Now here's something I have not yet written about. :D I have been interested in the Zen side of Japanese martial arts since the age of 16. It was about at this age when I began with Qigong as well. As a young karateka back then I did not have the confidence, strength or aggression of my classmates and looking back- I think it was a good thing. Because of that classes scared me. Now- had it not been to exposure to the mental training techniques provided to me by Zen- I would not have seen this hostile dojo environment as the ideal testing grounds for the things I have read. This is one major factor to which I attribute my development as a martial artist. One very important training tool that has always served me well and that continues to do so to this dat is Zen Meditation. This, in itself, has provided me with a number of benefits about which I can write in detail. One of those- was the development of intuition and sensory acuity. It is actually wonderfu...
I loved learning Kung Fu. Having learnt Karate and Japanese martial arts before I got into Kung Fu I was very interested in seeing what made Kung Fu different from them. My chance came in 2002. While some may feel that it takes long enough to learn one style well enough to be able to fight with it I was interested in knowing what approach the Chinese had to fighting and training. Well- apart from the Qigong and Force Training exercises I found these two training tools to be a very good way to see what basics Shaolin Kung Fu had. In Wong Kiew Kit's book on Shaolin Kung Fu you get introduced to some basic Shaolin techniques and given the tools with which to develop them for efficient use in combat. The first training tool is very familiar to a lot of us. A set, known in Chinese as taolu is quite familiar with students of Karate and Taekwondo as well. In Karate these sets are called kata. In Taekwondo it is known as poomse. The techniques in this basic form do not l...
Hello, everyone. Today's post is old news to Taijiquan students, but if you study karate at your average Western dojo (Take note: average- I know there are teachers who go the extra mile) this stuff may be news to you. I don't know about you, but I find a tremendous amount of the classical teachings in the mythologies of Dragonball Z, martial arts films and stories. I am going to use these stories as examples to show where the forces of Yang and Yin work in our stances. Now- just so that we start off at the same place: In this context I am not going to talk about good and evil, light and dark and other irrelevant manifestations of this concept. The forces I am going to discuss are gravity as the Yin force and then - as the Yang Force- that force that resists it. The anti-gravity force... If you have watched Dragonball Z you'd know that Goku flies. This levitation phenomenon was often mentioned in classical tales in the Chinese martial arts world. Having ...
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