We Thought Teaching Kung Fu Online Was Bullshit. Then Niko Came to Hungary.
A Brazilian student trained Chow Gar online for nearly four years, then travelled to Hungary for a two-week, in-person assessment—examining what structured online training can develop and what it cannot replace.
We once thought teaching traditional Kung Fu online made no sense. Then Niko trained Chow Gar from Brazil for nearly four years and came to Hungary to test what he had really learned.
Eight years ago, if someone had told us that traditional martial arts could be taught seriously online, we would probably have laughed.
To us, the idea seemed absurd. It was a little like drawing a beautiful cake on a piece of paper and believing that somehow you had learned how to bake it. Martial arts are physical. You have to see, feel, touch and correct. You have to stand in front of another person and experience what happens when their structure meets yours. We simply could not imagine how something so dependent on direct physical experience could be meaningfully taught through a screen.
At the time, we had little reason to think differently. We were already deeply immersed in Chow Gar and had a strong, enthusiastic community in Hungary. We trained seriously, and our Sifu, Gatekeeper Grandmaster Ip Chee Keung, visited us twice a year. He enjoyed coming to Hungary, spending time with us, teaching and, most importantly, practising with us. We travelled to Hong Kong every year as well, so Kung Fu was not something we fitted into life when convenient. It had become one of the central parts of our lives.
Those years changed our understanding of martial arts considerably. We had all trained before, but this was different. We felt genuine progress, and being able to learn directly from the Gatekeeper of the system gave us a reference that is difficult to describe unless you have experienced something similar. Watching him was valuable. Listening to his explanations was valuable. But practising with him was another level entirely. There are things a teacher can explain for years that suddenly make sense when you feel them once.
Gradually, we began to feel that we were no longer simply collecting exercises. We were starting to understand what the system itself was trying to develop. At the same time, whenever we looked around the internet at what was being presented as Kung Fu, we often felt frustrated. Much of it seemed to reinforce exactly the weak and superficial image that traditional Chinese martial arts had already acquired in many people's minds. Chow Gar itself was relatively unknown, and our Sifu's lineage was particularly underrepresented internationally.
At some point, the feeling became difficult to ignore. We wanted to do something about it.
The obvious idea was to bring people to Hungary, show them the system and let them train the way we had been fortunate enough to train. The difficulty was equally obvious: why would anyone come? Nobody knew us. Most people outside our immediate circles had never heard of us, and many had never heard of this branch of Chow Gar at all. We had something we believed was valuable, but no obvious way to make people aware of it.
That changed somewhat in 2019, when our Sifu celebrated his seventieth birthday in Hong Kong. We were invited to attend, and during that visit our friend and Kung Fu brother Bálint Vitárius was promoted to Sifu and received his flag.
To someone unfamiliar with Grandmaster Ip, that may sound like a ceremonial detail. It is not. Anyone who knows him and his approach to the system understands that such recognition is not handed out casually. Quite the opposite.
For us, that moment carried a certain responsibility. We did not suddenly imagine ourselves to be important, but it reinforced the feeling that preserving and sharing what we had received was no longer simply a personal interest. Chow Gar had long since stopped being an ordinary hobby for us. We felt that we had something worth protecting and, if possible, passing on.
Building Something We Originally Did Not Believe In
In 2020, we returned to the idea we had once dismissed: online training.
If we were going to attempt it, however, we did not want to produce a collection of random instructional videos. There were already plenty of those. We wanted to create a structured program that could guide someone through the system progressively, with each stage preparing the body for what would come later.
The difficult part was not simply deciding what to teach. By then, several of us already had considerable teaching experience. We had run groups, taught many students and spent years learning how to explain movements and recognise mistakes. The difficult question was how to translate that experience into a medium in which the teacher and student were not standing in the same room.
It quickly became obvious that we could not simply place a camera where the student would normally stand and call it online teaching. The medium itself demanded a different method. We had to think much more carefully about how lessons were structured, which details needed to be emphasised, what could realistically be corrected through video, how students could receive feedback, and which aspects of the system would inevitably remain limited until physical contact became possible.
So we started building the material around those questions. Even then, however, a doubt remained in the background: would this genuinely work?
It was one thing to design a curriculum that looked logical on paper. It was another to imagine someone on the other side of the world actually developing meaningful skill from it. Could a person thousands of kilometres away learn more than movements and choreography? Could they begin developing the physical qualities that make Chow Gar what it is?
For a long time, we simply did not know.
Then people started joining from places we had never expected. Students came from New Zealand, Chile, Brazil, Norway, South Africa, the United States and Japan, as well as Hong Kong and mainland China. For many of them, attending a seminar or camp was not merely inconvenient. It could require an international flight, time away from work and family, considerable expense, or simply circumstances that made travelling impossible.
