Formosa Neijia

The following is a long quote from Rob Turtle’s comment about Marnix Wells and push hands. It’s a continuation of the thoughts started in behind the curtain. As readers know, I make long in-depth comments like this into a post so they won’t get buried int he comment section. Thanks to Rob for this.
Marnix will [...]

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The quote below seems like a good follow up to yesterday’s post on the push hands tourney between the taiji grandmasters. Marnix Wells is well known for his translations and martial skill. Below he gives us his experience and it’s a bit against the common grain, so to speak. Here’s the original (I suggest reading [...]

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Dojorat recently asked me what I thought about mixing harder techniques into push hands. His thoughts are here.
There’s no problem with mixing the hard with the soft to some extent. I’m fairly open to eventually mixing in strikes, kicks, and throws into two person practices but then this evolves into sanshou, not tuishou.
Sanshou is obviously [...]

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Wow! Check this out. This looks much more high level than the usual push hands material that you see out there. In this clip, I especially liked level three. Look at the cooperative, yet controlling, play between the two participants. That’s very smooth. Almost bagua-like. Here is part of an article from them that explains [...]

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This training was popularized in the West by Jou Tsung-hwa, if I’m not mistaken. I know that Jou took some flack from some people for this practice, because they thought it was “made up” or something. But it is a legitimate practice that I’ve picked up bits and pieces of from various taiji and bagua [...]

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So I pushed with a new friend yesterday, and he was bigger than most of my push hands partners. I like pushing with bigger, stronger people so the challenge was welcome.
During our second session of the day, I had my left hand on top of his right arm near the tricep. My left thumb was [...]

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I obviously look at lots of video, but I really rarely see someone that I think really gets it. Here’s someone that does. This is Roberto Sharpe teaching some taiji and bagua push hands moves.
Notice that right away, he’s familiar with how xingyi and taiji have similar concepts, but slightly different expressions of the moves. [...]

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Here’s a great clip that I hadn’t seen before. The two gents start out in the familiar one and two hand patterns. Notice the horizontal nature of the wardoff, rollback, and push in single push hands and how that changes to a vertical expression in two hand push hands. Notice how the guy on the [...]

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Here is an excellent idea of what peng is and how to use it from Wu Meng-xia:
The fundamental idea of “propping up” (cheng) is as if springs (tan huang) have been placed beneath the shoulders in the area of the armpit, if the two arms are sprung in this fashion, then they may absorb with [...]

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This is Liu Cheng-de, a Chen taichichuan stylist, doing some excellent stand up grappling — otherwise known as qinna. Several things to notice here:
1. He doesn’t wait for an opening — he creates one. This flies in the face of what some believe is taijiquan, but so it goes I guess.
2. He has a deep [...]

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