Wait! you must say now. MMA is very different from Kong Fu! You don't see ground fighting in Kong Fu and you don't believe in big muscle and hard, rough punches! Well, you don't see ground fighting probably because they don't teach you that and you guys don't really play it out, and you do need good muscle to carry out powerful punches and good defenses. It is very clear that the traditional kong fu is made up with Punches, Kicks, Grapples and Wrestles. So the right question is, why don't you learned them all?
In fact, all Kong Fu styles are MMA, Mixed Martial Arts. For example, Mantis style, it is documented by its founder Master Lan Wang in the late 16th century that he integrated 18 different kong fu styles and mimicked the posture of mantis to create his unique kong fu system. Tai-Chi, another super famous kong fu style, is a combination of the traditional northern long fist styles and the Chen family's own style which, few people know, emphasis on wrestling and grappling skills. And in some systems, the names of the styles clearly state the mixed heritage of their system, such as the famous and powerful southern style , the Choy-Lee-Fut system, says clearly about its three different origins.
Like all great human creations, Kong Fu is a living thing and an evolving skill set that adopts to its time. And like all other human knowledge, it needs all sorts of inputs, for trail and error, corrections and integration to keep it alive and useful. Good systems learn from the past and open their eyes to the modern time, and good masters integrate what they have learned, experienced into their own styles. That is evolution. Not some exclusive daddy to son stuff.
Coming up next: Ch7. Getting Start.
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