Gayong International Performing Arts Academy

Level 3 Seni Gayong Weapons

2010-05-24T00:40:00.000-07:00

Level 3 Seni Gayong

2010-05-23T20:49:00.001-07:00

Marantau Trailer

2010-05-22T11:20:00.000-07:00

ONG BAK 3 (2010) Trailer

2010-05-21T20:11:00.000-07:00

Ip Man 2 (2010) Trailer

2010-05-21T19:36:00.000-07:00

The cast and crew of the 'Muzikir' 'Hang' Tuah 2000

2010-05-18T02:11:00.000-07:00

Martial Arts is All About Winning Fights

2010-03-25T01:27:00.000-07:00

While the variety of different martial arts forms have many origins, for most techniques, the starting point is the military. Alexander the Great trained his forces in pankration before they began their march towards India. Gatka, a Sikh martial art form which requires the simultaneous use of two weapons and is performed accompanied by music and singing, is believed to be derived from an Indian military training course called shaster vidiya. And Genghis Khan used bkyukl bökh, another form of wrestling, to keep his troops ready for battle.

When you’re training with the knowledge that not only will you definitely need the skills you’re learning but that you will actually be using them to fight for your life, you tend to spar with the aim of thoroughly beating the other guy. Fail to use your martial arts skills to win fights in those days and you’d have found find that losing carries a very high price.

It’s no wonder then that martial arts certainly have the impression of being all about winning fights.

Even today, when most martial arts students can afford to take their training a little less seriously, many techniques appear to be geared towards dominating others, winning submissions and battling opponents. That’s particularly true of those martial arts that have now become sports. The consequences of defeat might not be as serious as those faced by an ancient Greek soldier or a Mongol warrior who has allowed an enemy to get the better of him, but the first goal of a martial arts athlete is still to win a bout — and that can only be achieved by overpowering and defeating an opponent.

For judokas, boxers and fencers then, the rewards of victory might not be as valuable as the chance to live and fight again, but an Olympic medal is still a pretty impressive prize to battle for, and it can only be won by standing in front of an opponent and beating him or her face-to-face.

So it does look as though martial arts really is all about winning fights. That was what martial arts was about thousands of years ago, and even though the most common fights might have moved to the gym rather than the battlefield, that’s what they’re about today.

Look a little closer though, and you can see there’s a lot more to it than that.

Archery, for example, is a form of martial arts. It requires discipline, training and the skilful use of a traditional weapon. But success at archery is never measured by fighting opponents. No two archers will ever be asked to face each other thirty yards apart at the Olympic games and invited to see who can shoot first and most accurately. Instead, the skill is measured by their ability to hit a static target. The opponent they’re fighting then isn’t the person standing next to them at the competition; it’s their potential to be distracted, to lose focus and to allow their arm to lose its
stability.

If archery is about beating an opponent, that opponent is the fighter him- or herself.

That’s true of the vast majority of martial arts today. While many students are motivated by the desire to be able to protect themselves if necessary — to win a fight that they’ve been forced to take part in —few will ever actually put their skills to the test in that way. They want to be able to win if they have to, but if that’s the only aim of their martial arts practice, then they’re likely to find their training a pretty hollow and unsatisfying experience.

The real aim of martial arts is usually to identify and beat your own limitations.

The structure of dans and belts provides students with a way to do that. They can always see the next challenge to overcome, understand what they have to do to beat it, and enjoy the rewards of their efforts before preparing for their next step up.

If martial arts were only about beating others, then the skills wouldn’t be laid out in a series of lessons in which you have to master some before you can move onto the others. The strongest and most effective moves would always be taught immediately and the course would end there. Students would already understand everything they need to know.

Practitioners of internal martial arts forms too are rarely motivated by the desire to win a fight. They’re looking to relax, to enjoy a few moments of calm and meditation, and in doing so, to improve their health and wellbeing.

And then, of course, there are the many young students today who take up martial arts in order to give themselves something constructive and useful to do after school that doesn’t involve sitting in front of a computer screen or hanging out at the mall.

On the one hand then, it certainly is true that martial arts is about winning fights but those fightsare rarely those in which two people face each other and test their martial skills. Only a small fraction of martial artists, after all, take part in competitive bouts and sparring is usually about practicing moves rather than beating a partner.

Self-defense is about winning fights. You learn the skills you need to stop a man with a knife or a group of attackers, and then you stop.

Martial arts is about learning a skill and overcoming challenges within yourself. They deliver a victory that can’t be achieved any other way and one which is so much more valuable.

MYTH #1 from the '50 Martial Arts Myths' book by Cikgu Sulaiman

2010-01-19T19:11:00.000-08:00

THE SHAOLIN MONASTARY IS THE ORIGIN OF ALL MARTIAL ARTS http://50martialartsmyths.blogspot.com/

Back in the days of the Wild West, there was only one fist-fighter the bad guys really feared.Kwai Chang Caine was a hard-punching half-American, half-Chinese orphan with a weakness for spiritualism and hands that were more dangerous than a gunslinger’s holster. But Caine, a character played by David Carradine in the 1970’s television series Kung Fu, wasn’t just some bruiser who knew how to defend himself. He had grown up in the Shaolin monastery where he was trained by a Shaolin kung fu master — the ultimate source of all martial knowledge.

