Formosa Neijia

People usually compare learning MA to building a house, a useful analogy in most cases.
But when it comes to sparring, I think other analogies might help us see the picture more clearly.
Think of a pyramid, for example. If you want a pyramid to be really high, you need a really wide base. Sometimes I see [...]

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Lots of good discussion on my last sparring post. So much so, that I think we need a series of posts to deal with the topic.
One thing that I think needs to be made clear is the place in the continuum of training that hard sparring occupies.
Consider the following continuum:
normal standing–MA stancework–stationary technique training–footwork patterns–moving [...]

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May we never forget that day five years ago. It was the defining moment of our generation. Here’s in remembrance of the victims and their families. May God bless them.  
 New footage of the attacks was released today. Viewer discretion is advised.

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Some threads over at EF are about videos of posters that show them sparring. Often, the posters ask other people to comment on their performance. Whenever I read those questions, I often wonder where the teacher is and why they aren’t answering students’ questions.
Sparring, in general, is a touchy subject and is likely to draw [...]

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Plum Pubs is having a sale on Zhaobao taiji VCD’s. This series was excellent and I gave it a very positive review here. The san shou disk is exceptional. The demonstrator is pretty hard on his student. He faceplants him several times. I was surprised. He really used force in the applications of his push [...]

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The following is a quote from dragonprawn in this post over at EF. He made some great points that I would like to expound on after the quote.
Shane, Meynard and others got on me some years ago when I started a thread on Tim’s Shen Wu site called “Is Ground Training Necessary?” or some such. But [...]

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGfE6C18ePw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDVeq-nywYM
These two clips from youtube are better than most anything that I’ve seen on EF in a long time. Dong Hu-ling was the son of Dong Ying-jie, one of the senior disciples of Yang Cheng-fu.  
Push hands is a bit of an obsession of mine. I think it’s undervalued by too many people and taught way [...]

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This completes my little trilogy of posts on my encounters with TCM and healing modalities of this sort. This is the first and second post.
Years ago at university, I studied choy lay fut (CLF) pretty intensely and my teacher chose me to help him do a demo at the University of Florida. Every year, the MA clubs [...]

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 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gNsDp2N6yM
Don’t worry. Nothing disgusting here. Just an interesting scene from a Japanese TV show.
The shows there are wild. Nothing like here in Taiwan.
The video shows what happens when people enter what they think is a normal squat toilet. Let’s just say they get more than they bargained for.
Good thing a foreigner didn’t go in. With [...]

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Someone has put up a copy of Feng Zhi-qiang doing his qigong set and other assorted actions. As with anything about Feng, I highly recommend that people check it out. Feng is always worth watching IMO. His qigong is said to be some of the best around. Does anyone have more info on it?

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