Originally Posted by
EdenResident
You are right. Though we still don't know when his peak as a fighter was supposed to be. The way he was described at the start of HSDS, he seemed to have very strong fighting instincts, not unlike those of Xiaofeng. Later on, when he one-hit KOed strong fighters like the Xuanming elder and the fake Shaolin monk, we can see that he striked very cleanly. Those all point to reasonable speculations that ZSF was a very strong fighter, not just a great martial art theorist.