The Way of Least Resistance

I'm pleased to announce that my video "Bridging Hard and Soft Vol. 1: Fundamentals" is now available for purchase from my online shop which can be found here . More details can be found in my recent press release and article .  Otherwise, here's a teaser for the video: Addendum: the video is now also available from direct download (at least in the US - it might take another week or so to reach other countries Amazon stores). Copyright © 2015 Dejan Djurdjevic

Some of you might be wondering what I've been up to in recent weeks.  Well I certainly haven't been idle! Rather, in response to countless emails and personal messages requesting it, I've been preparing a very special DVD series: A comprehensive course introducing karateka and other external martial arts practitioners to functional, practical internal arts methods (not " woo woo "!).   Ultimately the 2 DVDs that comprise this course provides a complete sub-system for students wishing to add practical "softness" to advanced training within their own art. The DVDs feature techniques from the hybrid forms of Hong Yi Xiang's Taipei-based Tang Shou Dao (Karatedo) system .  Because of their "crossover" nature, they will have sense of familiarity to karateka, northern and southern Chinese stylists and even Filipino/Indonesian artists. Accordingly, they are designed to act as a kind of "plug-in" for most traditional "hard...

Introduction In my upcoming seminar on the half hard, half soft art of Hong Yi Xiang, I will be concentrating on various "internal" or "soft" elements - and marrying these with the more familiar "external" or "hard" elements.  I hope to do this by using form - and extrapolating to function.  This should also give participants a good idea of why the heck one should bother with traditional forms or "kata" in the first place. So what are some of these "soft" elements? Well as I've discussed many times before they have precious little to do with qi/chi balls or paranormal powers.  Instead I'm going to cover some of the more subtle, but very useful, skills of grounding, movement/evasion (including footwork) and deflection/interception/entry that are actually quite counter-intuitive at first glance, yet obviously practical and simple at the second: concepts that make sense in a civilian defence environment and even i...

Further to my recent article about the "bridging forms" of Hong Yi Xiang's Tang Shou Dao , I've decided to hold a seminar in Perth on 4 October 2015 from 10 am to 2.30 pm at the Lake Nenia Retreat in Mundaring (the Honbu dojo of the Academy of Traditional Fighting Arts ). Anyone who is going to be in the Perth region on that day is welcome to attend. If you are a karate practitioner, I hope it provides an added angle to how you see your karate as it has for me.  The "bridging form" component of the Tang Shou Dao system is one of the few Chinese arts that crosses over very well into the Ryukyuan arts (and to my eye seems to be heavily influenced by it). If you are an external gong fu practitioner, this should be right up your alley. If you are an internal arts practitioner looking for something that gives you ideas of practical applications to your art, then I believe this will also be of interest. If you are a more modern combat sports or real...

I was honoured and privileged to attend and participate in the 30th anniversary festival for our school yesterday.  What a blast!  Over two hours of martial arts demonstrations by all the students of the Academy covering almost our entire syllabus - ranging from karate kata and bunkai (applications), embu (our two person forms), tuide (grappling), throwing, jo and bokken, sai ( tie chi in Chinese), jian (Chinese straight sword), xingyiquan (single and two person forms) and taijiquan. Having not seen many of the students for a while, I was flabbergasted by the improvement in their skill, timing, knowledge, creativity and toughness. They know so much more than I did at their levels - and can execute it under pressure, with power and efficiency and without flinching. I suppose that goes to show that the old saying is true: "Poor is the student who does not surpass his or her teacher"! Those who want to see more pictures of the event can do so here . Speaking of im...

A lazy year? My regular readers will note that it hasn't exactly been a standard year for this blog. I started off with two fairly meaty (I think anyway) articles in January relating to the karate maxim " karate ni sente nashi " ("there is no first strike in karate") and a fairly big post on  traditional techniques in MMA  in February. But from that time until August I wrote almost nothing here - just a few "micro blogs". Even my January and February posts hardly reflected my usual average of 4 or so large (at least 3,000 or so words) articles per month (something I've maintained since I started blogging in 2008). So what happened?  A very busy year, is the answer: Writing a novel in 3 months Somewhat surprisingly (for me and others) I used the period of 24 December 2013 to 26 March 2014 to write a novel -  The Mirror Image of Sound .  This was published in instalments in "real time" (on a  blog  dedicated to this pr...

Continued from Part 1 . So, in order to learn to strike a "live" opponent the way we would strike a "dead" target, we need more than bags and shields. We need to learn timing skills - skills that comprise appropriate, if not optimal, reactions. Sparring is going to test these skills, but won't necessarily teach them. What will teach these skills are drills: drills comprising elements of techniques isolated for practise. But as we've seen, such drills will probably not teach literal fighting techniques (ie. "when he does this, you do that"). Principles vs. techniques So if martial arts drills don't teach literal fighting techniques, what do they teach? As one of my colleagues at the Traditional Fighting Arts Forums is fond of saying, martial arts drills teach principles - not techniques. When you are taught a martial arts drill you learn a general principle of movement; an appropriate reaction using the correct biomechanics, optimal pos...

The missing link between practice and application Introduction There is a famous scene in Bruce Lee’s “Enter the Dragon” where the character O’Hara (played by Bob Wall) holds up a board in front of Lee’s face and breaks it with a punch. Lee stares back unblinkingly and says, slowly and emphatically: “Boards… don’t hit back” That line is a fairly typical example of Bruce Lee’s philosophy. Nowadays people would say that it was trite. However in its day the statement was quite novel, at least in the wider public’s eye. You have to remember that up until the end of the ’70s traditional Asian martial arts were regarded by many in the West as exotic and mysterious - if not supernatural. People were deeply impressed by traditional demonstrations. And board-breaking was common in these, especially in the case of karate which was “king” of the martial arts until Bruce Lee started everyone “kung fu fighting”. Of course, even back in the early ’70s experienced fighters knew what most people...

Embusen: a kata's movement "floorplan" “Embusen” is a Japanese term that literally means “demonstration line(s)”. It is commonly used to describe the pattern of lines along which a kata is performed. So, for example, the kata pinan nidan / heian shodan has a sideways “H” embusen (meaning that when performed, the kata will, broadly speaking, trace an “H” - or if you prefer, a capital I with serifs - on the ground). The kata shisochin has both an “x” and a “+” embusen (ie. it moves in 4 directions from the centre - which fits well with its name, meaning “4 direction battle”). The variations on embusen are almost endless - particularly when one looks at other arts. The “embusen” of the internal art of xingyiquan is essentially a straight line forward and a straight line back. Baguazhang’s “embusen” comprises endless circles, like eddies in a pond or stream. I even know of one bak mei (white eyebrow) form where the “embusen” traces the Chinese character that is the name ...