Formosa Neijia

I’m off to the beach for four days. I’ll be back on Sunday. Until then, please enjoy the archives. I’ll be be back next week with more to discuss.
BTW, these are pics of the place we’re going here in Taiwan. It’s on the southern-most tip of the island and it’s called KenDing. These are pics [...]

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This is a pretty good clip of a really cool style called piguazhang. The guy in the clip demos several of the basic swings that make up the basics of pigua. He also does an extrapolated version of the second competition form and the staff form at the end. BTW, this is the wushu verison [...]

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One thing that I run into fairly regularly is a prejudice against martial arts from Taiwan. It comes from certain circles fairly regularly and tends to echo the same complaints. But despite the persistence of certain MA pundits, Chinese martial artists would do well to see through the rhetoric.
Due to historical circumstances, the Republic and [...]

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This is the famous Du Yu-zi doing the lao jia yi lu. He was the highest ranked person in Chen style to come to Taiwan. You can find more info on him here.
People who have only been exposed to the “official” version of Chen style will be surprised by his performance. This version looks pretty [...]

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One of the things that I liked from Matt Furey’s stuff is the idea of a “royal court.” What he did was take three exercises that he thought were the most worthwhile, most broadly useful and then construct a little workout around them. I did his version of the royal court years ago — hindu [...]

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I said a few months ago that sometimes you just have to say something negative about some people, even if there’s no positive side to it. This is one of those times.

This man is Yan Gao-fei, an American Chen teacher originally born in China. From what I’ve heard, he’s one of the top Chen people [...]

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I purposely left the acronym “TCM” out of the title of this post in hopes that someone might actually read this one. I’ve noticed that my posts on TCM-related topics aren’t too popular. That’s too bad. I hope that readers would not avoid the TCM posts. I think there is lots to say on [...]

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The following is a book review of the famous Huang Di NeiJing – The Yellow Emperor’s Internal Classic — translated by Peter Unschuld, a leading figure in Chinese translations of classic TCM material. As many of you probably know, the NeiJing is THE original book on TCM, so this is an important discussion. The book [...]

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One of the main things that the TCM-qi paradigm brings to the table is a fairly well developed vocabulary that can then be used to describe IMA and qigong mechanics. If you think about it for a minute, there are many, many terms that are tossed around that come from this paradigm: wuji, yin-yang, san [...]

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I say that because there’s a huge gap between theory and practice. Everybody knows about the yijing, yin and yang, etc. but how does all that tie in with training? The missing link between the philosophy and IMA training is TCM theory.
Many people look down on the the qi paradigm, as I did, for many [...]

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