After Shaolin monk Zhang San-feng left Shaolin, he ended up living in the Wu Dung Mountains and developed a new school of martial arts called wu dung (Cantonese: wu tang.)
As legend goes, Zhang San-feng saw a crane fighting a snake. The snake used soft coiling motions to ward off the bird’s attacks, and the crane used its wings to fend off the snake’s strikes. By 1365, Zhang San-feng had combined Taoist breathing exercises with the soft, fluid, coiling self-defense moves and created the internal martial art mien chuen (cotton fist). This became the foundation of tai chi.
Taoist monk Chiang Fa (aka Wang Zong-yue) taught mien chuen to Chen Wang-ting. Chen Wang-ting blended it with previous knowledge to create chen tai chi, a tai chi style that uses fast-slow and hard-soft movements (i.e., the perfect yin-yang combination). Chen Wang-ting taught Chen Chang-ching, who then taught Yang Lu-chen. Yang Lu-chen made changes and created yang tai chi. Over time, three new tai chi styles evolved: wu, sun and wu/hao.
Tai chi teaches you how to circulate your body’s chi (internal energy). To reap the full benefits of tai chi, you’ll also need to practice tai chi chi kung.
– March 5, 2013
Although no one carries a sword for self-defense anymore, the practice of certain sword routines and techniques from traditional tai chi can help you develop skills that are useful in life and in other aspects of the martial arts, including empty-hand sparring.
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– August 26, 2011
This list is in no particular order. I could have put krav maga, haganah and others in there, but when I got to 10, I stopped. This list will piss off many instructors, but they have to realize, for example, that with a system like kyokushinkai, which came from goju-ryu
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– June 29, 2011
The Asian martial arts have received a tremendous amount of exposure in the past century and are now almost universally known. Meanwhile, we in the West have neglected many of our own martial arts traditions, which in some cases have fallen into obscurity—much as the Asian systems had at the
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– April 7, 2011
On our walk down the martial path, we will find that we cannot rely on our martial arts training as we did when we were younger. That head-high kick gets harder and harder to deliver effectively. The power in that once-awesome reverse punch seems to slip, regardless of how much
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– March 21, 2011
China has always been the traditional home of the Asian martial arts. For 2,000 years, its people have experimented with and developed self-defense systems that have only recently become known in other countries as karate, judo, jujutsu and sumo.
Yet curiously, little is known of the Chinese martial arts (wushu) outside
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– March 19, 2011
There are few types of action films that I enjoy more than the historical epic. Drunken Master II, Gladiator and 300—all are sweeping, emotional roller coasters packed with flawed heroes, grandiose visuals and beautiful violence. Sadly, many critics love to complain about historical movies, saying they’re wildly inaccurate and only
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