bengquan.net

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…

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.

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

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.

This is probably my favourite Aunkai exercise so far. It looks a lot like a standard Qigong exercise but is actually quite unique. This is a video of the exercise being performed:

There are a number of things to focus on:

• The hips can be visualised as a basin.
• The spine plugins into the basin.
• The arms are like a funnel (that pours into the basin).
• The legs form a counterpart to the arms (an inverted funnel if you like).

When coming up the visualisation is that the hands pull the body (this is a very Aunkai kind of idea). There is a focus on keeping the spine vertical all the way down. In my practice I accept that it’s not reasonable for me to keep the spine vertical the whole way down but that is the intention - you can see that Ark keeps his spine very straight and vertical the whole way through.

If you’re doing these correctly you shouldn’t be able to do more than 6 or 7 without a break. These are one of those things where the exercise becomes more difficult as you become better at doing it.

Update: there are more details here and here on the Martial Movement wiki - worth checking out if you’ve not seen it.

On Qigong

I said at the start that this is like a kind of qigong exercise. I have a habit that sometimes gets me confused and in trouble of seeing similarities between different kinds of training and different exercises - it can be very useful but also leads to me misunderstanding the intention behind some exercises. That is a kind of disclaimer because I’m going to say that this Aunkai exercise reminds me of the following qigong from Hun Yuan Tai Chi:

(Note: I’m not talking about the circles - the qigong movement starts somewhere around 40s in).

The similarities are obvious, I think, whether they are simply external or there is some similarity in the intentions behind the exercises too I’m not sure (the visualisation I learnt for the Hunyuan exercise is very different but even so…).