The Way of Least Resistance

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...

Stances: the foundation of traditional martial arts Four years ago, almost to the day, I wrote an article about the function of stances in traditional martial arts.  At the time I was pleased to see that my piece met with a fairly universal positive reaction in traditional martial circles - regardless of style. I suspect this is because almost all traditional martial arts share the same stances  (more or less) and these are used  for pretty much the same pedagogic reasons: You have a forward (or bow) stance, a reverse stance, a cat stance, a horse stance, a twisted stance and, from southern China and Okinawa, " sanzhan/sanchin " - an hourglass stance.  While there are a host of other less common stances, for the most part these constitute nothing more than minor variations of, or transitions between, the previously-mentioned stances. The "odd man out": xingyi's principle stance But what if there were a stance that seemingly "bucked the trend...

Introduction There is a tendency in the Chinese, and increasingly in the Japanese, martial arts to venerate “standing post” training - what is known as zhan zhuang (站樁 - literally “standing like a post”).  In particular the internal arts of China are known for this practise.  Even more particularly, the art of yiquan (意拳 - literally “concept fist”) focuses almost entirely on this as a martial training method. Yiquan, which is also called “da cheng quan” (大成拳 - literally “great achievement boxing”), was developed by xingyiquan master Wang Xiangzhai (26 November 1885 - 12 July 1963).  One of his students was the Taiwan-based martial artist Wang Shujin (a master of xingyiquan, baguazhang and taijiquan who happens to have also been one of my grandmaster Chen Pan Ling's main students). In Japan the yiquan tradition was continued by Kenichi Sawai, founder of the school of taikiken (体気拳 - literally “mind and spirit fist”). So what is the point of “standing post traini...

Introduction In Parts 1 and 2 of my article "Bridging the gap between karate and the internal arts", I discussed my design of an experimental or "research" form ("kenkyugata") - one that is an "external/internal hybrid".  In this essay I wish to describe and discuss the "final product" in detail. The goal of this project was to create a form for external martial arts practitioners (in particular, karateka) that enables them to assimilate  into their practice some  of the principles/concepts  (意 or "yi") of the internal arts relating to efficient momentum transfer - both for defence (effective evasion and deflection) and counter attack (landing blows more securely and with "whole body" force multiplication). Above all else I wanted this kata to be sufficiently familiar to karateka : I wanted to avoid the need for them to undergo lengthy training in the outward form  of the internal arts  (called 形 or "xi...