Formosa Neijia

I’m finding that some throws are nearly universal. Sumi-otoshi (the four corners throw) appears in aikido, judo, and taijiquan. Consider the following clips:

This is an aikido version done smoothly against a student. Notice the positioning.

Now here’s a version from a Tomiki aikido competition. Great timing here.

This is a judo version in competition.
How is this done […]

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There’s a transition you have to make in going from someone who does the taiji or whatever as a personal practice to someone that competes with their form. It can be a difficult transition.
Consider that you normally just practice for yourself and you likely do your thing as you and your teacher see fit. For […]

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Thanks to Charlie Conklin for this. Below is a description of some push hands games from Cheng Hsin. As I understand them, the purpose of these games is to introduce elements of freeplay that move you beyond simple cooperative pattern work. You’re still cooperative in terms of playing the game, but you must now look […]

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This story was provided by BL in a recent comment. It’s a nice story that illustrates the importance of the mental aspect in IMA training. We should never let our physical training overshadow those other parts of training. Enjoy and thanks to BL.
The Assembly of the Cats
Once there was a sword master called Shoken, who […]

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So why train for strength at all?
There are many answers.
One that I liked from the recent thread in have strength but don’t use it was that life doesn’t stop while you train IMA. That’s very true. We still need to move furniture. I find I need to pick stuff up off the floor almost everyday. […]

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“Jon Smith” goes to philosophy class one day and the professor says something that resonates with Jon. Jon raises his hand and speaks form his heart about the subject. After he speaks, a small group in the back of the class applauds and voices their approval. After class, the group approaches Jon and asks him […]

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One of the best pieces of advice that I could give is to have strength, but don’t use it. Lift your kettlebells, hold downward dog for five minutes, do some weights if that strikes you as a good idea. But when it comes to doing forms or applications, don’t use that strength at all. Get […]

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For a review of who Peter Ralston is, check out my review of his DVD.
It seems there is a Cheng Hsin blog now.
I’m glad to see this. More info about Peter Ralston’s system is a good thing. The blog has a link to his new wikipedia page.
Lots of interesting tidbits there, more than I’ve seen […]

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There’s some great discussion going on in the thread below the post a statement from the Yang family. What is troublesome is that the statement is all about who has “the true form” and how oh so terribly important that supposedly is. The function has simply been replaced by the form.
This happens too much in […]

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My teacher Chen Yun-ching is in the June edition of Inside Kung-fu. If you hurry, you can catch the article, which is excerpted from Jess O’Brien’s book Nei Jia Quan, 2nd edition: Internal Martial Arts.
In the article, Chen laoshi brings up some interesting points. One of them is that push hands should be thought of […]

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