Highlighting the practice of a little known, or often little understood, martial art discipline within the Chinese martial arts, in the main, called a Free Form.
Most martial art students, after first learning the basics, will start to think about practising freestyle kickboxing or some other form of combat with a sparring partner but there is one more disciple to look at, and practice, first that can help to bridge the gap between the practice of set forms before moving on to the practice of sparring with a partner – and that is the discipline commonly called Free Form. In exactly the same way a boxer will practice shadow boxing against an imaginary opponent with all the punches and moves performed without doing them, or thinking about them, in a preset way so this is the case with Free Form. In the case of Free Form however there are many more striking techniques, kicks, blocks and stances, of course, to perform compared to standard sport boxing. Some would say that the practice of set and free form exercises is nothing more than a martial art dance but just like the professional dancer all these various techniques and moves need to be practised to fully understand them and also to perfect them, more so, when a training partner is not around to help you with your freestyle/kickboxing skills at times. If nothing else it is a good way of warming the body up while practising techniques at the same time and will give more insight and purpose to the techniques rather than just standing on the spot and doing lots of boring repetitions. Many people think that Free Form is just a simple case of making up your own moves as you go along and is easy to do, but in fact much of the Free Form practice is based on time honoured experience through practical training and other forms of self defence study over a period of time. Watching someone practising Free Form for the first time the expert eye of the instructor will often see the student performing a set limited number of kicks and strikes that are often done moving forward without any thought to stepping back or to the side, as would be the case when in a real fight situation, and in very much a robot fashion. This would often also include copying some moves from a set form that they may have done in the past as they would still have such set moves very much implanted in their minds. Therefore the further aim of the Free Form is to act like a transitional bridging action between the set form and the physical fighting side of their training with a person when doing freestyle fighting. It should be noted at this point that Free Form is very much based on time honoured experience rather than just copying set moves, so that being the case - for grade exam test purposes, this discipline should be taught and tested alongside the freestyle boxing aspects of a persons training, upon reaching senior level in rank first, in the main. In conclusion therefore the practice of the Free Form is just the same as a boxer performing shadow boxing, which over a period of time, is perfected through experience. In fact you could say that Free Form is the art of experience and to an expert trained eye your level of experience will soon shine through, or not, as the case may be. For a related article click >HERE< Comments are closed.
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