Formosa Neijia

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 Di. That’s not a knock against them, per se. It’s just what they specialize in.

I have all of Di’s xingyi VCDs and I think they are a good sampling of the HeBei xingyi forms. He has put a lot of the style on video and he should be commended for that. They really aren’t that bad.

But some of the details could be problematic from a fighting point of view.

For example, please look at the followinig pictures of Di doing pi (a downward strike) with the staff.

This occurs at 10:50 and 11:00 on the staff disc. This is his hand position after a pi strike with the staff. As anyone with solid staff experience will tell you, if you hit someone else’s staff with your staff and your hand is in this position, your staff will go flying out of your hand. The thumb alone is nowhere near enough to keep the staff in your hand when you are doing downward strikes (pi).

Moves like this look great in transition and make forms more attractive. But they don’t work in fighting. Again, anyone with solid staff experience, regardless of style, will tell you this. If you don’t believe me, I recommend you do a downward strike with a staff like he’s doing with the back of your hand facing downward. Make sure you do it against something that provides hard contact when you strike it. But a warning: I’m fairly sure you won’t do it again (!) and the chances of you hurting your thumb are pretty good. But I also know that some people will have to experience it for themselves before they will believe. That’s fine. It took my instructor knocking my staff out of my hand when I did this for me to believe too.

Again, the VCDs are fine for forms. The bazigong video is nice and clear as is the bashiquan and zashichui. His two man work in both the anshenpao and five element two-man form needs some work. The students who are doing those forms are obviously wushu athletes and don’t know much about proper distancing and timing. You can tell that they don’t do the two-man work much, especially non-cooperatively. There is little of the flow that xingyi two-man forms is supposed to bring.

All-in-all, good vids but don’t try some of this in fighting.