Wen Hsiu Quan

It has been a while since I have sat down to write any book. You may have noticed that I even neglect my blogging nowadays...  I have, however, had enough time to think about what to write about next. I have chosen to write about form practice in Kungfu. In our general language we use the term "forms" to refer to those sequences of movements that are performed without an opponent. Kungfu people, however, call these sequences "sets". The word "forms" are usually used by Karate people when they refer to kata. In Karate the Japanese term kata is used while the Chinese term taolu is used by Kungfu practitioners. Kungfu forms are generally longer than Karate forms, though. In Karate we find that the traditional styles follow a very conservative approach to teaching and practicing forms.    During the 80's some more progressive styles of Karate have appeared with acrobatic forms- performed to music, no less.....

Weird as this may sound these days- Judo was the not only the first martial art that I took up, but it was also the first "soft" martial art that I have learnt. With the standards of competitive grappling having gotten really high we hardly see anything that appears to be soft in Judo these days. Then I won't even mention anything about the Founder's maxim of minimum effort, maximum effect. Judo nowadays seems to be about: I was happy to learn my first throws and found that some worked even on people that were bigger than I was at the time. Still- I have found that I easily got toppled sometimes by a completely untrained person. Well... as you all know by now I have found the bugs, fixed it and wrote a book about it... The first major bug-fix came from Karate. And- it was not even Japanese Karate, but an Okinawan-based style, Shukokai (a style that was derived from Shito Ryu). Karate taught me the value of a good stance. Now... the stances that...

Hello, everyone. How are things in your country? Is your dojo open? Are you training at home? If you are a student living in a country under lockdown like ours, I am sure you have a lot that you can do. The number of things that you can practice at home is virtually unlimited with online classes and instructional videos abounding. I am also sure that if you are studying an art like Karate you have enough forms to practice anyway. Plus- many of those exercises that you normally have to do in the dojo can be done at home. If you are a teacher, however, you may feel derailed now. You had this or that competition lined up for the next month, maybe a grading around the corner... Now those plans have been derailed, right? So- what is left to do? Well... How about teaching martial arts? :) But- you may ask in disbelief- what have we been doing all this time? Sure- you have been teaching martial arts. Most likely it was the syl...

Hello, everyone! I hope you have also had a good morning's workout and that you are having an awesome weekend. Today I am at the last post in a series of posts that got written for my friend Nicolas in the U.S.. Nicolas loves sword-fighting and is into HEMA and Lightsabre League battles. Even though weapons training is not a big thing with me I do practice with weapons on Saturday mornings. To me, however, it is more of a physical workout than training for an actual fight using the weapon. That does not mean that I do not practice fighting techniques at all. So- how does one get a physical workout while practicing fighting techniques? Well... One way is with forms! In the previous posts we have looked at some exercises that are also basic attack and defense moves. We can string all these together in a single pattern that can get practiced regularly. This way our bodies get used to doing all the movements that we need it to do when we use the sword. Here is our form f...