Is Kung Fu effective in a fight?

I had planned to begin this post with the sentence ‘Go to Youtube and type in the title of this post.’ Having done this myself though and seen the sheer volume of posts on the topic, you may get lost there. Instead, let’s just say that you did and we’ll talk about what you would see. You would see a very long list of videos on this topic which vary wildly in both opinion and quality. You can find videos talking about how all Kung Fu schools are scams right through to how some Kung Fu styles are so deadly, they can’t even be used in MMA competitions. You also find opinions all the way along the spectrum. The evidence offered up in some of these videos is questionable and others are just people speculating with no real knowledge. It’s mostly what we expect from any topic being debated online.

So what’s the answer? The answer is that the question is wrong to begin with. When someone asks ‘Is Kung Fu effective in a fight?’ or ‘Is Kung Fu good for self-defence?’ they have to make one big assumption if they expect an answer: that the quality of the skill is always the same, regardless of the person practicing/teaching it. This just isn’t the case, not just with martial arts, but with any trained skill. There are undoubtedly people out there working as plumbers who are terrible at there jobs. Despite this, people are not asking ‘Is plumbing effective against a broken toilet’ (or at least I assume not). The difference here is that plumbing is something we all use and see working every day. It’s easy to understand what it does and how it works. Kung Fu and fighting are not as prominent. These are things most people know vaguely about but rarely ever see. As a result, people make assumptions based on the evidence they have available.

The real question we should then be asking is ‘Is this person’s Kung Fu effective in a fight?’ or ‘Is this person’s Kung Fu good for self-defence?’ When you start asking these questions, not only are you likely to get useful information, but it’s much easier to measure. When you think of it in these terms, the questioning then becomes about does someone understand the skill well enough to use it for its intended purpose.

Now that we know what the question should be, the next stage is, how do we get the answer? This is a bigger topic, and I will pick this up in the next post