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Da Shi (Head Master) Gary Martin doesn’t do franchises, affiliate schools or DVD home-learning programs. In fact, his school has only the one branch: a huge, converted warehouse down Deadman’s Road in Moorebank, in Sydney’s west. But on any one night, as many as 300 students sweat it out across its expansive concrete floor, ploughing fists and palm-heels into pads, wielding traditional Chinese weapons and generally working hard.
Putting them through their paces, besides Martin and his wife, kung fu master Julie, is a core group of long-time assistant instructors. They have all been training under Gary Martin for well over 20 years. In fact, it took each of them 22 years just to get their Gold-sash (master level) ranks.
This, it has to be said, is not the norm in the Australian martial arts scene, neither among commercial, full-time schools like Martin’s, nor non-profit clubs run from hired community halls. But it’s the way Martin has always done things. Rather than spreading his instructors out across the State of New South Wales — or indeed, the country — to plant the Gary Martin Kung Fu flag in a selection of prime shop-front locations, Martin long ago decided to put all his energies and resources into making his single school the best it could be.
“Let’s put it this way, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that just about every waking minute of my life is spent thinking of ways to keep making our school better and better,” says Martin. “Our curriculum is broad and caters for people looking for hard physical workouts, street defence skills, Chinese medicine, mental training, philosophy and the list can go on. We have a wide interest base in our system and I believe this is the reason for our success.”
But what most notably separates Gary Martin Kung Fu from the pack is the way that the combat skills of ancient Chinese martial arts are taught with a mentality more akin to that found in a kickboxing gym or reality-based self-defence school. That is, the ethos of the training promotes simplicity and effectiveness, with hard slog being the norm at any practice. While Martin’s system is comprised of the traditional Chinese systems of tai chi [or taiji], pa qua [or bagua] and Hsing-I, the method of practice is modern and leans more toward the ‘martial’ than the ‘art’.
Negotiating the modern minefield of insurance and potential litigation issues holds many martial arts schools back from attempting to provide any close simulation of street reality in their classes. Gary Martin, though, considers this essential and says that if done properly, safety isn’t an issue. While most school owners today ensure every inch of floor space is covered with shock-absorbant jigsaw mats for fear of students injuring themselves, Martin’s charges spar on concrete.
“We’ve never had an accident or serious injury in our training and this is our 30th year of teaching, so the manner in which classes are structured and supervised plays just as much an important role in class safety management as does the type of drill being done,” he says. “The challenge for a teacher here is in the way the drill is organised, presented and then the intensity developed. Our senior students do knife, bottle and bat drills absolutely flat out. Our newer members are more structured and as their confidence grows, so too does the drills’ intensity.”
It could be said the Gary Martin Kung Fu Centre is where kung fu meets the streets, because it’s with street violence in mind that most people first venture through the doors. Whether it’s the reality or just a perception driven by sensationalist media coverage, the common view is that serious violence like stabbings and group attacks have been on the increase in Australia over recent years. Martin finds this reflected in what students need, and works to cater for it — but it’s by no means a new approach for him.
“Is society getting more violent? Definitely, but it hasn’t changed our training methods greatly because street skills have always been our focus,” Da Shi Martin explains. Street defence skills and fitness have always been the priority for newcomers, he says, but nowadays they are more aware of the difference between real self-defence skills and mystic martial arts fantasies.
“Young guys today are pretty savvy when it comes to what happens in a real fight — i.e. knives, bottles, multiple opponents — along with a commonsense understanding of not trying to ground-fight in a violent group situation. The nature of fighting in the street has changed more from one-on-one, to a large increase in the use of weapons and now gutless pack bashings are more ‘accepted’. Young guys looking for a good school know this.”
As a result, the Gary Martin Kung Fu syllabus is designed to address these points with realistic training drills.
“Our workouts are seriously tough and focused on street defence, with the internal aspects [of kung fu] brought in gradually as a student progresses up the grades. This is the way I have always taught. The way society is heading means more and more people are interested in studying arts like I teach, because they understand we cover real scenarios.”
Training at Martin’s school incorporates drills that replicate bottle-attacks to the head, glasses smashed into the face, and swings with baseball bats or iron bars. Students also engage in a full range of knife defence drills and work on evading and attacking multiple opponents. As well as specific drills for strength and endurance, each workout contains kick-shield drills, timed mitt rounds, combination drills for refining range and power with elbows, knees, hand strikes and kicks, and ground skills. On top of that, there are drills to increase situational awareness, defence scenarios in low-light and outdoor drills for terrain advantage. Clearly, Gary Martin’s methods have long departed from the traditional trifecta of forms, touch sensitivity drills and one-on-one sparring.
“Our school has a traditional base, but as the years pass we have gone more and more down an evolutionary path that is appropriate for my students, living in this country, in this era of time. When we have had visiting masters at our school, their knowledge of the forms is strong but their understanding of the types of threats we are faced with is out of touch. So on this point we don’t necessarily see China as being the source of the majority of our training drills anymore.”
