Hsing-I Two Man Drill

Sifu Rudy and Pals


Hsing-I Instructor

Here is a comparison of the same drill done by different instructors. In pervious posts I have suggested the importance of "live" drills, and these are pretty good examples. Live drills have continuous flow with no stops and starts.
One of the faults in pre-arrainged one-step sparring/self defense patterns is that students, even experianced ones tend to "freeze up" when something changes or somebody makes a mistake in the pattern. People tend to stop, decide who is to blame, unwind and then start over.
While these drills are simplistic and limited, they encourage constant flow, give and take, much like push hands in Tai Chi. This is the hallmark of Internal Martial Arts.
I always enjoy the informal presentation of Sifu Rudy and his crew. If I dig around I think I can find the website for the instructor in the second video, a long time internal arts guy who I believe is based in California.
--(Edit.)
The instructor in the second video is Mike Patterson, who now teaches out of Las Vegas Nevada. Here is a portion of his bio; we will have more of Mike's techniques in future posts--
"ShrFu Patterson was the All Taiwan Full Contact Martial Arts Champion in 1975-1976, an all inclusive contest open to all styles and all ranks. He was the youngest champion ever in the history of the event and retired undefeated. He has since trained Numerous World, International and National Full Contact Champions himself. He served as the West Coast Regional Director of the United States Chinese KuoShu Federation from 1996 to 2001 and now serves as a special advisor for the same organization on the internal martial arts, he was Men’s Coach of the 1996 World Team U.S.A. Inside Kung Fu Magazine chose him as The 1997 Coach Of The Year, having trained so many successful Full Contact KuoShu Fighters for competition. He has trained a total of 25 World, International, National and Regional Chinese KuoShu Full Contact Champions between the years of 1994 and 2000. He retired from this venue of coaching at the end of the year 2000 (at least for the present) to focus more time into teaching and disseminating these internal disciplines. He has served as consultant for military, law enforcement and professional athletics programs."