Wen Hsiu Quan

  Modern martial arts are to a large extent what had happened when classical martial arts met Western Boxing. The foremost reason modern fighters will give you for using a short fighting stance when sparring or fighting is that a short stance is more mobile. Is a shorter stance more effective, though? Well...  Let's have a look at that... Can you attack more easily from a short stance? Can you defend more easily from a long stance? Do this simple test and tell me what you find... With punching one can indeed spring into the attack and cross a long distance to land a punch on a target. The feet and body are both out of reach in the beginning, but that changes as soon as you shoot that hip forward... This is of course effective in competitions where fighters start off away from each other. This enables you to go in, score your point, and get out of reach again In the case of a long stance we see that the body may be out of reach, but the lead foot has already arrived on the scen...

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 ...