Tuesday, Aug. 03, 2010

Twin Tigers Kung Fu stresses endurance

Circuit training pushes fighters to the limit so competition won't

To Eric Gardere, kung fu is not about belts. Fighting isn't even the main part.

To Gardere, kung fu is about changing, both the body and the attitude.

That's why the training course he set up for his Twin Tigers Kung Fu Studio students was designed to be impossible.

"It was originally created so that students wouldn't be able to pass it, as more of a life lesson," Gardere said. "Everything we do in here is more of a life lesson than anything."

He was surprised when, on their first attempt, most of his students completed the circuit-training course.

"They went in those bathrooms and threw up, but they came back out and finished the course," he said. "So we decided every time they came in here we would change the course."

It's a training program that remains in fluctuation to this day, and now includes 21 stations that are always changing.

"I was green. I looked like the Hulk," said Conrad Ruiz, 18, of his first time through the course. "I still pushed through, but I was barely able to walk."

Gardere says conditioning and technique go hand-in-hand, especially for tournament kung fu.

"When they go to tournaments, they have to fight for two minutes straight, nonstop," he said. "And it depends on what division they're doing, but they may have five or six fights in a tournament, plus the Grands (finals). That's seven fights. They have to be in condition to do that."

Twin Tigers is not just the name of the studio. It's also the name of the style invented by Gardere, who has been studying martial arts since he was 4 years old. He'll be 55 in August.

The fighting style was developed using Gardere's daughter Tiffany as something of a crash-test dummy as she was growing up.

"I created the forms having her do them, to see if they were possible, because some of the forms are pretty hard," Gardere said. "I wanted to make sure it was even feasible before I stuck it in there as part of our curriculum. If she could do it, I figured anybody could do it."

Gardere started his training in a hard-style karate. As a teen, he switched his studies to Kajukenbo, a Hawaiian blend of karate and kung fu. It was when he was beginning his concentration on kung fu at Professor Gaylord's in Fremont that another student of the martial arts, Bruce Lee, had an influence on him.

"The first few times we saw Bruce Lee, we just knew him as Master Lee," Gardere said. "His first movie hadn't come out, and a few months after he was already coming here, I went to the movies and saw his first movie, and he was up on the screen."

With that thrill, Gardere was sold on kung fu. Today, his students are the recipients of some of the things he learned from Master Lee. The studio is run jointly by Gardere and his daughter, who also runs a kung fu studio in Modesto.

When it comes to the belt system, Gardere lets students take matters into their own hands. Students put together a 65-move form for green belt, 135 moves for brown and 200 for black.

"That shows us that they're thinking, that they can take what they learned and turn it into a fighting art," Gardere said. "I train my students to react off of action. I want to make sure they know how to defend themselves. If you get grabbed from behind in the dark, what are you going to do? You're going to panic, for at least five seconds. That may be the difference."

Enterprise reporter David Witte can be reached by phone at 388-6565 or by e-mail at sports@losbanosenterprise.com