Formosa Neijia

Awesome article from Li Ya-xuan, one of the top disciples of Yang Chen-fu. Unfortunately, he isn’t widely known, but he should be. This man’s taiji seems like it was top notch. I have some of his books, which I talk about below, and his form is great. Large, strong movements that are sure to build […]

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We use lots of acronyms when talking about this stuff, don’t we?
A while back, I wanted to get in some sparring practice and do some grappling. Sparring here in Taiwan is amazingly rare. I know of only one traditional school that does it. Just one. Even the schools that supposedly specialize in fighting material don’t […]

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When using heavy weapons and other things for internal strength training, you need to be very careful with your joints. I’ve been aware of this lately since I started doing long pole and some ball exercises. Since you relax the major muscles as much as possible, most all the weight gets placed on the smaller […]

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Sorry for the small pic. The title of this post maye seem strange for those of you familiar with Mark Hatmaker’s material. He’s not an IMA guy and this tape is not really IMA material. I say this is good groundfighting material for IMA because of how he presents the techniques. I’ll explain more below.
This […]

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I ran across this Washington Post story about fight videos being posted on the web. It contains some good comments about this growing trend that I’d like to address here.
I often look at these videos when someone mentions them on message boards because I think we all need constant reminders of just how sick people […]

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I had the pleasure of beginning my sword training this week. I started learning the san cai jian form and accompaning two-man practices. What follows are my random thoughts on sword training.
1. Don’t get a heavy wooden sword to practice with. i did the He-Man thing and got the heaviest wooden sword that i could […]

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I thought I’d write a quick word about a few things.
First of all, I’m not looking at becoming the IMA version of Don Quixote. So I won’t go charging at everything that I think is wrong in IMA or go after every teacher/system that I think is fake. I hope I made that clear here. […]

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That’s what’s happening to me on this thread over at EF. I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I appreciate the education that I’m getting. I’m learning a whole lot about people who claim to be practicing the IMA’s. On the other hand, what I’m learning is disturbing to say the least.
What […]

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Critics never win for two reasons.
First, people want to believe. I think most of us live lives of quiet desperation. We get stuck in dead-end jobs and dead-end marriages. We want something that brings us alive, something that mystifies us and points to something bigger out there. Traditional religion used to fill that role but […]

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So we need to talk about something fun, I think.
This is one of my favorite kungfu movies and is definitely worth buying. It has a great plot, explores the Chinese-Japanese rivalry from a humorous point of view, and nobody dies so everyone in the family can enjoy it.
The plot revolves around a Chinese man who's […]

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