That made the purpose of the online program much clearer. We continued adding ways for students to interact with us directly: private one-to-one coaching, video feedback, the ability to ask questions, and a closed community where they could share training, problems and experiences. Over time we began to see progress that challenged our original assumptions. In some cases, it was genuinely impressive.
Still, one question remained unanswered.
What would happen when someone who had learned Chow Gar entirely online finally stood in front of us?
Then Niko Came From Brazil
This May, we finally had the opportunity to find out.
Niko had been training through MyChowGar from Brazil for nearly four years. Anyone active in our closed community probably knew him already. He shared his training regularly, asked questions, posted videos and had the slightly obsessive curiosity that is extremely useful in martial arts. If something did not work, he did not simply move on. He kept playing with it until he understood it better.
One of the things I found particularly interesting about him was how much the training had entered his everyday life. During our later conversation he described experimenting with Chow Gar principles while carrying shopping bags, brushing his teeth, drying his hands and even making a sandwich. It sounds amusing, and it is, but there is also something revealing in it. For him, training had stopped being something that existed only during a designated hour in the day. The system had become a physical puzzle he kept returning to.
Over the years, we had watched him develop through the videos he shared with us, but this was different. Niko had never trained directly with us or had prior physical experience of our Chow Gar. Everything he had developed had come through the online program.
His trip therefore became more than a visit from an enthusiastic student. It was also an honest test of the method we had spent years building.
He stayed with me for two weeks, and we trained twice a day. I felt that if someone had travelled all the way from Brazil after committing years to the program, I owed him more than a few casual sessions. I wanted to give him my full attention and, above all, give him the part of the training that the internet cannot properly provide: direct physical reference.
When he first arrived, I asked him to perform a number of exercises so that I could see exactly where he was. I had already seen plenty of his videos, but video always has limitations. Seeing someone in front of you, from different angles and at close range, tells you more.
I was impressed almost immediately.
I recorded some of what he was doing and sent it to Attila, my Kung Fu brother and one of the instructors in MyChowGar. Attila is a very strict teacher, particularly when it comes to Chow Gar, and he is not easily impressed. Even he was surprised by what Niko had managed to build without previous direct contact with us.
That was an important moment. For the first time, we were looking at someone who had come into the system with no previous Chow Gar experience, learned entirely through our online program and then arrived in Hungary to have the result examined physically.
As the English expression goes, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
This particular pudding had just flown in from Brazil.
I felt proud of what he had achieved. Not because everything was perfect, because it was not, and it would have been strange if it had been. What mattered was that there was clearly something real there. He had built enough of a foundation that we did not need to spend those two weeks teaching him where to place his hands or how the basic exercises worked. We could immediately begin working on quality.
That distinction is crucial.
What Online Training Can Build, and What It Cannot Replace
The fact that Niko had developed so much online did not convince me that direct teaching had become unnecessary. In fact, the experience reinforced almost the opposite conclusion.
There are things we can explain very effectively online, and there are many technical mistakes we can identify and correct through video. A structured curriculum can take someone remarkably far if they train seriously, and regular feedback can prevent many common problems from becoming deeply established.
But there comes a point where explanation is no longer enough.
During our conversation after the final training session, Niko expressed this very simply:
> “Some things cannot be fixed unless felt.”
That sentence describes the limitation of online training better than any theoretical argument could.
A student may understand the idea of connection intellectually. They may know what the bridge should do, understand the purpose of locking or recognise the difference between unnecessary tension and a connected structure. But intellectual understanding is not the same as physical understanding.
Sometimes another person has to touch your bridge. Sometimes a teacher has to apply pressure and allow you to experience what happens when the structure is right, and what happens when it is not. Sometimes the correction consists less of another explanation and more of giving the student a physical reference that their body can recognise.
This is also something we learned through years of teaching. Certain things cannot be rushed because the body needs time to absorb them. We often say that the training has to “sink in”. A student can understand a concept in a few minutes and still need months before their body begins to express it reliably.
With Niko, my task was therefore not simply to show him more material. I had to judge what he could genuinely use at his current stage. That meant tailoring the training to his level, his understanding, his physical capacity and his stamina. I wanted to push him far enough that he could discover new things, but not so far that enthusiasm turned into injury.
Chow Gar can be demanding, and people who practise it seriously know that some of its training methods place considerable stress on the body. A teacher therefore has to understand not only how to challenge a student but also when to stop. More is not automatically better.
Niko handled the training exactly as his previous work suggested he would. He was prepared, curious and stubborn in the right way. Over those two weeks, I could see him changing. His lines became cleaner and certain technical details improved, but those were not the changes that interested me most. What mattered more was the quality behind the movements: the connection, the bridge, and especially the way power was beginning to travel through the body.
Power quality is, in my view, one of the clearest places where the real level of a practitioner becomes visible. It is also one of the most common weaknesses I see, including among people who are regarded, or regard themselves, as advanced practitioners. Knowing more material can hide this problem for a long time, but it cannot solve it.
