Join me for World Tai Chi Day!

If you're in Perth on 30 April 2016, feel free to join me in celebrating World Tai Chi Day.  The details are below!


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Punching: alignment and conditioning

Image
Choson Ninja and the question of "conditioned" knuckles The other day one of my colleagues at the Traditional Fighting Arts Forums alerted me to a fellow who calls himself Choson Ninja. He has a series of videos on Youtube and in this particular one he tells you about the dangers of getting "ugly" knuckles from hand conditioning. The general thrust of his argument is correct: conditioning can lead to deformed and ugly knuckles - especially so if you are doing it incorrectly. Certainly, even moderate makiwara practice will cause you to develop callouses. How "unsightly" these are will depend on how much and how "hard" you do your conditioning. However I disagree with Mr Choson about much of what he says in his video. To begin with, his knuckles are not really that conditioned . Rather, they appear to be damaged from breaks. Mr Choson certainly doesn't have anywhere near the kind of callousing one gets from regular conditioning such as st...
Read more

That first punch: can you really "block" it?

Image
Introduction: that nasty first punch I recently had my attention averted to a blog post of the (always interesting!) Wim Demeere, ie. "How not to block a punch" . I find myself agreeing with pretty much all of what Wim has to say, but I have my own gloss on the issue – particularly as it relates to that all important first punch that people so often face. First, let's have a look at the video that Wim critiques. I have embedded it below: A video featuring an assortment of punches to the face – all of which are unanswered – and a particular practitioner's answer to how to "block" such punches. "It's not possible to block this sort of punch – and here's the evidence!" The first thing people think of when watching a video like this is to question whether it is at all possible to "block" such a punch. They will draw distinctions of the kind I make later in this article under the heading "What about the practiti...
Read more

We need to talk about the whole gun thing

Image
I'm continually surprised to read the number of posts on Facebook of people (almost always so-called "conservatives") urging others not to discuss gun control in the wake of the latest mass-shooting tragedy at Sandy Hook, Connecticut. They say that to do so would be to "point fingers" and "make politics" out of this tragedy. In other words, they're saying: "You're not to discuss the 'elephant that has crept into the room', namely gun control . It would be 'unseemly' and 'political' for you to do so." It's as if they want a special dispensation not to discuss the most relevant legal, political and social issue impacting on this tragedy "out of respect for the fallen and their families". Well I'm sorry: you can't silence the debate in relation to its most relevant issue – all on the basis of some purported "moral high ground". If we shouldn't talk about gun con...
Read more