Formosa Neijia

VCDs on Sun style xingyi and bagua have been strangely rare so far. So have VCDs on the arts of Fu Zhen-song, the famous bagua expert. The Sun style has been represented on video mostly by Sun’s daughter, who despite being good, has long been past her prime. Students simply need a better version to […]

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The first part of this series is here, the second part is here.
Before I leave this topic, I want to add one exercise that I think can help most people.
Kua squats can really help you loosen and strengthen the area known as the kua, which is so vital to good taiji.
Start with your feet parallel […]

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This Google video says it all: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5243836417224631021&q=Katana
A shopping network was attempting to sell some fake Japanese swords and the presenter got a little more education than he bargained for. I hope he got his wound attended to and that he didn’t need surgery.
Many, many people are buying the most worthless junk off Ebay. Swords that […]

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I’m posting this due to a thread on EF about his VCDs. I just made a comment that I’ve seen small flaws in Di’s xingyi videos. I often wonder what makes people automatically assume that all people with VCDs are great fighters? Most of them probably aren’t. Many people with VCDs are form specialists like […]

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I attended class last night for the first time in about six weeks with my main Chen style instructor. I was waiting for the next module to open up (I don’t really care for the modular teaching system).
So after class, he asked me if I had any questions. Hehe. After all this discussion of the […]

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I know there is a lot of confusion as to what is and isn’t huleijia. One of the main complications in all of this is the fact that huleijia uses 10 different frames to express their taiji. The following is my brief introduction to the frames according to different people. Please set your encoding to […]

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The following is a long post from Tom over at EF. You can read the original here. I want to archive this in case I lose track of it. It’s solid info on the lineage of zhaobao and how it relates to the Chen family and huleijia.
Just to clarify: there are several taijiquan lineages with […]

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[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=8h69lWbED_U]
This is the best bagua jian that I’ve ever seen. I thought that Sun Zhi-jun’s version was pretty good. But this is even better. Yes, this form is “wushu-ified” a bit, but you can really see the bagua shenfa as well. It also has some unusual moves. There is a downward stab into the ground […]

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The first post on kua can be found here.
It looks like I’m not the only one thinking about the kua these days. A new blog on IMA called Internal Arts IA has a long interview with Joseph Chen about the importance and usage of the kua. Here’s an excerpt that I found interesting:
Kua is the […]

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I’ve come across two things worth noting about this all-important (but little known, it seems) aspect of taiji, or IMA in general. Here they are.
An excellent bit of advice about sinking the kua can be found here. The following is a quote from that page:
The most basic requirement for doing Tai Chi is song […]

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