Formosa Neijia

My personal martial arts journey

Formosa Neijia random header image

Entries from November 2006

Zhou laoshi intro

November 29th, 2006 · 9 Comments · Mantis/long fist, Taijiquan

For the next week, I’m going to take some time out and profile one of my main teachers — Zhou Bao-fu of the Kung Fu Loung school. This year is the school’s tenth anniversary so this would be a good time to introduce him. Additionally, his excellent DVDs are on sale at drastically slashed prices [...]

[Read more →]

Tags:

Tim Cartmell’s standing grappling

November 28th, 2006 · 4 Comments · Bagua and/or xingyi, Other MA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuP6cApKAD8
Okay, everyone has seen this by now I would guess. But a lot of us have been waiting for this so I thought I’d highlight it. Tim is one of the few guys to do both IMA and BJJ, giving him the ability to flow from one to another. He makes them work seamlessly meaning [...]

[Read more →]

Tags:

Wushu will not be in the Beijing Olympics

November 27th, 2006 · 10 Comments · Off topic

The following is a news report about the decision NOT to include wushu as a demostration sport in the 2008 Beijing Olympics. You know a lot of hearts in China are broken over this. This was supposed to be Red China’s chance to dance and flip in the sun. I guess they’ll have to make [...]

[Read more →]

Tags:

Praying mantis and weapon museums

November 25th, 2006 · 1 Comment · Mantis/long fist

The following is an article from the only English newspaper in Taiwan that I haven’t worked for (I need a new career!). It introduces Lin laoshi, a long fist-mantis teacher that learned from the legendary teacher Gao Dao-sheng. Lin has recently opened a type of museum that is talked about in the article. I [...]

[Read more →]

Tags:

WuTan Chen style taiji

November 23rd, 2006 · No Comments · Chen taiji, Other MA

As everyone knows, WuTan is a major branch of Taiwan martial arts that is fairly well known around the world. But up until recently, most of us haven’t had an opportunity to see what the WuTan guys practice. Thanks to youtube, that is changing.
Contrary to what I thought in the past, there is a bit [...]

[Read more →]

Tags:

Taiji park people

November 22nd, 2006 · 9 Comments · Taijiquan

Everyone knows that lots of poeple do taij in the park in Taiwan and mainland China. It may seem like a stereotype, but this one is true. With so many people doing it, you’re bound to meet a few interesting people that practice in the park. So here are some of my experiences.
I was doing [...]

[Read more →]

Tags:

Yang taiji comparison

November 20th, 2006 · 3 Comments · Taijiquan

Zenmindsword has basically nailed this discussion in this post over at his blog. This is what he had to say:
So how does it look like when we place the pictures of Yang Jun, Fu Shengyuan and Dong Hulin side by side.
Take a look below and decide for yourself whether Yang Zhenduo’s claim that only his [...]

[Read more →]

Tags:

New video page

November 19th, 2006 · No Comments · Off topic

I would like to direct everyone’s attention to my new video page in the upper left-hand corner. Alternately, the Formosa Neijia video page is located here. As you can see, I’ve uploaded a few videos already and I plan to upload more as time permits. I’ll be blogging about most of these vids in the [...]

[Read more →]

Tags:

Yang family vs. Yang style

November 17th, 2006 · 17 Comments · Taijiquan

After talking about Yang Jun’s performance, I think it might be nice to talk about what is and isn’t considered Yang taiji. It seems there’s a split between Yang “family” and Yang “style” taiji. It’s important that we understand this split because it explains many of the differences that we see and why some people [...]

[Read more →]

Tags:

On criticism and video clips

November 16th, 2006 · Comments Off · Off topic

I think we need to take a minute to talk about two important things.
First, when we look at certain things and are critical of them, we aren’t necessarily trying to tear them down. Polite criticism can be a good way to explore what we know about the arts and gives us a means to communicate [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: