Hi, my name is Al

Buk Sing Choy Lay Fut

Choy Lay Fut is the kung fu style I have trained in since around 2003. When I started I weighed in at a monstrous 110kgs. Within the first year I hit 97. I missed a full year of training from tearing my shoulder apart(literally) via a spinning backfist in the end of 2006. I have had it fixed and sat through the rehab period and have signed back on for 3 years. I am aiming to get into the school to do some work this weekend, or if not next week after work. I will pretty much have to relearn how to swing my right arm properly all over again. I now also weigh a fair bit less. This is both an advantage and disadvantage.

Choy Lay Fut, like most kung fu styles rely on speed and your ‘core’ rather than arm strength. This applies to most other styles but is not usually noticed. Even boxers and wrestlers, who spend hours building up their ‘guns’ fall back to their cores for power. In boxing, the hips twist, the heel lifts and the torso spins around to generate power. In Choy Lay Fut in particular, there is a saying, ‘an extra inch is an extra inch of power’. This refers to the cumulative amount of power you can draw if you have full extension of your arm. The signature punch of Choy Lay Fut is the ‘charp chui’(sound familiar?). Literally translated it means ’straight leopard fist’. It is held in such a way that the 3 middle knuckles of your hand are the striking area. This might sound like it could break your hand easily, and well… it could, thats why kung fu practitioners do Iron Palm training, but more on that another time. Charps are also flat so they can move quickly and deliver a hell of a lot of force into a small area rather than hitting a larger area with impact spread everywhere(think a sniper rifle versus a shotgun).

To the untrained eye, Choy Lay Fut looks like a wild flurry of huge haymaker type punches. This isn’t the case. The knockout punch of Choy Lay Fut is the ’saow chui’ which requires a full swing of a slightly bent arm and curved wrist. Since it involves a big twist of the hips to achieve a high velocity it is a little easy to see coming if the person is slower, say if it was thrown by a tattooed, 97kg,long-haired bogan. With that much weight behind me moving properly I could hit pretty hard, the catch was, I could get picked apart by quicker fighters with good footwork. Choy Lay Fut teaches a lot of offensive and defensive footwork where the attacker can come in from various angles and flow through to a point where they can move out of the counterattack. There are thousands of techniques in the style, and these are just 2 of my favorites. I haven’t even started on kicks, but if I post again on them I might as well turn this into a martial arts blog(hmm theres an idea).

On that note, today I am training towards being able to do a handstand pushup. I’ve always wanted to. I think in a fortnight I could aim to be able to do 1. Wish me luck.