Year of the Snake
To celebrate the new year, the Chinese Association of Woking organises end of term performances at the school and in the local town centre.
This year the Wutan Kung Fu Sifus, Jim and Frank, kindly allowed the Taiji class to slide into one of their set pieces.
Taiji forms can be quite long (our short form is 5 minutes if you do it quick!) and don’t always lend themselves to a snappy demo, so we decided to do something aligned to Taiji, but different.
We settled on a very short ‘linking set’ of another ‘internal’ traditional Chinese martial art - Xingyiquan.
Traditional Chinese Martial Arts
A ‘quicky’ including good videos of Xingiquan, Karate x Wing Chun and MMA (I am sliding this last one in quietly and hoping you won’t notice that it is not Traditional Chinese Martial Arts!)
Xingyi Quan - book roundup
I have been reading up on Xingyi recently and buying all the books I can find. Not practising it enough of course and desperate to get some more ‘FaceTime’ on the Five Element Fists with my teachers. We have a linking set which I am making progress on, but still want to go back to drilling the basics.
The way of the warrior
In this podcast there was a reminder of the wonderful 1983 BBC series - The Way of the Warrior - which has been uploaded to YouTube.
I watched this series with my father, but can’t say I remember the individual programmes. He bought the book that accompanied the series and I am currently looking for a copy.
The quality of the video compared to modern standards is shocking! Nevertheless, there is so much there worth learning, you just have to push through.
Xing Yi - Five Element Fists
Xing Yi Quan is classified as one of the internal styles of Chinese martial arts. The name of the art translates approximately to "Form-Intention Fist", or "Shape-Will Fist".