Here is a list of my top 8 must watch martial arts DVD’s. These are all up here for different reasons, and I will explain what I thought was so good about them with each listing. In this list, I am not going to discriminate between instructional DVD or martial arts movie. As a martial arts enthusiast, and lifelong martial artist, I am just as entertained watching an old Kung Fu flick as I am playing, pausing and rewinding a martial arts instructional video. There is no particular order in which each video is placed. My top listing for best martial arts DVD changes from day to day based on my mood or where I am at with my training.
Marcelo Garcia: Winning Techniques Of Submission Wrestling (Series 1)
If you are moving beyond the basics with your ground game, this series will give you tons of great stuff to work on. If you know anything about Marcelo Garcia — you will have to check out the arm drag and taking the back discs. Best ju jistu instructional DVD series EVER!
Enter The Dragon
Do I really need to say anything about this movie? Bruce Lee’s most popular flick, and I’d have to say this martial arts DVD comes in just behind his Fist Of Fury.
Fist Of Fury
Arguably Bruce Lee’s best film.
Seven Samurai
Cult classic. If you are a fan of old fashioned martial arts movies, you need to see this movie.
Erik Paulson: Ultimate MMA Training Series
This 3 DVD set is packed with useful information. Most martial arts instructional videos waste a lot of time repetitively showing you the same technique over and over. Not so with this video. Paulson also focuses on transitions and give tons of used tips and techniques. Best MMA training video Ive seen in ages. He also goes over some good drills to burn this stuff into muscle memory.
Snake In The Monkey Shadow
Drunken style. Snake Form. Monkey Style. Tiger Claw and Mantis Fist. You can’t help but get sucked into this martial arts DVD.
What is the best martial arts DVD you’ve seen over the last 10 years or so? Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? Iron Monkey? Once Upon A Time In China? How about one of Jackie Chan’s more recent films? Most of the people I have talked to about this all say they liked Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I recently saw a fantastic film from Korea which in my opinion surpasses Crouching Tiger for a couple of different reasons.
The name of the movie is ‘Bichunmoo (Dance With Sword)’ (2000). It was directed by Kim Young-jun and stars Shin Hyun-Junen and Kim Hee-seon. The film is not rated, but Im sure it would have gotten an ‘R’ rating in the United States due to the slicing and dicing and the romantic theme of the movie.
This movie surpasses Crouching Tiger mainly due to the fact that the story line is a bit more polished and clear cut. Where Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon kind of picks up in the middle of a story, Bichunmoo is completely self contained. Aside from the martial arts action, the story lines are what makes these movies so good. Bichunmoo is the best martial arts DVD I have seen in a long, long time. It not only has the high quality fight scenes and choreography that rivals Crouching Tiger, it also delivers with a good romantic plot line. For someone like me to say that this is a plus in a movie, it has to be good. I usually hate having to sit through all that boring romantic crap they always seem to inject into movies these days. The character development and history that they give about the people in the movie does a lot to pull you into the movie. This is one of those movies that you feel a little depressed at the end of the movie because it’s over.
Bichunmoo also happens to be the biggest budget film in Korean history to date. You can tell by some of the computer generated special effects, specially when they are delivering the early storyline between the two main characters.
If you haven’t seen it yet, you absolutely MUST see Bichunmoo. Its a Romeo and Juliet meets Kung Fu flick with amazing martial arts action fused with a bunch of sword play.
A little side note: if you get the DVD, change the language setting to Chinese and watch the movie with English subtitles. If you watch it the way it comes, it will be in Korean, with the actors mouthing in Chinese, with English subtitles. This is the best martial arts DVD I have seen since first watching some of the old Bruce Lee movies!
I used to think that only the old movies had good story lines, but it wasnt until I started paying attention to the films coming from other countries that I noticed that some of the best martial arts DVD movies are still being produced despite mainstream Hollywood’s destruction of the martial arts genre by limiting it to cheesy fight scenes and special effects.
You can learn a lot from watching a martial arts training DVD. A lot! If you are going to learn this way, whether you are also receiving some martial arts instruction from a teacher or if you are learning martial arts from instructional videos, there are a few things you need to consider from this mode of instruction.
The first thing that you need to take into consideration is the fact that when you learn from a martial arts video, the information will only flow in one direction, and your martial arts DVD will not be able to make important adjustments to your technique. A good video should address some of the common errors most people make performing certain techniques, but it is highly likely that you will have difficulty mastering any particular move simply by watching a martial arts instructional DVD. Your technique will have to be fine tuned by experience, or if you are training under an instructor your rate of improvement should increase dramatically. Quite simply, nothing beats full contact training with a qualified instructor. Martial arts training DVD’s, clubs, forms, and books are all supplemental to live, interactional instruction. Specially if that instruction involves ‘live’ training. That being said, not all of us are privy either to the money, time or access to qualified instruction. Something is better than nothing.
The other side of this argument, specially for those who train under instructors who aren’t as eclectic or open minded, is that it exposes you to more techniques. This in itself is a mixed bag as well. There are those of us out there, the author included, who like to compulsively ‘collect’ techniques. This can be detrimental if your time is always spent learning new techniques and never bothering to put in the time drilling over, and over, and over until whatever technique it is becomes ingrained into your nervous system. People like this can still benefit from learning from a martial arts training DVD. They simply need to wait until they have processed whatever information they wanted to glean from the video before moving on to purchase the next latest and greatest instructional DVDs on eclectic martial arts that is going to finally make you feel like a complete martial artist.
Learning from a martial arts training DVD can be either a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you go about learning from it. It has been my experience that the best way to learn is to grab a single technique at a time, grab someone and drill with it, then find a way to apply the technique as a sparring drill and then finally use it full contact sparring. So go ahead and get that new DVD, just make sure you grab something useful from it before moving onto the next technique!