Comparing Shifu Shi Zhengzhong to a 1936 hand drawn manual of Shaolin of the defeating legs method.

The Author

In 1936 Hua Deyen of Hebei published Shaolin Defeats the Wall. A book describing essential moves of Shaolin Boxing. Like our Mantis Boxing he described it as 360 essentials or Zhai Yao brought about by the extraction of the essence of generations of many kung fu master's hard work.

As we will see below, the well drawn illustrations on each page of the book do an excellent job of portraying the free flowing nature of applied kung fu techniques.

An idea taken from the philosophy of my first Mantis Shifu, Arthur D'Agostino, 'We should look for the similarities of styles and moves in order to get a deeper understanding of their application.'

Here we do just that by looking at Master Hua's similarities to Mantis Boxing and the details of one application from that book. We in Mantis Boxing usually call it the uprooting kick, chao tuei. In Master Hua's book it is called po tuei, or defeating the legs.

Defeating the Legs Illustrated

The masters face each other. The black striped pants is the attacker and the solid black pants demonstrates the technique.

	We join them as striped has already attacked with a right punch to the central gate. Solid is about to wrap his right hand around the strike to securely grab the wrist.
	Solid has grabbed the wrist. As he flips his body over he has brought his left hand over stripe's elbow. Notice the height of his leg.
	Shifu Shi Zhengzhong performs double binding hand of Mantis Boxing. The application as drawn above shows how the binding hands are place on the opponent's hand and elbow. The lead binding hand works well as a straight strike to the opponent's face as well as protecting your own face.
	Solid applies the uprooting kick as his left hand strikes against stripe's chest.
	My shifu taught this technique with the right hand still holding the right punch. Yang Fengshi grabs the wrist and chops the throat. In practice Yang would uproot the kick or move to a different attack.
	Before black can apply the force to his kick striped must lift his leg out of the way. As striped moves his leg out of the way he throws a left punch to the chest of black.
	Black secures stripe's wrist and flips his body over.
	Black applies the momentum of turning his body to apply the right uprooting kick.
	Notice the alignment of Shi Zhengzhong's hands and legs. The hooked foot travels in one direction while the waist is turned so that the outer forearm elbow is on another line. This is the follow through of both the foot and and arm. The opponent caught between the two will find it hard to stand upright.

The technique illustrated here is the uprooting kick, while the photographs of my shifu and his kung fu brother are shown doing the hook step, gou zi bu, also known as the seven star step. It is easy to see how one type of step can turn into another[

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