That’s not to say that the arts’ wudao traditions are being left behind. Martin disagrees with any suggestion that his school’s progressive, street-practical pragmatism could ultimately see some layers stripped from the complex warrior traditions he still seeks to propagate. When I ask whether it’s possible that he may one day stop calling his system ‘kung fu’ because it has truly become something else, he responds: “Our school is a kung fu school. Don’t get me wrong — we are deeply proud of our arts and their history. Just because we are including extra drills into our curriculum doesn’t alter the incredible depth of wisdom and insight that our three base arts possess. The forms of our arts — tai chi solo forms, the pa qua [bagua] circle forms, the Hsing-I 12 Animal forms and all the associated weapons forms — are taught at our school in their purest form. They are the heart of our system.”
He also points out that, while the method of teaching and delivery may have changed to keep up with the times, these arts were created on battlegrounds of old and are formidable fighting forms when learned and applied as such. Hsing-I, for example, was traditionally the hand-to-hand combat method learned by the Chinese Emperors’ bodyguards and even today the minders of Chinese officials are trained in it. So, while most of Martin’s drills themselves may not be traditional, the techniques contained within them are drawn from the 12 Animal forms and the attacking mentality they foster, of constantly driving forward, is pure Hsing-I. “We too train for the development of chi, but our main focus is to win a fight,” he reasons.
For many years, Gary Martin would regularly return to China for training and although his teacher died in 2003, he still maintains contact with friends in the arts in Asia. “It’s important for me as a martial artist, as I really love the deep understanding of the arts’ philosophies that the Asian masters possess. It’s refreshing, spiritually, to talk about the arts on a level that doesn’t include the letters UFC,” says Martin. “I see a lot of these ‘defence systems’ as being one-dimensional — self-defence is all there is to many of them.”
By contrast, he explains, the systems he teaches are deep and multifaceted enough that they allow a student to grow with the syllabus and apply their different elements at various stages of life when they are most relevant.
“With our system, if you look at a person’s life from the day they first walk into our kwoon, they are looking to learn defence and fitness. As the years pass and their skills become greater, they have moved on in age to a different point with a different set of motives for wanting to study the arts. Usually at this point their work/career is an important feature of their life and the positive mental attitudes, stress control, goal-seeking focus and inner drive learnt in their kung fu study is beneficial,” the kung fu master muses.
“Then the years move on to marriage, kids and now they’re studying the healing skills, which benefits their family and gains their support. Then it’s on through to middle age and its associated stresses, but all along this journey, the curriculum of our kung fu provides them with skills that satisfy these changing needs. Kung fu is a complex system and one which offers enormous rewards on many different levels. Self-defence is the starting point.”
It’s not surprising then, that Martin also has some strong words to say concerning the recent rise in self-defence systems that teach and certify instructors through intensive courses that may last just a few days. The technical complexity of its techniques and principles, and the sheer depth of the syllabus, would make such methods impossible in the kung fu systems Martin teaches. However, it’s the lack of potential for careful character assessment and development that he sees as the greatest flaw in this approach.
“Our kung fu encompasses traditional Chinese medicine, a science on its own. There’s the development of ch’i strikes, Hsing-I’s unique ‘shock punch’ and self-hypnosis for pain control — all subjects that take time to master,” Martin explains. “We don’t have aspirations of opening up a thousand schools, so our students settle into a training rhythm they can maintain and approach their training as a course of study between teacher and student on a journey of mastery. From White level to Gold-sash is 22 years — no instructor’s certificates after a ‘short course’ in my school.
“What other sport offers short courses for the average person off the street to become an instructor? Tennis? No. Swimming? No. Football? No. They are usually taught by people who have reached a standard of proficiency in that particular field themselves. Martial arts should be the same: the cost of losing because of inexperienced coaching in our field can be huge.”
These days it’s not uncommon to hear instructors lament the high rate of student turnover due to the desire for immediate results. Complex martial arts systems that take many years to master are a turn-off for many, particularly those most concerned with learning how to survive an assault that’s as likely to happen tomorrow as in five or 10 years when the student has gained the skill sufficient to deal with it. But it appears that at the Gary Martin Kung Fu Centre they have struck a balance between immediate necessity and deeper, long-term development, which may just be the key to their retention of students over the long term.
“People training others to reach proficiency in martial arts require a deep level of life skills. As you move through life, you gain experience in a wide range of life’s issues. It’s this experience that can’t be bought or taught, it can only be developed over time, usually by making mistakes and learning how to correct them. Martial arts instructing, to me, on top of fighting knowledge, is also about mentoring young people to live their lives in a positive and forward-moving direction,” the master reveals. “Student retention comes from the year-in, year-out hard graft of personally setting a standard students want to aspire to, combined with a curriculum that constantly offers new challenges and insights.”
That said, Martin knows it’s not just about the kung fu. On any given night, he might find himself advising his students on anything from job interviews to marriage issues. “This, I believe, is a part of the role of a martial arts teacher,” he says.
And if his club’s continued success is anything to go by, Da Shi Gary Martin is right on the money.
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