Grandmaster Woo modified his teaching plan to better serve the American and eliminated most of the Chinese methods of standing the horse for months before any combat tactics were taught. He knew most Americans would not do this so he bypassed this basic training because if he had not the school would not have survived. Most were not interested I learning forms, they just wanted to learn to fight and defend themselves. Taking this shortcut took its toll years later with many students who seemed to have weaker horses than those who studied the more classical forms of Kung Fu. He later added form practice to correct this, he wanted more time to be used at class learning San Soo techniques since he felt you could work with your body exercise on your own time. He favored Dynamic Tension over weight training and he warned you that jogging was not good for you, he was finally proven right about the jogging. About weight training he would say, “where are all the older weight lifters, they are either fat or dead”, that also had merit. The more you listened to him, the more you understood how intelligent he was. Whenever you had a problem and felt down he would listen to what you shared with him, then give you some valuable advice and when you left you felt much better, always.
Shortly after I started I can remember him telling us exactly what he was going to teach us, “I am going teach you San Soo (how to fight), you would have to study Kung Fu for 20 years before they would teach you San Soo” and that is what he did.
I see some individuals on the web who compare San Soo with other arts and have absolutely no understanding of what we do. They want to compare us to some of the musclebound athletes who workout everyday and may run 15 miles each morning. We had a few of those but most of the students I knew were not interested in honing your body into an all around professional athlete. Most came in 2 to 3 times a week to learn how to defend themselves and their loved ones from violent people. If faced off, your job was to attack and end the confrontation almost before it starts. This is the reason he relied so heavily on the “element of surprise”, his training was not designed for long drawn out battles. In fact, if there were holes left in our training was that he did not teach “hands up fighting”, many students worried about fighting a boxer and how they would handle them. It was not as big of a issue with those of us who had boxing experience, I did have my students practice hands up training for both speed and power. During Grandmaster Woo’s last real fight at his school (he was about 70 years old), I was told he went hands up before he finished the fight, I was not there at the time. Remember Old San Soo was first taught and later New San Soo, there were some gigantic changes that took place which I will attempt to explain.
