Cycopl

ouch

it's been kind of a busy past couple of days for me. yesterday I went to a martial arts competition, but I didn't compete. All styles were welcome there but the majority of people did chinese martial arts, mainly southern hung gar kung fu (my style) or northern praying mantis. It was really awesome seeing all of the different styles of martial arts, and the sparring was badass. I mainly just went there to do the lion dance though, I just stayed to watch the rest of the events. It really opened my eyes and I am going to start training harder for continuous and full contact sparring. There was a karate guy there that really impressed me, he was a black belt and he couldn't have been older than 17, but he was kicking all kinds of ass and ended up being the champion of the teen divison of sparring. He definitely knew what he was doing, I went up afterwards and give him some props, and we got talking and he said he was going to be in the junior olympics or some shit. Yeah he was a badass, I'm going to train super hard so I can kick his ass once he's 18.

Today, I got to train with Buck Sam Kong (that's a link, JP). He is a true kung fu master, and he is our sigung, which is kind of chinese for grandfather. He is our sifu's sifu, our teacher's teacher. He was very cool, very down to earth, and he always had a smile on his face. Especially when we had been practicing punching exercises for 30 minutes without stopping and he was enjoying a cold bottle of water while we were all dying. I learned about the 12 hands of hung kuen, which is like 12 philosophies of the hung gar style, and we did training on full-contact sparring, complete with punching and kicking each other in the ribs, kicking people in the back of the thigh (fucking ouch), lots of punching and kicking combinations, lots of ways to block punching and kicking combinations. It was a lot of fun although I felt like I was going to pass out afterwards. Now my arms hurt so bad, it's hard for me to lift common household items. I had some trouble with the soap in the shower... my legs are fine though, we didn't really do any forms or stance practice so our legs were spared. I had a lot of fun though and it kind of really pumped me up when I met him, I want to become a badass kung fu master like him now.