At Arkansas Wushu, we have been working very hard on putting together a comprehensive online manual. This way all of our practitioners have a reliable reference they can turn to whenever there are questions about a particular style or technique.

Programming these manuals has been a rewarding, yet challenging experience. Trying to get everything clearly formatted has raised almost as many questions as it has answered and as a result, many changes have been made.

One example of this is the Chuan Fa/Kenpo manual. When we look back at some of the documentation Sifu Kyle Russell had to learn from, it is amazing anyone could make any sense of it all. The written manual was not broken into steps, there were no pictures, and every self defense technique was simply written as run on sentence. To make matters worse, many of the techniques were written incorrectly! In some cases the technique was given two different names due to extremely minor changes, making the manual larger than it actually needed to be. This created a lot of unnecessary confusion. A video was put out from the original school in an attempt to clear things up, however the video only includes the name and the performance. With no breakdown and all the video being taken from only one angle, the practitioner was still left with many questions. If you would still like to see the original video we are working on improving from, you can find it at https://youtu.be/EhAQQL2jJPA.

There was no reference at all for Shotokan is Sifu Kyle Russell’s school. Everything was done from memory or by asking an elder student. At Arkansas Wushu, we fixed that by doing a step by step breakdown of every form all the way to black belt! We plan to continue and get a full reference of all the 26 Shotokan forms. This step by step breakdown is also linked to the Arkansas Wushu Youtube channel. Originally we did very short videos for each technique. This became problematic as it created 100’s of videos that were only a few seconds long. We are now in the process of remaking the videos as an entire belt, and adding time stamps to for the individual techniques.

We have began the list of requirements on Chan Quan, Nan Quan, Wing Chuan, and Shaolin but do not currently have much content to train from. The website does have a good insight to how the styles are broken down as these styles do not necessarily use a belt system. Instead Chan Quan is broken down into 4 levels while Nan Quan and Wing Chun have 3 levels. Weapons are an optional addition to the Wing Chun system.

With everything formatted and mapped out, we should begin adding new videos this week. Hopefully before much longer, we will have a complete distance learning program in place for those who choose to use it.