This is why I was so interested in what Niko had actually developed. I was not looking at how much material he could reproduce. I wanted to know whether the years of online training had begun to change the way his body generated, connected and expressed force.
The answer was clearly yes.
Not finished. Not complete. But real enough that there was something substantial to work with.
For us, that was perhaps the most satisfying answer of all.
What Changed When Online Training Became Physical
Toward the end of the two weeks, I became curious about how Niko himself perceived the experience. We had spent years seeing his progress from our side of the screen, but now he finally had a direct physical reference for many of the things we had been talking about.
After our last training session, we left the camera running and started talking.
One of the things he said surprised me at first:
> “I realised the system is much simpler than I thought.”
I knew exactly what he meant.
Simple does not mean easy. In fact, simplicity is often considerably harder to achieve than complexity.
Traditional martial arts can look incredibly complicated from the outside. There are forms, Qigong exercises, strengthening methods, bridge work, applications, body mechanics, power training and layers of terminology. It is easy to believe that progress means accumulating more and more pieces.
With experience, however, many of those pieces begin to converge. The practitioner gradually recognises that the same fundamental relationships appear again and again in different exercises. The difficulty is not necessarily understanding the principle. It is embodying it well enough that it remains present under increasingly difficult conditions.
Niko compared it to cooking a dish with only a few ingredients. With fewer ingredients, there is nowhere to hide. Each one has to be right, and the relationship between them matters.
That is a surprisingly good analogy for Chow Gar.
A movement may be simple. Making the entire body express it correctly is not.
In that sense, Niko's trip also reinforced something we had learned from our own Sifu. The deeper the system becomes, the less mystical many things appear. They become simpler, but the simplicity has to be earned through experience.
This also brought us back to another distinction that matters a great deal in traditional teaching: the difference between explanation and transmission.
Transmission can sound unnecessarily mysterious when people talk about traditional Kung Fu, but it does not have to mean anything supernatural. Often it is extremely practical. A teacher gives you a physical reference. You feel their bridge. They apply pressure. They correct you through contact. You experience directly what previously existed only as words, movements or ideas.
Our Sifu has sometimes told us during training, “I give you my power.” I understand that statement very differently now than I did years ago. It is not that power somehow magically passes from one person to another. It means that by training directly with someone who already possesses a quality, you are given a physical reference for what that quality actually is.
After that, you still have to build it yourself.
So, Were We Wrong Eight Years Ago?
Yes and no.
We were wrong to think that serious progress could not happen online. Niko is one of several students who have demonstrated that it can.
A carefully designed online curriculum, combined with consistent practice, feedback and direct access to instructors, can build a meaningful foundation. It can develop structure, coordination, body awareness, forms, Qigong, technical understanding and increasingly sophisticated physical relationships.
What it cannot do is remove the need for physical experience entirely.
I still do not believe Chow Gar can be completely transmitted through a screen, and I would be suspicious of anyone claiming otherwise. Partner work matters. Physical correction matters. Touch matters. Eventually, the student needs a reference that cannot be compressed into a video file.
The important lesson for us is that these two forms of training do not need to compete with each other.
Online training can prepare someone remarkably well for direct training, while direct training can deepen what years of online practice have already built.
Without his previous work, Niko's two weeks in Hungary would have been spent introducing basics. Instead, we could use that time to work on subtler questions of connection, pressure, limits and power quality.
That is probably the clearest proof we could have hoped for.
Four years online had not completed his journey, but they had made the next stage possible.
Perhaps that was what we failed to understand eight years ago. We were asking whether online training could replace the traditional way of learning. It cannot, and it does not need to.
The better question is whether it can allow someone living on the other side of the world to begin the journey seriously, develop for years, receive meaningful correction and arrive for direct training with something real already in their body.
Now we know that it can.
Niko's Story, in His Own Words
After our final training session, we sat down and talked about what he had expected before travelling to Hungary, what nearly four years of online training had given him, what changed once he experienced the system physically, and what he now understands differently about Chow Gar.
If You Are Starting From Somewhere Far Away
Niko began his Chow Gar journey in Brazil, thousands of kilometres from us. Many MyChowGar students are in a similar position, which is exactly why we eventually built the online program we once thought could never work.
On September 21, the next two guided MyChowGar groups begin. The Awakening Cohort is for people starting the Chow Gar foundation, or those who want to rebuild it carefully with structured progression, feedback and direct guidance. The Transformation Cohort is for practitioners who already have that foundation and are ready to work more deeply with connection, bridge quality and the next stage of the system.
Neither path is intended to pretend that a screen can replace a teacher standing in front of you. The purpose is to make meaningful training possible long before geography allows that meeting to happen, and to make sure that when direct training finally becomes possible, you arrive with something real to build on.
By Zoltán Bereczki, Siheng