, but without the skill and the conditioning they
are not going to be able to use it as well as someone else who has developed
the skill.”
“What if the prospective student counters that this is
all too stylized and therefore of limited use?” I asked.
“An old traditional saying is that real Kung Fu is
always felt, it’s never seen,” Sifu Bey smiled. “It’s hard to get across to people the
‘inch power,’ a mainstay with most all the Southern Chinese
systems. It’s really a hard thing to get across unless you touch.
Unless they see for themselves, ‘Okay, that works.’ …From the training,
from the skill…we’re going to have a much different effect.”
One manifestation of this involves Hung Ga’s use of
“tiger” techniques, Sifu Bey elaborated. “Our emphasis on tiger claw is very
important, not just because it’s deadly, but because it is versatile, it
affords us a lot of options. …It will end the conflict and end the
conflict in such a way that very few people will know what
happened.” He spoke of the development of gripping power and of
striking various nerves and pressure points.
The Hung Ga techniques demonstrated for me included a lot of
linear, extended arm striking, with both vertical and horizontal fists
(emphasizing the appropriate knuckles for each). The style contains both
linear and circular techniques, just as in Wing Chun, and both arts emphasize
simultaneous blocking and striking.
Weapons training in Sifu Bey’s school involves extensive use
of traditional weaponry, such as the broadsword, saber, pole (staff), tiger
fork, kwan dao,
“mother sun knives” (the butterfly swords known to many Kung Fu
practitioners), spears, and iron fan. The mechanics of these traditional
weapons translate to defense and offense with contemporary weapons such as
knives, according to Sifu Bey, who told me about an incident in which his
teacher swung his coat like a broadsword to whip a pair of would-be
muggers. The weapons training also enhances the Hung Ga practitioner’s
empty-hand abilities, as one might expect.
Regarding training to defend against knives and firearms,
Sifu Bey was realistic. “We
train. above and beyond everything else. the psychological component. The
psychological component in combat for us is that you’re going to get
hit. You have to be able to function at the optimum after you’ve been
hit. The assumption is that you’re going to get cut. We talk about
what we will allow to be cut and where we won’t take a cut. …We don’t seek to disillusion students…
but we don’t train you to think that you won’t get cut in a knife fight.”
Sifu Bey and Ireality demonstrated for me a typical Hung Ga
defense against a choke attack.
Ireality (left) attacks Sifu Bey.
Sifu Bey counters by collapsing Ireality’s arm.
Driving forward, Sifu Bey strikes low…
…And then moves higher, collapsing Ireality’s
stance.
Sifu
Bey encourages those interested in Hung Ga to visit the Yee’s
Hung Ga website. He can be reached by phone at 315.876.2645.
“Come meet with us, watch a class, take a couple of free classes,”
he offered.
More (Unrelated) Hung Ga Photos: 1,
2, 3
“What we do is based on developing the family
structure, the family relationship,” Sifu Bey told me. “If I’m
accepting a student I’m basically showing them how to kill me. So you
want to develop that bond. Also, to show real progress in what we do
takes a little time. You want to allow the individual to be able to see
the process.
“This is something that everyone can do. The art
has a lot to offer.”