There was a reason the show’s producers chose Shaolin as the place where Caine was trained.For those who aren’t familiar with the full range and variety of martial arts, it can appear that fighting skills have one central origin: a temple in China’s Henan province where Buddhist monks copied the actions of birds and animals to produce a unique form of fighting from which all others developed. Some methods have enhanced the Shaolin style; others might have misinterpreted it, producing weaker versions that are no closer the real thing than the last Chinese whisper is to the original message. But all forms of hand-to-hand fighting, it appears,owe their origins to Shaolin.

The truth though is very different. While the history and development of martial arts has certainly been heavily influenced by the fighting monks of the Shaolin temple — at least in the way martial arts are shown in movies, if not in their actual fighting forms — Shaolin is just oneof many places where martial arts have been practiced.

And it certainly wasn’t the first.

Even in China, martial arts have been around long before the foundation of the Shaolin temple in the fifth century. The Spring and Autumn Annals, a historical document dating from the eighth tothe fifth centuries BC, mention “hard” and “soft” forms of martial arts. Other documents dating to the Han dynasty (206 BC–220 AD) refer to differences between sports wrestling and unarmed combat, for which manuals were available even then.

Nor was martial arts training restricted to China even at this time. Pankration, a sport practiced at the Greek Olympics in 648 BC, combined wrestling and boxing to produce a complete system that included kicks, locks, throws and even chokes. A tournament might have looked a little like a modern mixed martial arts meet — except that pankration fighters fought naked, something that mixed martial artists tend to avoid.

In India too, the Akananuru and Purananuru, two poetry collections dating from around the first century AD and the second century BC describe a martial arts system using spears, swords,shields, bows and silambam, a kind of staff.

And the techniques used and taught by Roman gladiators and legionnaires might be considered a form of martial arts training too, even if they weren’t spread widely, had little influence and are no longer practiced today.

In truth then, while Shaolin martial arts are certainly important, they’re not the origin of training in armed and unarmed combat. Martial arts began in different places and at different times, in response to certain conditions — such as the attitude of local religions or the violence of the surrounding environment. Each form developed in its own way, influenced by local changes, by talented teachers who discovered ways to improve the technique or by meeting with other forms that inspired new moves altogether.

So how then did one temple in one country come to be seen as the model for all martial arts and the source of knowledge for hand-to-hand combat?

Much of the reason lies in Shaolin’s history . The temple was founded on the slopes of Mount Song, one of the five holy peaks to which Chinese royals were supposed to pay homage. Located just 35 kilometers from Luoyang, an imperial capital, it was also easy to reach and was therefore given plenty of gifts from emperors keen to show their spiritual side.

The temple’s links to royalty didn’t stop with a fortunate location though. The first evidence that the monks took part in combat dates to the early seventh century, when they joined a campaign against bandits. In 621 Shaolin monks helped Li Shimin seize the imperial throne. As a reward,one of the monks was appointed General-in-Chief of the imperial army.

However, it’s not until a thousand years later — during a time of banditry, violence and a weak imperial military — that we first see evidence that Shaolin monks actually engaged in a unique form of combat training. Texts dating to the seventeenth century describe Shaolin monks practicing spear-fighting, unarmed combat, and most importantly, fighting with a staff. That last technique might have been influenced by the fighting technique used by the Monkey King in Journey to the West, a hugely popular book that predates by two centuries the first known use of Shaolin skills.

It was also around this time that we begin to see the spread of the Shaolin myths. When the monks were called on to support the military in its campaigns against pirates, Friar Tianyuan, a Shaolin monk, was placed in charge of the monastic troops. Monks from Hangzhou challenged his command by picking eight champions to face him in combat.. Tianyuan spotted them climbing towards his terrace and beat them off. When they attacked again with swords, Tianyuan used a door-bar to defeat and disarm them single-handedly, winning their respect and their obedience.

And that perhaps is the greatest evidence that Shaolin is not the source of all martial arts. The temple specialized not in animal forms but in fighting with a staff, a method rarely used today outside the ritualized sport of kendo. It is however a rich source of martial arts stories.

GAInt seniors at George Washington Univ. Washington DC, USA

2009-07-27T20:09:00.000-07:00

Live blade demo by Abdul & Mahmood

Both ibn Hussein made some VIP bodyguards in the audience draw their side arms thinking that at any moment one or both the siblings are going to jump off the stage and 'assassinate' any one of the VIPs due to the intensity of their performance. UNREAL.

GAInt. Performing Arts Juniors

2009-07-27T19:39:00.000-07:00

Syahril & Adam. Friday night Gayong class.

Only 2 1/2 yrs in this world and they 'never fight' each other when they they play together. They say they only do silat. Well, they are in training for a future in Gayong. What can you expect when Adam is ibn Abd Lateef ( cula kuning ) and Syahril is 'ibn' of cikgu Sulaiman. Some kids grow on tv. Follow Adam & Syahril grow on the web.

2009-07-27T07:40:00.000-07:00

More of Syahril Silat

Low and high leg attacks. The right way. He's just amazing. Wish his twin brother could be apart of this. Yes, Syahril is the younger twin, though not identical twins. None the less. Imagine having two of the same awesome talent. I'm gonna see if I can put Syahril, Syahrul and Adam together for some real Gayong. LOOK OUT YA'LL! HERE THEY COME.