School » Training and Ranking

What’s involved in a Sonora San Soo Class?

A Kung Fu San Soo class is often like a family. Whether intentional or not, the dynamic sometimes follows the long tradition of Chinese martial arts to emulate the family model. Head instructors usually develop a parental and nurturing relationship with their students, beginning easy and toughening them as they improve. Instructors tend to end up adopting a great deal of interest in the psychological and spiritual welfare of their students. Students look to instructors with trust and expectation. People grow very close and a great deal of humility often develops, along with a powerful sense of integrity, honor, and as one progresses, confidence.

More often than not, a training session at the Sonora school tends to be much like an advanced black belt class, because typically most individuals in attendance range in rank from black to master practioner. New students are nevertheless welcome and have one-on-one free access to all the higher belts, almost providing them with private instruction, although in a group environment.

A Sonora class usually opens with a series of warm-ups. Warm-ups usually precede or include a number of fundamental fighting exercises. Warm-ups often include an elaborate variety of kicking and punching exercises, and the eight basic foot movements of Kung Fu San Soo. The eight basic foot movements form the fundamental footwork, balancing, and positioning for fighting techniques. Sometimes students are run through a series bag kicking and/or punching drills, usually in combinations that include footwork and timing. Emphasis is placed on striking and/or kicking accuracy, footwork, coordination, guarding, blocking, and finally, power.

Other times instructors have students practice punching and/or kicking drills, or various blocking drills, paired up with each other, using the front of the back of the forearms, or the thighs, as targets. Occasionally, gauntlets are set up using students holding pads at various angles and positions. Each student runs the gauntlet, utilizing kicks, punches, and footwork, to move through and learn intricate combinations, improving timing, striking accuracy, balance, and fight coordination. Sometimes students run the gauntlet using padded sticks or staffs to strike positioned bags.

During most of these drills the instructor usually randomly determines a sequence of steps, strikes, kicks, swings, and blocks, so the combinations are unique for every occurrence. This teaches a student to understand how the can react in almost any possible situation where they might be attacked.

Then instructors create a series of one to four technique lessons per class, consisting of an attack, and a series of counters and complex response to the attack. Attacks might consist of kicks, punches, grabs, attempted take downs, even assaults using weapons like a stick, club, baseball bat, knife or even a gun, and sometimes many of the above in a sequence. Students are trained to move forward, to the side, backwards, or around and opponent, always looking for a different opening and a different way of exploiting it. They are trained to deflect, check, block, or avoid, and strike, kick, seize, or throw an opponent. Sometimes several of these moves are simultaneously applied. The idea is to strive for precision techniques performed with intentional inconsistency, where fight patterning and personal interpretation would be difficult to assess by a trained fighting opponent. Students are even trained to do all these things from the ground, including kicking, striking, and leveraging, and avoiding and escaping ground holds.

These lessons are not meant to be memorized step by step, move by move. But certain techniques within an exercise or lesson are intended to be memorized and practiced, both with the mind and through the development of precise hand, eye, and foot motor skills. These skills can then be utilized whenever a student might need them, in any number of infinite combinations, fluidly, and on the fly. Lessons are practiced with other students, striving to include persons of as many sizes, body weights, with as much previous formal or informal experience fighting, and belt ranking levels, as possible. Students often include former or active police officers, prison guards, former street fighters, either former or seasonal Mixed Martial Arts fighters, body guards and security guards, but most often persons seeking confidence in self defense, and individuals looking for mental, physical, spiritual, and moral refinement.

Once or twice a year Sonora students travel to other schools to train or demonstrate, and about that often they invite guest teachers to vacation in Sonora, which is very close to Yosemite National Park, to conduct a seminar. Past guest teachers have included Bill Lasiter and Jeff Frater.

Almost all classes practice a set pattern of movements called forms Forms were designed by fighting monks to allow students to practice alone and develop timing, balance, movements, strikes, kicks, blocks, breathing, and energy flow. Most traditional Asian martial arts incorporate forms in one way or another. Forms are divided into free forms and weapons forms.

