TMA vs LARPing

[Plasma]

The land must be purified to please the man in the clouds.

We could build a hotel and invite them all, then SMITE THEM!

[nomamao]

Not true at all.

Ok, so when they compete at FULL CONTACT fighting, they are still LARPing? I don't get it.

Explain please.

[Shaolinz]

Ok, so when they compete at FULL CONTACT fighting, they are still LARPing? I don't get it.

Explain please.

Even LARPers can sign up for full contact fighting.

[BFGalbraith]

If your Kungfu school competes at leitai, it's not LARPing.

Seconded, big time:

An important part of being a "real kung fu school" traditionally means regular full contact competition with other martial arts schools in the area. Whatever their means of full contact competition is in that area (and traditionally in china it was the fighting on the "Lei Tai" ,) boxing, kickboxing, SanShou or whatever, is the key factor in determining if you have found a Kung Fu school or a Chinese Culture LARPING school. At the very least they should have fairly-painful continous sparring between students inside of the school, and they would then probably let visting students from other schools participate in. But again, the main factor to guarantee the quality of the kung fu is that school's participation in the ring or cage, or on the mat or lei tai.

We have a vocabulary problem here when we speak of Chinese Martial Arts (CMA). "Kung Fu" is too broad, Wu Shu can be too specific, and "San Shou" is also rife with multiple meanings. (I am just going to use the phrase CMA for "real kung fu" for the rest of this post.) Which leads us to this issue:

As per the sore muscles, standing in difficult stances and otherwise being tortured by someone from China, I wouldn't go by that very strictly, because that XMA/wushu stuff is probably pretty hard to learn and atheletically demanding, but not what I'de call CMA. There are pleanty of Chinese Martial LARPING (CML) schools that sprouted off (or degenerated from) CMA schools, and as such have a lot of very difficult calistenics for their students to engage in. (I've seen both types of schools even in my favorite CMA system, unfortunately.) Lots of CMA schools also do athletically challenging "lion dancing", but not all schools that do "lion dancing" are CMA schools (and are instead CML,) nor do CMA schools have to have "lion dancing."

Instructions on how to turn your CMA into CML:
1)Stop doing full contact continous sparring in class.
2)Train a full generation of students to be trained without full contact continous sparring.
3)Allow those students to go out and teach your non-sparring version of the CMA, and bingo, you have CML.

[nomamao]

LARPers can sign up to Box as well.

But, will they really survive in the ring more than 30 seconds? If some TMA forms only freak make it through 3 rounds of Full Contact fighting, and they aren't destroyed, then something has to be working.

That's my opinion on it.

[War Wizard]

Not true at all.

Ah, beat me to it.

[BFGalbraith]

Even LARPers can sign up for full contact fighting.

Very good point. I would point out that once the LARPer actually steps into the ring they aren't LARPing any more - they might suck, but they are definitely attempting to practice the art of self defense as the beating begins. Further more, as they adjust their training methods to succeed in the ring, their entire school becomes more Martial Arts and less LARPING.

This brings up a question for me about the origins of Chinese Martial LARPing. If they are watered-down "Chinese boxing" schools, and they stop boxing and become LARPing, while holding on to some of their original training methods:
then, would real "chinese boxing competition" help cure their "LARPing"? A non CMA way to ask this would be: "If an areobic kickboxing instructor starts to compete and do their damnedest to train for actual kickboxing matches, will they not end up reinventing something very close to the real kickboxing that their aerobic kickboxing degenerated from?"


I wonder if some Martial Arts go through this cycle, getting watered down but then built back up again when challenged by full contact competetors, and then getting watered down again by political correctness or market preasures after being "hard core" for a while.

[It is Fake]

Seconded, big time:

An important part of being a "real kung fu school" traditionally means regular full contact competition with other martial arts schools in the area. Whatever their means of full contact competition is in that area (and traditionally in china it was the fighting on the "Lei Tai" ,) boxing, kickboxing, SanShou or whatever, is the key factor in determining if you have found a Kung Fu school or a Chinese Culture LARPING school. At the very least they should have fairly-painful continous sparring between students inside of the school, and they would then probably let visting students from other schools participate in. But again, the main factor to guarantee the quality of the kung fu is that school's participation in the ring or cage, or on the mat or lei tai.

We have a vocabulary problem here when we speak of Chinese Martial Arts (CMA). "Kung Fu" is too broad, Wu Shu can be too specific, and "San Shou" is also rife with multiple meanings. (I am just going to use the phrase CMA for "real kung fu" for the rest of this post.) Which leads us to this issue:

As per the sore muscles, standing in difficult stances and otherwise being tortured by someone from China, I wouldn't go by that very strictly, because that XMA/wushu stuff is probably pretty hard to learn and atheletically demanding, but not what I'de call CMA. There are pleanty of Chinese Matial LARPING (CML) schools that sprouted off (or degenerated from) CMA schools, and as such have a lot of very difficult calistenics for their students to engage in. (I've seen both types of schools even in my favorite CMA system, unfortunately.) Lots of CMA schools also do athletically challenging "lion dancing", but not all schools that do "lion dancing" are CMA schools (and are instead CML,) nor do CMA schools have to have "lion dancing."

Instructions on how to turn your CMA into CML:
1)Stop doing full contact continous sparring in class.
2)Train a full generation of students to be trained without full contact continous sparring.
3)Allow those students to go out and teach your non-sparring version of the CMA, and bingo, you have CML.

Nope the full contact bit DOES NOT stop you from larping.

SCA and Arma are considered larping. They go out and beat each other mercilessly with weapons. That is why I say just because you do full contact, it does negate larping.

If you want to say larping has some effective fighting schools I'll agree. If you do tea ceremonies, forms (I enjoy forms), bow at every corner of your school, call people asian names, ecetra you are still larping.

If you drop full contact sparring you becoma a Martail Larper(copyright Annatrocity).

[nomamao]

Nope the full contact bit DOES NOT stop you from larping.

SCA and Arma are considered larping. They go out and beat each other mercilessly with weapons. That is why I say just because you do full contact does negate larping.

If you want to say larping has some effective fighting schools I'll agree. If you do tea ceremonies, forms (I enjoy forms), bow at every corner of your school, call people asian names, ecetra you are still larping.

If you drop full contact sparring you becoma a Martail Larper(copyright Annatrocity).

Oh, I get it. Well, then most kungfu will be LARPing.

But, as long as it's not Martial Larping, I'm cool with it.

[FullMetalTaiji]

The point I was trying to make is that these days Kung Fu is most likely Kung Poo, similar to Crappling but worse...:pottytrai