Sport Sanda (Wushu Sanshou)
散打The full-contact competitive discipline of Chinese wushu, from 1979. Bouts are fought on a raised platform without ropes, where pushing the opponent off scores.
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About Sport Sanda (Wushu Sanshou)
Sanda, formerly and abroad often called sanshou, is the full-contact competitive discipline of Chinese wushu. It arose neither in a monastery nor in a family lineage but at a desk: at the end of the 1970s the Chinese Wushu Association began assembling it in order to give the traditional styles a common competitive format in which performance could be measured. The first experimental bouts took place in 1979, the rules settled in the 1980s, and since 1991 sanda has been part of the world wushu championships. Bouts are fought on a raised platform called the leitai, which has no ropes. That determines the whole tactical picture: pushing the opponent off the platform is a scoring aim, so work at the edge counts as much as striking. Punches, kicks, throws and sweeps are allowed. Ground fighting is not pursued; after a throw the referee stands the fighters up at once, which makes the throw a conclusion rather than a transition. The most typical element of sanda is catching a kick and throwing immediately, which carries such weight in no other full-contact sport. Amateurs fight in a helmet, chest protector and gloves; professional sanda has been fought without a helmet since the 1990s. The discipline is also trained outside sport: in an altered form it is part of the training of the Chinese army and police, where elbow and knee strikes and disarming work are added. Sanda is often described as Chinese kickboxing, which is misleading, since it is precisely the throws and the work at the platform edge that separate it from kickboxing.
Similar styles
Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.