Kung Fu San Soo forms are based on a center, or ‘Bakwa’, composed of the Buddhist eight spoke wheel. Each spoke describes an angle from center, at either ninety degrees of offset, or forty five degrees of offset, forwards or backwards, which is called north and south, or side to side, which is called east and west. One foot usually remains in the center, unless a move specifically requires leaving and returning to center for a moment, therefore defining the center of the Bakwa itself. As a student learns to maintain his own fixed center through the use of forms, the center becomes an infinitely moveable core of position and balance during fighting. San Soo fighters take their center wherever they go.

A Free Fighting Form consists of a series of fighting techniques performed in precise order. The idea is to establish precision, balance, timing, and motor skill memory. Every move should be deliberate, and each strike, kick, or block, should be delivered as if in an actual fighting situation. Forms can be practiced slowly, or ‘internally’, or fast and hard, or ‘externally’. They can also be soft and flowing, or employ tension to develop dynamic strength. Each free form consists of about 26 moves, with about five or six moves taught each week, and one full form completed every five to six weeks.

A Weapon Form is similar to a free form, except weapons are utilized. Weapons are always formal Chinese combat weapons and include the staff, spear, sword, butterfly knifes, axes, knives, moon knife, and chain. Weapons forms teach coordination with objects, and practical application extends from the form itself. For example, a shovel, long stick, or broom handle becomes a staff in a life threatening pinch. Each weapons form consists of about 45 to 55 moves, with about ten or twelve moves learned each week, and one full form completed every five to six weeks.

Kung Fu San Soo forms are typically informal, usually designed from scratch around some aspect of combat. In fact, at the Sonora School, forms are almost always tested to 'bodies'. That is, as a form is created, the creator places other practioners, as 'bodies', strategically around him to test and demonstrate the spacial effectiveness and positioning of the form, as if each part were demonstrating an actual combat technique.

Toward the end of the class, time is usually allocated for free sparring called "working out". This sparring is the core of Kung Fu San Soo training and what sets it apart from most other martial arts. It’s thought to be distantly based on an ancient, spontaneous Taijiquan (Tai Chi) two man form. In a Kung Fu San Soo "work out", two or more students spar by simulating fights. One student attacks an other, and the defender counter attacks with a spontaneous set of combinations composed of blocks, checks, evasions, strikes, kicks, grabs, leverages, and throws. The contact can sometimes be fairly hard, especially when blocking, and the throws and leverages are real, with one student sometimes resisting. Punches and kicks to tougher soft muscle areas are often employed with considerable force, strengthening the receiver's own body, and building precision in the striker. But bare knuckle punches to the delicate areas of the face or throat, eye gouges, and joint and bone breaking leverages are held back as not to actually seriously injure fellow students. Groin cups are always worn, with strikes and kicks to that area usually making some contact for precision and experience for both partners. This all requires skill and timing to learn.

"Working out" has no predetermined sets of movements. It is always fully spontaneous. The defending student never knows what the attacker might do until committed, and neither the defending student nor the attacker knows what the defender is going to do, even from move to move. Students begin very slowly, learning to apply lesson techniques, move by move as each opportunity opens up, learning to spontaneously recognize available targets to act on them. Higher belts work closely with them, showing them, and encouraging them. Students learn to block, evade, check, strike, kick, bite, gouge, seize, apply leverages, throw, stomp, grapple, and more. As students advance, this sparring can occasionally ramp up to full speed with nearly full, but selective power applied. In this way, each student incorporates more and more techniques from lessons to develop the students’ individual style, or fighting ‘essence’.

In what promises to become a school tradition, and unlike many other schools, Master Rusty Wallace has instituted a number of aspects to school training of his own.

First, every student who reaches the level of black belt or higher becomes an instructor.

Second, the responsibility for creating new forms each month are rotated around to all students who have become instructors, working down each month from the highest to the lowest rank, and repeating. So every instructor gets a chance to create forms, and everyone gets a feel for that instructor's essence.

Third, the responsibility to create new technique lessons is rotated around to every instructor according to rank, so everyone gets a chance to be innovative and their efforts are critiqued for strength and weakness by the higher ranked students, up through the masters.

