Recent youtube bagua videos

These videos from this guy’s channel crossed my Yahoo pipes, an amazingly good web 2.0 mashup service to aggregate feeds and much more. You can not only combine feeds, but parse searches for feeds, do things like combine them, truncate, search for specific terms, block various elements, and more. Essentially check in with a cache [...]

Extensive bagua posts at this blog

Jonathan is on quite the path. Lots of bagua training as well as Ironman training. Sheesh! I am a slug - speaking of which, heard this joke this week - what did the snail on top of the turtle say? Wheee! Haha. I have missed all classes for a while now due to work. This [...]

Another wonderful demo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4loFu4wCxDk
I like how this demo is broken down and builds up slowly. At about 1:40 is my favorite part. He doesn’t complete an application but that part is easy to imagine. That entry is something I can definitely try to learn. It’s easy to imagine it as a “form” if the other person wasn’t there. [...]

Beautiful demo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLyIlt6LyoI&feature=related 
Beautiful demo from a seminar promo. Wish I could go. A few notes for me to find a way to train bits and pieces some other way. 
1) I see mostly a rollback as an initial intercept. I can sometimes do a good rollback. Other times I cannot. Part of the problem is lack of ambidexterity. Mostly it [...]

Throws and gyroscopes

It occurs to me that when I was thinking about smaller circles, I was not only thinking about smaller circles but also very small degrees (say one degree) of a larger circle. I suppose those two patterns can be combined whether into spirals, figure 8’s or some other movement combination. An interesting pattern I’m trying [...]

Directions of movement

Taijiquan classics mention the five directions, but it seems to me in common practice in so-called internal arts, people tend toward these kinds of directions:
1. taijiquan - backward then forward, yield then issue
2. bagua - forward on a diagonal in a circular way
3. xingyi - forward as linearly as possible - the smallest possible advantageous [...]

more entries to diagonal or tani or similar

More ideas from talking with my friend who trains a different internal/external mix.
1. if they are too tentative to reach, enter and press their arm on their body fast.
2. if they grip one arm or sleeve, roll back with their lapel grip attempt - must be just out of reach to “entice into emptiness”, bring [...]

Basic sweep

This sweep from a baguazhang video of Mike Patterson (the title here seems to be incorrect in labeling it tai chi) is pretty much the same sweep shown in the Human Weapon: Sambo episode except the Sambo demo caught the arm from the outside in a rollback and pull down motion then pulled on the [...]

Baguazhang progression and I don’t know what is a good ratio of nei to wai gong

Interesting training progression to go back and read later. I am a bit unclear about how one is supposed to combine neigong and waigong and at what ratios, order, etc. No one really prescribes some definite ratio anywhere I can find except for some of the yiquan sites (50% zhan zhuang is right). I plan [...]

Some recent lessons from judo

I am really pleasantly surprised what I’ve been learning in judo recently - and some of it is basic stuff written about taijiquan that I already “know” intellectually but don’t know kinesthetically well at all. Mostly if you want someone to go up, push down first, if you want to push someone, pull first. My [...]