The Way of Least Resistance

Brush knee is one of those central techniques you find in taijiquan - one of its "defining movements", if you will.  Chances are that if you stumble across a picture of someone doing taijiquan, it's either single whip or - or it's brush knee. So I thought it might be useful to run through the ubiquitous brush knee and show some of the varied applications - running from those that people most often use to those that might be more obtuse and even seem "inventive" (but which, I'm sure you'll agree, actually follow the literal form of the technique ). If you want to run through my video at the end of the article, you can.  It goes on a bit.  Or you can just take a look at my brief analysis that accompanies each of the gifs below: The first, and I think most common, interpretation of brush knee is a deflection against a front kick. It certainly does work for that.  In so doing, it uses taiji's " continuing momentum " of which I...

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...

Last weekend I had the privilege and honour of being one of the featured instructors at the 2014 IAOMAS conference. I have to hand it to my long-time friend and colleague, Colin Wee of Joong Do Kwan, the IAOMAS Coordinator: everything ran like clockwork. Colin also managed to assemble a very diverse, yet mutually compatible and reinforcing, group of instructors and managed to attract a participant group that was especially open-minded, friendly and well-skilled.  The net result was a very enjoyable and informative experience. Proceedings opened with Dr Nigel Farrier of Martial Arts Education Centre whose topic was: "Using your body more effectively for weight transference and generating speed. I followed with my topic: "Fighting in the ‘melee’ range; understanding the significance of ‘toe to toe’ fighting in civilian defence, distinguishing it from sport fighting, learning to dominate it and avoid collapsing into the clinching/grappling range". We then broke f...

Master Wu Bin demonstrating the sinking backfist (image courtesy of Kung Fu magazine) Following my previous articles "How civilian defence grappling differs from sport grappling" and " Elbow locks: an introduction ", I wanted to discuss one particular technique that warrants special attention in both contexts: Many of you martial artists will be familiar with the movement depicted on the right (demonstrated by Master Wu Bin - one of China's leading wushu trainers, as featured in the Kung Fu Special Edition 2012 magazine): This is a technique that features regularly in Chinese martial arts forms (including the feng quan forms taught in the Chen Pan Ling system). But what in the world is it? One of its main applications, as often demonstrated to me by Master Chen Yun Ching , is not as a backfist strike , but rather as an arm bar  to the elbow. Why in the world would you ever want to do an arm bar in a low, cross-legged stance like this, you might a...