Luo Dexiu Clip

Oct 28, 2009 and

It’s not just Luo and, unfortunately, it is in Chinese but it seems to have a few interesting bits even so:

Intu-Flow: Elbows and Wrists

Aug 08, 2009 , , , and 

Nice exercises via The Fight Geek:

Nice find for those of who spend too much typing but also seems to fill a hole in my existing wrist exercises - and goes nicely with bagua.

Update a bloody age later: some of these a bit like exercises in bagua which are practiced with the circles in different planes. There is a kind of similarity to piquan too, if you play with it you’ll find it…

Su Dong Chen: Dragon

Aug 04, 2009 and

Nice clip of Su Dong Chen doing… some stuff. The first exercise is a version of the Gao Bagua Dragon then there are some interesting applications.

Su Dong Chen video (embedding is disabled).

The video name is interesting ‘up and down - double changing palm’ is in some ways more descriptive then ‘Dragon’.

Update: I particularly like where ~:12s he is low but still with good structure.

Luo Dexiu in Paris

Aug 02, 2009 , , and 

Not really a proper post but I thought people might be interested in this video of Luo Dexiu’s seminar in Paris:

Kiva Martial Artists

Aug 02, 2009 and 

It’s been a really long time since I posted - I know. I have a lot of posts that I’m working on but at the same time I’ve been learning so much that I realise more than ever how unqualified I am to be writing anything at all about martial arts. So it goes… I’ve learnt a lot from my teachers and have read some good (and not so good) books and have a lot to write once it’s clear in my mind.

Anyway - while there are some on topic posts coming up this one is pretty far off. I wanted to draw peoples attention to kiva.org if you don’t already know about it. From their website:

Kiva’s mission is to connect people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty.
From another page:
Kiva a lets you lend to a specific entrepreneur; empowering them to lift themselves out of poverty.
I really like this idea - essentially you lend money to people in need allowing them to improve or start a business to become self sustaining and the money is repaid to you. I have nothing against giving money but I also think that this is a nice additional method of helping people in need.

Again the Kiva website has a lot more information about how microfinance works.

A final nice thing about Kiva is that they allow you to join groups and count your total loans etc based on groups that you join. There is a very small martial artists group. It seems like a nice idea and a good way to show that martial artists aren’t all crazy people that get off on hurting people.