Finally, all the masters, including school founder Rusty Wallace, work out with students. In this way, they virtually tug and urge everyone up to their level of skill and experience.

Belts and Ranking

Historically, Chinese martial arts did not utilize belts as a means of ranking. Shaolin Systems did often use a sash system, which evolved between the Tang and the Ming Dynasties, but most secular Chinese martial schools did not use belts as a means of ranking. A student simply learned the art, and at a certain point, applied it to either establish a fighting reputation, or kept it to himself as a potential means of defense, a “hidden dragon”. Accomplishments are in the end, within the mind and the ability to make the body do what the mind sees fit. Still, most modern American martial training systems have belt rankings and students expect them.

So Kung Fu San Soo Schools uniformly utilize some kind of belt ranking system. As explained here, Chan Siu Dek, the father of Kung Fu San Soo in America, did not originally have a set ranking system. But he eventually established a belt ranking system in his El Monte School in the 1960’s, much like the common modern ranking used globally in Karate, Judo, and Jujitsu training. This belt system consisted of white, yellow, green, brown, black, seven degrees of black, and a masters rank at the eighth degree.

Some Kung Fu San Soo schools have returned to the Shaolin sash ranking system. But the Sonora School uses the belt ranking originally set in place by Chan Siu Dek. Each belt requires a test, for which there is no charge. It’s consists of one of the master instructors working alone with the student to make sure he’s learned a minimal set of basic necessary fundamentals.

None of it is written in stone, except the generally allocated amount of time required, and one student might excel at one set of fundamentals early on, while another might take much longer. If any student has mastered something that’s close and is able to apply it in a simulated fighting situation, it counts for a great deal. It’s all just a means of helping the student to understand his own strengths and limitations, to know what he’s really capable of, and what he needs to work on during his next belt ranking period.

With respect to uniforms, originally, Chan Siu Dek had his students wear white Japanese style Jujitsu guis, as Chinese fighting uniforms were not readily available in those days. He later went to more formal Chinese uniforms for demonstrations. Today the Sonora School is largely informal, it's up to the student whether to wear more traditional Chinese uniforms, or guis, or simply uniform pants and school tee shirts, as they see fit. But as Kung Fu San Soo employs a great deal of heavy Shuai Jiou throws and Chi Na takedowns, and on nothing more than outdoor carpet over concrete, the Chinese uniforms don't usually hold up all that well. The only stipulation enforced is that the uniform should be white until the student reaches the black belt level. Holding with the tradition going all the way back to Chan Siu Dek, students are required to leave their shoes at the door and work out in bare feet. The belief is that if a person can learn to land a solid snap kick, roundhouse, or crescent, in bare feet and without hurting their toes or instep, it should be easy in shoes.

All students begin as a white belt. Based on two or more classes per week, it takes about three months to earn a yellow belt, or a minimum of about 24 classes. Testing includes basic kicks, punches, basic elbows, rolling, falling, the eight basic foot movements, and one free form.

It takes about six months more to earn a green belt, or a minimum of another 48 classes. The student must be able to perform four throws, four leverages, and one weapon form.

To earn a brown belt it takes about six months more, and a minimum of an additional 48 classes. Eight more leverages must be performed, eight more throws, general pressure points, one free form and one weapon form.

To earn a black belt, it minimally takes an additional 18 months, or 144 more classes, and sometimes more, depending on the student. The student must design and perform his or own free form and one weapon form.

Each degree of black belt is earned by an additional minimum of 110 classes, and one more year.

After eight degrees as a black belt, a student becomes a master. There are no official rankings beyond the master level.

Belt ranking is only a means of establishing time and effort applied, to provide students with a set of goals, a means of quantifying time and effort, and a method to signify ranking order within the school. The art of Kung Fu San Soo is probably not meant for any student overly preoccupied with the color of a belt or a ranking system. Chan Siu Dek's own son, Warren Woo, commented that he used to ask his father, "What belt am I now"? And Chan Siu Dek would reply, "Belts are for holding up you pants. It doesn't matter what other people think. It's what you know that counts".