Regulating the sympathetic nervous system

This part of the ANS controls the “fight or flight” responses. It can produce body reactions such as increasing blood flow to the skeletal muscles as much as 1200%! Whoa. I would think zhan zhuang is more about calming the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system (controls “rest and digest”). However these systems are [...]

Reductionism vs. intangibles - it’s all about the nervous system

Another great analogy Yayama makes in his book Qi Healing is concerning reductionism in a mechanistic, scientific way vs. intangibles explained through some other mechanism of understanding.
Car - can take apart and look at all the component pieces and understand how each one works and put the system back together and understand it as the [...]

Marketing qigong based on yoga’s success

From a marketer’s point of view, the only thing that would bring any of the qigong and TCM knowledge back to the future is changing consumer demand, driven by a real or perceived need. Most likely that means demand driven by patients’ needs (because neijia hobbyists are few, but everyone needs to be concerned with [...]

Inversion control toward headstand

This one is far less distracting and seems more readily achievable. Getting precise control in inversions seems useful in grappling for having some sense of things when literally rolling, as well as fun and rewarding in itself.
http://media.libsyn.com/media/scy/pincha_with_headstand_arms.mov

Handstand splits on the wall

This video tutorial on how to do handstand splits against the wall is, er, um, yeah. Wow. FF to 1:17 to see the tutorial. No wonder yoga is more popular than tai chi. I was planning to actually try and learn this technique until I watched the tutorial, and then watching the tutorial itself became [...]

Finding prana in sun salutation

Good post here about finding prana to power yoga asanas. Sounds like pretty much the same thing as finding qi to power taijiquan postures (ignoring the martial aspects for the moment).
And another one by the same author on pranayama (seems like qigong):
First, pranayama is one of the eight limbs of the practice of yoga. It [...]

Yoga and qigong: relationship of chakras to dantians

I’m getting more interested in the similarity of yoga and qigong. It’s interesting that some of the concepts are very similar but don’t quite match up. For example, there are seven chakras that seem to have some relationship to the 3 main dantians.
1. Upper dantian - could be the crown chakra, the third eye chakra, [...]

Nice post on yoga and martial arts

Here is a great post on yoga and martial arts. The blogger hasn’t done a day of yoga in his life but his post is super convincing. I like how he puts a clip of this guy doing really advanced inversions above a clip of Royce sparring and draws some interesting comparisons.
http://www.markstraining.com/2008/04/yoga-for-martial-arts.html

Kundalini yoga and qigong

I was reading about kundalini yoga on this page and elsewhere. Kundalini roughly sounds the same as prana, which seems to be essentially same concept as qi. However it’s not clear to me yet from limited reading what relationship kundalini yoga has to qigong, other than that monks brought meditation and other exercises from India [...]

Rickson Yoga

Here is Rickson Gracie doing ginatisca natural in a clip from the famous video Choke:

What is with the really weird breathing technique?
And here is a cool video where he flips over when picked up and looking like he’s about to eat a slam: