Ditangquan (Ground Tumbling Boxing)
地趟拳A northern Chinese style that goes to the ground on purpose and fights from there. The fall is a technique, not an ending, and a standing opponent has no answer.
Quick Facts
ChinaCharacter & Origin
Training
Who It Suits
Organisation & Competition
What the style is built from
Editorial rating on a 0–3 scale, based on how much room each area gets in ordinary training.
Catalogs & Databases for Ditangquan (Ground Tumbling Boxing)
About Ditangquan (Ground Tumbling Boxing)
Ditangquan, literally ground-tumbling fist, is a northern Chinese style that does what most martial arts avoid: it deliberately goes to the ground and fights from there. The fall is neither an error nor an ending but a technique. The practitioner drops, rolls, shoots a leg out of the roll, scissors the opponent's legs and drags him down, and rises at once into a new movement. The whole style is built on the idea that movement does not end with contact with the ground — the passage down and back up is as continuous as a step. From this follows the reason it makes sense: an opponent who has trained standing fighting has no learned answer to an attack delivered from below his knees. The style is physically very demanding. It requires excellent breakfall training, trunk strength and joints that will take a beating, and for that reason it is trained in its full form for a relatively short part of a life. Today ditangquan is most visible in competitive wushu, where it has a routine of its own and is among the most rewarding disciplines to watch; it is in that form that most people meet it. The entries for founder and for an origin in the sixteenth century are placeholders in the catalogue, not documented facts; the style is associated with the Shandong region and its earlier history is not documented.
Similar styles
Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.