Grandmaster Wong demonstrating “Single Tiger Emerges from Cave”

Let us start with two big secrets. Knowing them may help you to overcome two big problems facing kungfu today.

The first big problem is that many kungfu practitioners today are not practicing a martial art. They are only practicing demonstrative kungfu forms – what past masters referred to as flowery fists and embroidery kicks. They may have practiced these forms for a long time, and may be able to perform them beautifully, but they are just incompetent in self-defence.

The second big problem is that those kungfu practitioners who are competent in combat do not use kungfu forms. They use forms of other martial arts, like Taekwondo and Kick-Boxing. Some have even gone to the point of believing and publicly saying that kungfu forms cannot be used for combat!

The first secret is that kungfu practitioners in the past did not practice their kungfu sets for demonstrations to please spectators. They practiced kungfu sets to train themselves for combat.

The second secret is that free sparring was never meant to train combat, as many modern martial artists mistakenly think it is. Free sparring was meant to test or confirm whether practitioners were competent in combat. Hence, it came at the end, not at the beginning, of a systematic combat training programme.

These two secrets come together in a kungfu set. It sums up the patterns and the sequences practitioners learned in their combat training. In other words, the patterns in a set were not thought out at random; they were the result from combat and were arranged in a meaningful way for easy remembering. In this respect, a kungfu set is a concluding stage of learning.

Then, in another respect, a kungfu set is a starting stage for practicing. By practicing a kungfu set, practitioners improve the skills and techniques for combat. In other words, if you have undergone systematic combat application, even when circumstances do not enable you to continue your training with a sparring partner, but by practicing kungfu sets in solo you can prepare yourself well for actual combat.

In our school, the basic material for combat training is the 16 basic combat sequences in Shaolin Kungfu, and the 12 basic combat sequences in Wahnam Taijiquan. These combat sequences are summed up in our various kungfu sets.

Participants at the regional Shaolin Kungfu classes in Andorra, Switzerland and Finland in August and September 2006 did not have sufficient time to learn all the 16 basic combat sequences. Hence, these 16 sequences were condensed into 8.

How we used these 8 simplified combat sequences in our combat training are shown in our review webpages at