Ken Gullette's Internal Fighting Arts

Learning the Internal Arts through Video

The martial arts are full of legends--tales of masters who could fling a larger opponent across a room with the flick of a finger, or masters who could defeat a crowd of martial artists without being injured.

One legend tells of a young student who wanted to learn a form from a master. According to the legend, the master performed the sequence of movements one time, turned to the student and said, "I will be back in one year. You master this form!"

One year later, according to the legend, the master returned and the student had, in fact, mastered the movements. And he didn't even have a DVD player!

I'm a visual learner and I've studied martial arts since 1973, but I still can't memorize more than two or three moves in a row by just watching a performance once. In 1978, however, when I bought my first VCR, it opened up a new world of martial arts training for visual learners like me.

Imagine if you had videos of some of the great martial arts masters of the 19th Century. Imagine if you could watch the creator of Tai Chi, Chen Wangting, perform his movements in the 1600's in the Chen Village. Legendary Hsing-I master Sun Lu Tang, the creator of Sun Tai Chi, lived until the 1930s but sadly, not long enough for camcorders and VCRs to be invented.  Chen Fake, Chen Xiaowang's legendary grandfather, lived until 1957. What a shame we have so little on video to see how they moved.

Since the early 1980s, martial artists around the world have been recording themselves on video. The rise of the VCR and DVD gave us the chance to stop a master in his tracks or slo-mo the movements like never before.

The body mechanics for these arts are incredibly complicated. It takes years of study to do them correctly. I've learned in person from folks like Grandmaster Chen Xiaowang and his brother, Grandmaster Chen Xiaoxing, their students Master Ren Guangyi and Chen Bing, and American students and disciples. I've also purchased their videos and have found them lacking in true instruction. Not all great masters are great teachers. My best teachers have been Americans--students of these masters like Jim and Angela Criscimagna (disciples of Chen Xiaowang)--who questioned beneath the surface and explained, in plain English, the mechanics behind the movements.

It takes someone with years of face-to-face instruction to be able to decipher the body mechanics that the masters show on video but don't teach on video. And that's the problem.

If you try to learn martial arts through video, the challenge is to find someone who can actually teach visually. Most masters only do repeated movements at different angles with very little instruction on body mechanics. Without proper body mechanics, you can't do the internal arts properly. Some of the best videos I've seen have been by martial artists who were not considered masters, but they were good teachers and knew how to use video.

If you try to learn martial arts on video, find a way to get feedback on your techniques and movements from a qualified teacher. We all believe we look like a great master when we perform, but the reality is usually different from the self-image in our heads.

Use a camcorder to record your movements and then compare them to the video you're studying. Be brutally honest with yourself. Get a friend to look at both videos and tell you where you're making a mistake. Is your body really doing what the instructor is doing?

Some of my students who live in other parts of the world put private videos on YouTube for me to watch and critique. Sometimes I make video replies to show them the mistakes they're making. I've done this for my students back in Iowa. I now have students as far away as Japan.

Nothing can replace face-to-face teaching and hands-on corrections, but if you live in an area without people who teach the arts you want to learn, and you're a visual learner, the development of video and the Internet has given anyone a chance to explore the arts like no other time in history. And my online school at www.InternalFightingArts.com combines both the power of video learning with live Zoom classes where you get personal feedback. I have seen many people improve tremendously this way. Are you next?

--by Ken Gullette