bengquan.net

This is my personal martial arts site. The focus of the site is primarily Chinese Internal Martial Arts (sometimes Neijia Quan) and I’ve chosen the name Beng Quan as a reference to a technique from Xingyiquan which I’m studying. I hope the site will grow to discuss broader topics overtime. The main arts discussed will be Xingyiquan, Baguazhang and Taijiquan.

In addition to martial arts I will also covered related topics which include health, fitness and strength training. I’m not trying to be the last word in these topics either - if you want pure hardcore strength training you might want to try Body Weight Culture or T-Nation.

Purpose

As this is a personal site I’m aiming at providing some useful stuff for beginners (i.e. like me) rather than trying to dig into advanced topics (for one I’m not qualified for two most of us need to focus on the basics more - I speak for myself here). I’m hoping to talk about the training that I find most useful rather than necessarily what is traditionally correct, I’m also coming at it from a clearly western viewpoint.

So this is a kind of distillation of what I’ve learned so far - I’m by no means skilled in these arts which go very deeply but it can be hard to get started. I’m hoping that what I put here will be useful to others. It’s all an exercise in writing for me - as part of my work I write a lot of technical documents and this is a chance for me to write something a bit more free form and fun.

A note on ‘Internal’ Arts

While I’ll readily admit that I’m not as experienced as others in these arts. I do agree with what some others have said about the term ‘Internal’ and it’s misleading nature. There are some reasons for the use of the term internal but for the most part it doesn’t add a lot to the discussion. It can be very useful to group certain arts together based on shared characteristics but there are real limits to this idea - to my mind these limits are very often passed.

Does it make sense to say some arts are internal and all others are external? Are some more internal than others? Do these questions really make sense? More importantly - even if they do - what do they add to our discussion? I would argue that the questions do have some utility but they highlight, I think, that ‘internal’ is a reasonably obscure term. From what I see different people mean different things by it. For example sometimes it simple means the avoidance of relying on strength against strength (or even speed vs speed). To other it has almost mystic meaning.

As far as this site is concerned I will be writing about martial arts that emphasis certain characteristics more than other arts. These arts are commonly called ‘internal’ but I’m treating that as a category of arts that emphasis the following things:

• correct body structure - this makes it harder for opponents to control your movements and allows you to generate power more efficiently (i.e. you don’t necessarily have to be strong in order to resist a strong opponent or to strike hard).
• fighting strategy - avoidance of blocking in favour of things like ‘borrowing’ or ‘redirecting’ the opponents force.
• maintenance of health is often a big part (e.g. taiji is more famous for health than it’s martial aspects).
• short power (or fa jing) - this is not exclusive to the ‘internal’ arts (for example tongbei and wing chun also have fa jing) but there is a much stronger on it in taiji, bagua and xingyi. This is the idea of being able to strike with power without a big wind up. It can take years to develop this kind of ability.

Many arts include these things but the ‘internal’ styles tend to emphasis them more strongly. (The list above is not really complete).

Conclusion

Thanks for reading this please feel free to contact me or leave a comment on a post or on the wall.

-mark