Song of Myself part 1

"I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you"
Walt Whitman

Ink drawing and Photoshop colouring
(Click on image to enlarge)

Sanda basic takedowns

Another interesting video clip on sanda takedowns. It is clearly taken from a Chinese instructional video and it shows all the fundamental techniques, performed with different speeds and seen from different view angles.

Caveat: some of these will not really work unless there is a significant technical gap between the opponents.

Sanda takedowns from the World Championship in Macau 2003

Martials arts cannot be described by text, they are inherently a performance that can be captured only (and still only partially) by a video. This is one of the reasons why when I begun training around 1981 the only "real" things available were judo and karate, the rest being quite made up from cheap kung fu and ninja movies. There was no way to assess the reality of what passed for kung fu, and nobody could go to China to check.



Nowadays video clipping services such as Google Video and YouTube contain a lot of interesting footage that can be immediately shared. For example, this clip from the World Championship in Macau, 2003 is a good collection of sanda takedowns performed by top level athlets

Martial arts: 10 years of sanda

I became aware of sanda as martial art in 1990, thanks to the effort that PWKA made in getting to Italy Chinese masters from the mainland and visiting periodically the PRC. Nowadays this is fortunately a common practice, but back then a good part of what was pushed for kung fu was in fact karate mixed with some made-up, esoteric looking sequence of movement.

Today sanda is a well known discipline available in any good gym of chinese martial arts, with a reliable definition in wikipedia.
Actually the sanda tournament rules I placed on my website back in 1997 are a bit outdated. Sanda today is structured in 4 main levels: beginners, amateurs, semi-professional and professional.

In a beginners tournament the athlets fight with a moderate contact (no KO), with 2 rounds of 1 minute each and a 30 seconds break between them. The fight is seamless, meaning that the referee does not stop the match to assign points.

Amateurs fight with KO, with 2 rounds of 2 minutes each and a break of 1 minute. A third round is required if the score is even at the end of the second one.

Semi-professional athlets fight on the distance of 3 rounds of 2 minutes each, while a professional match spans over 5 rounds of 3 minutes each, with a break of 60 seconds.

The use of elbows and knees is now permitted, and only in the professional category. Another important difference is that semi-professionals and professionals wear only boxing gloves, mouthpiece and groincup (no headgear or chest protection), much like in the other kickboxing disciplines. In fact sanda athlets begun to partecipate to K1-like tournments with interesting results.

But then I would argue that sanda without takedowns is just kickboxing, because the strategy for close-quarter, which I believe to be the most distinctive element of sanda, is just the same.