Wen Hsiu Quan

Hello, everyone! I think this stance is one recognised easily by Kung Fu and Karate practitioners alike. It is the mother of all stances. When you want to teach someone proper posture for Chinese, Japanese or Okinawan martial arts (okay- Korean martial arts as well), the Horse Stance is an excellent place to start. In sparring context both Karate and Kungfu uses the stance facing forward for stationary practice. Punches and strikes are practiced while the legs get a workout and the student starts to develop the rooting necessary for effective technique. Once Horse Stance is mastered other stances follow with very little difficulty as the relaxed shoulders, low centre of gravity and upright back are things essential to all other basic stances that follow. It is true that one starts learning ducking and leaning at an advanced stage, but that would be useless without the foundation laid by basic stance training. Ask a Karate master the value of Kiba Dachi-or Horse...

Hello again, everyone. Thank you for joining me. I am at the last chapter on moves found in forms of Karate and Kung Fu that are similar or even exactly the same. This particular movement called "Single Tiger Emerges from Cave" consists of three elements that I will analyse separately. Firstly- the stance being adopted may be known to even a lot of kyu-level students of styles like Shito and Goju Ryu as Cat Stance. In Chinese martial arts we find it being referred to as Tiger Stance. While I have not yet seen any Karate katas showing it, one of the functions of this stance is to enable you to shoot into Bow (forward) Stance while attacking with a move like Black Tiger Steals Heart (which is a fancy Chinese name for Gyaku Zuki to put it simply). The second element is the hand form called "Tiger Claw" that sweeps forward and outwards to deflect a straight attack. Hand forms are an integral part of Shaolin Kungfu and the Tiger Claw is ...

Hi, everyone! I have taken some time before today's training to make these short videos about this very versatile move. You don't really have to study Karate for very long to come across the Morote Uke. It is right there in the Heian/ Pinan Katas from Heian/ Pinan Nidan! At your 8th to 5th kyu grades (I won't mention belt colours anymore after I have heard how Kyokushin belt grades are made up) you learn that this move is a block, as the "Uke" in the name connotes. I really have no objection to that to be honest. In Shaolin it is taught as exactly that. Then it is called "Stopping Fist"- if done with a closed fist- or "Beauty looks at Mirror" or just "Mirror Hand" when it is done with an open hand. In one of the Shaolin forms I have learnt the Mirror Hand is followed up with the Precious Duck punch that I have written about last week. In Taijiquan forms it can flow into a Single Whip, Cannon Punch or a double hande...

Hi, everyone! Welcome to the third installment in my series of posts about Kungfu moves found in Karate. Read articles on the internet and you'll find that almost everyone says that Karate is developed from the White Crane style of Fujian. That is really an oversimplification of things. I have never learnt White Crane. We at Martial Arts Forums have seen one video being posted in our group of an elderly master performing a White Crane form and I think we can all agree that it certainly does not resemble much of what we see in Karate today. Today's technique, however, I have found in two styles of Karate before I have learnt about it in Shaolin Kungfu. The move is called "Precious Duck Swims Through Lotus". In Master Wong Kiew Kit's Five Animal Set this movement looks like this: In Shukokai's- and Shito Ryu's version of the kata "Rohei" we find it looking like this: The Precious Duck is the punch and not the bloc...

Greetings, everyone! I have thought it best to start off this series of posts with a greeting- not just any greeting, but a greeting straight out of the world of Martial Arts! Our American friends have lots of awesome tales of the Wild West, but what about the East? They certainly have their time of Ronin and Ninjas to look back to in Japan. One of my favourite eras, however, was the Jiang Hu era in China. This era was not necessarily tied to a particular dynasty, but it was a time in which martial artists lived a life on the edge in an underground lifestyle of challenging each other to the death, righting wrongs, driving out bandits or just taking revenge. The kind of stuff movies get made of. This greeting hails from that time... This greeting, of course, is the familiar salute with the right fist covered by the left hand. To us Westerners this is a greeting associated with martial arts only as modern Chinese civilians do not bother to greet each other like this a...