Lau Family Hung Gar

Growing up during the '80s, as kids, we were constantly surrounded by films such as 'karate kid', 'bloodsport', 'best of the best and a forever continuing list of chop-socky stories of the underdog coming good and beating the bad guy. Well, like most guys my age, I too wanted to be 'that guy, but good classes were hard to come by so my dreams stayed just out of reach.

Fast forward to the early nineties and a best friend of mine had been studying Thai boxing for a few months and asked me to come with him to buy his protective gear at a little shop in Birmingham. The owner of the shop knew both of us quite well from previous visits yet still seemed quite shocked to find out that after trying a bit of jiu-jitsu, a bit of wing Chun and a bit of Kickboxing, I still wasn't studying any martial arts at all.

Anyhow, he was very quick to point me in the direction of a local school which at the time was known as the 'Temple Karate centre' (due to the long-standing hand-painted sign that still today hangs high above the entrance). It was here I took my first lesson in Chinese Kung Fu, I was instantly struck with an overwhelming feeling of accomplishment and enthusiasm and couldn't get enough of training even when I was studying up to 15 hours a week over four nights.

A couple of my fellow students were discussing which movies they had seen which is when I first heard about the likes of Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Donnie Yen, Gordon Liu and more significantly Lau Kar Leung (this may become apparent a little further along the way) anyhow, all these movies still followed along the same theme as the movies I had watched when I was much younger so I was incredibly intrigued to see the Chinese cinema approach to telling the story.

I was enchanted by the tales of characters such as Wong Fei Hung, Fong Sai Yuk, Chan San Feng and other key historical Chinese legends. So my journey through the Chinese martial arts had well and truly begun and after fighting on the Kickboxing circuit & studying both Chinese Kung Fu and Tai Chi for over twenty years, in 2011, I finally achieved every real kung fu fighters dream when I visited China for the first time. The travel, food and people made me feel quite out of my depth for the first couple of days while there, but I was fortunate enough to get an audience with the principal of the top school on the legendary Wu Dang Mountains.