I’ve read some interesting comments on this post: some clearly from practitioners and many not. Here’s a little extra background about Chinese Martial Arts. Th

I’ve read some interesting comments on this post: some clearly from practitioners and many not. Here’s a little extra background about Chinese Martial Arts. They date back thousands of years: some scholars claim 2000 while others claim 4000. In either case, it wasn’t martial arts at that point. It started as health exercises that we now call Chi Kung (Qigong). They developed into martial arts later when people became intrigued by the stronger, healthier bodies and quicker reflexes of the practitioners. In particular, military-minded people saw the potential benefits and contributed greatly to the development of Chinese martial arts. Another major contributor was the famed monks - both Shaolin and Daoist (Taoist). As they traveled around Asia, they accepted challenges and worked out with martial artists from other cultures. What they learned was incorporated into Chinese martial arts. So, mixed martial arts is nothing new, it’s been happening for hundreds if not thousands of years. Martial arts competitions were considerably more brutal than they are currently. They didn’t wear gloves and anything went. Deaths occurred and sometimes people were handicapped for life. Even training was much more brutal. My instructor’s master recalled training on a beach in China. When they practiced throws, people landed on rocks periodically: no head gear or padding. As someone mentioned already, kung fu is a generalized expression meaning any endeavor that requires prolonged, conscious effort to master. So, a skilled software engineer would be said to have “good kung fu”. I’ll keep to the popular use of Kung Fu even though it’s not completely accurate. Chinese martial arts divide into two major classifications - Internal and External. What we call Kung Fu is a collection External styles. There are thousands of them, many of which are similar. The Internal ones are Bagua, Xing Yi, Tai Chi, and Liu He Ba Fa. Other than Tai Chi, the Internal ones are lesser known, although Jet Li showed elements of Xing Yi and Bagua in his movie “The One”. Again, there are probably hundreds of Internal styles. In this era when people use their bodies less, what will preserve Chinese martial arts are the health aspects from which they derived, not their application to MMA.