Matthew Staley, Martial Poet, Pt. II

“Shi Fu said the reason you can’t really find good xyq stateside, or anywhere really is that it requires alot of one on one becuase the shapes are easy to learn anyone can copy them and externally look like they have good xing yi quan but internally the hamster is off making love to the [...]

Matthew Staley, Martial Poet

So, Matt and I are discussing the effects of Zhang Zhuang practice as we are taught it (which differs from other methods, like Wang Peisheng’s, for example, in that you aren’t consciously moving Qi or directing force from place to place, you are merely adjusting the intricacies of your posture) and he had this to [...]

Good reading

I discovered that one of my Taijiquan ‘ancestors’ (if that is the right term) has an exceptionally useful website up. Now admittedly, some of it is in Engrish, but if you stick with it you’ll really get a lot out of it. The site belongs to the school of Master Chu Gin Soon (Zhu Zhen [...]

More comedy

I tell you, I could spend all day watching Youtube’s various terrible videos that claim to be Xingyiquan. These people would get MURDERED in an actual fight. Take this bunch for example: what part of this “no kicks allowed” slapfight is XYQ? It really is amazing to see people doing what looks like XYQ to [...]

Why genuine Xingyiquan is such a big deal, pt. 2

Chang Shi Fu had this to say on the subject of Xingyiquan versus other styles:
“In other styles, you have many hand and foot techniques, lots of techniques. But what use are techniques against, say, a car? They not work against a car. Xingyiquan is the car.”

Why genuine Xingyiquan is such a big deal

I have a lot of friends that are martial artists of different levels, styles, and backgrounds, the vast majority of them of course being Americans trained in America by other Americans. I find that as a new ‘adoptee’ into the Nei Jia that I am unable to really convey why the genuine Internal styles are [...]

The Inadequacy of IPD

I am lately of the opinion that pattern differentiation AKA IPD as we
are taught it may actually be a gross over simplification of things
designed to get people up and running in a hurry. Furthermore, a lot of
the incomplete/failed diagnoses that are come up with are because the
IPD patterns don’t cover the whole picture. As in [...]