Flying Crane
Sr. Grandmaster
I wouldn't take this too literally. Yes, there can be some truth in it, but also a lot of these stories are mythologies used to give the system an identity.
Really, how often does someone get a chance to witness a bear or a tiger or a leopard fight? Even a few hundred years ago, I bet this is something that was rarely witnessed by anyone. So instead I think people identified what they perceived as the essence of HOW these animals might fight, and built techniques based on that, but I would wager that in many cases their time in witnessing the actual animal in action is minimal or non-existant. However, these people did have a strong base of training, upon which they built their methods. Nothing springs forth fully formed from a vacuum, remember.
You're point is well taken however. We do learn a lot from observing others, and this has happened in the past as well. But I think it is the rare person who can really grasp the essence of what he is observing, absent an instructor to give guidance along the way. This includes people with a stong background already, altho they would certainly have an advantage compared to a newbie.
Trying to learn something from video that is from the same system you have already studied would certainly give you a better chance as well.
Trying to learn something from video from a system that is different from your background is shaky at best. Some systems use very different methods of generating power, and have a very different philosophy of how to approach the entire realm of combat, and this can't be figured out thru mimicking what you are seeing on a video.
So if you think some other style has forms or kata or poomse that is cool and you want to add it to your repertoire, I guess you might want to ask WHY you want it. Are you looking at it as performance art? If so, maybe you can mimick it well enough to fool an uneducated audience. But if you are looking to absorb the fighting techniques and strategy of a completely different system thru learning forms by video, I really think you are fooling yourself. You may be able to approximate the gross movement, but you will fail to grasp where power comes from and how this stuff is really applied. This may sound condescending, but that is not my intention. Different systems really do approach these things in very different ways and it is often not obvious without someone to really guide you thru it. Some systems are more similar and there may be commonalities that you can discover, but some systems are really really different, and your prior training can be a hinderance to learning the new system without a teacher helping you. From my own experience, I train both with a kung fu sifu, and a kenpo instructor. I know that I need to be very careful that my kenpo doesn't start to look like my kung fu, and vise versa. In fact, my sifu has commented at times, "your white crane is starting to look like kenpo, be careful to not let that happen". It's because the two arts really are that different in how the basics are done, and they have a very different method of generating power and delivering strikes.
I've done it years ago, I tried to learn some forms from other systems thru video, but I knew I was only mimicking it. This is just how I felt about it, but personally, I would have been very very hesitant to ever show what I was doing to someone who had actually trained in the system. After a while, I dropped everything from my practice that I had learned thru video.
