Ken Gullette's Internal Fighting Arts

I have read and collected a lot of Tai Chi, Xingyi and Bagua books since 1974. But most of them made the internal arts more abstract and difficult to understand.

So I decided to write a book that I wish I had read in 1987 -- a book that would organize and teach, step-by-step, the fundamental body mechanics that are required for high-quality Tai Chi, Bagua and Xingyi. After 31 years of studying and then teaching these arts, writing a book like this is the right thing to do.

In my opinion, these body mechanics -- ways of moving -- are necessary for beginners to know how to do internal movement for gongfu. There are more things you learn down the road, but I have seen Tai Chi teachers who have spent decades in the art and still don't know these body mechanics.

It involves much more than simple directions such as "turn your foot out 45 degrees and relax."

And it has NOTHING to do with "cultivating chi."

I have included 250 photos and clear, straightforward descriptions in this book. I...

I first launched the $5,000 Chi Challenge around 2002. It was published in Inside Kung-Fu magazine in 2003 (see the headline halfway down the left side of the magazine cover in the photo).

To date, no one has accepted the challenge. The most recent teacher to receive my challenge was Richard Clear, but after an initial acceptance in messages (he said he would be "happy" to take my money), when it was time to sign an agreement, it fell through. 

After it fell through, I began to receive messages and emails from his Business Manager with what I considered veiled threats to "visit" me.

Here is what happened, boiled down as simply and accurately as I can do it:

On the Fajin Project Facebook page -- I am a member of the page -- we look at videos by martial artists who appear, whether stated or not, that they possess "chi" powers that defy physics. Often, these are teachers who pretend to knock their students down without touching them, or they touch them lightly with push hands, for exa...

Grandmaster Chen Xiaowang was teaching us the proper way to do fajin ("issuing energy") with the Hidden Hand Punch movement from Laojia Yilu. He had each person stand in front of him and do the movement.

I had really been practicing, and I was particularly proud of the way I was able to close into the kua before firing the punch. I had been studying Chen Taiji for over five years, practicing and practicing. I knew I was going to get a "good" from the Grandmaster.

He stood and watched as I assumed the position, legs wide, and I closed into the kua.

He shook his head. "Too much," he said.

"Too much?" I asked.

There was a bit of a language barrier, but it was clear that he did not like what he saw.

"Too much."

He showed me, and he settled into the kua the way I had done. "Too much," he repeated. Then he did it again, closing into the kua in a much more subtle way.

"Just enough," he said.

Ahhh, just enough.

I tried to copy him, and closed much softer. Then I fired the punch.

He ...

I was very sorry to read in the New York Times about the death of Charles Neville, one of the Neville Brothers, one of the greatest bands to come out of New Orleans. Aaron Neville is one of his brothers.

Charles bought several of my DVDs and joined my website when it launched, 10 years ago this July. Each month, I would get a notice that he had paid his monthly fee, but I never really connected his name to Aaron Neville and the Neville Brothers. He remained a member until less than two years ago, and I wondered if he was in poor health. I knew he was in his 70s.

He called me on the phone a couple of times over the years, before I realized who he was. I talked to him like I do all of my website members.

The last time he called, he had forgotten his password to the website, so I created a new one for him. He said, "I haven't been on the website in a couple of months because I've been traveling, playing music."

It is strange to be on the other side of the microphone. I am accustomed to doing interviews for my podcast, so it was a different feeling to be interviewed by Jeremy Lesniak for his Whistlekick Martial Arts Radio podcast. I was honored to be asked.

Here is a link to the show. I almost postponed it because I had been battling a lung issue for almost two weeks, and with only one lung, I could hardly speak without coughing for several days. The heavy breathing is very obvious, and the microphone picks up every bit of it!

Here is a link to the show:

https://player.fm/series/whistlekick-martial-arts-radio-podcast-shifu-ken-gullette

He was 17 years old; taller, heavier and stronger.

And he wanted to beat me up.

I was 14, a skinny, friendly kid with glasses who was a magnet for bullies back in the days when boys settled arguments by fighting. Yeah, that's my picture at the top of the page. Doesn't that look like the face of a martial artist? At the time, none of us knew what martial arts were.

He was the son of the sheriff of Jessamine County, Kentucky, and he had a couple of young toadies who followed him around.

A couple of my cousins were with me, leaving the drugstore in downtown Wilmore where we had been drinking Cokes, looking at comics and lusting after Helen, the pretty girl who worked there.

Back in the 1950s and '60s, dogs and boys ran free through the streets and farms around Wilmore because, by God, that's how the good Lord made us. We walked on the train tracks, explored the graveyard, went swimming at local creeks, and even walked across High Bridge, a dangerous feat especially when trains were...

Last October, I offered a free tai chi class for people aged 40 and over. I stopped teaching older students a decade ago because I wanted to focus on the martial-oriented side of the internal arts. But we used to have a lot of fun with the older friends we made, so I started this new, free class to make new friends, have fun, and teach the Chen 19 form. Some of the students were nearly 80 years old. The oldest student was 83.

When you have practiced a form for 20 years, it seems easy. It was clear the very first night that even a beginning, short form like the Chen 19 appears like a deep, yawning abyss in front of someone who has not studied it before. The idea of actually getting through the thing seems impossible when you are learning the first movement.

As we went through the opening movement, I began coaching them through the simple stepping out and raising the arms, then dropping the energy while lowering the arms.

We practiced it a few times and then I said, "Okay, practice th...

My neighbor Earl is one of my best friends. He is also 96 years old. A couple of weeks ago, I realized that he could benefit from the practice of Zhan Zhuang -- "Standing Stake" or "Standing Pole."

If you do Zhan Zhuang as part of your practice (I call it "Standing Stake"), you can teach it to elderly people in your life.

We moved into our current home almost four years ago and Earl, who was 92 at the time, walked across the street to introduce himself to us. His mind was sharp and he had a great sense of humor. His wife had died two years before. He fought in the Philippines during World War II, came home with PTSD, but got help and lived a happy and successful life. His three sons all live within a mile.

During the first year we lived here, I was friendly with Earl and would sometimes cross the street when he was outside to talk to him.

But during the last three years, Earl and I have developed a close friendship. My home office looks out toward his house. We sit out during warm ...

You are in a situation where you cannot escape a fight. Someone your size or larger lunges at you, grabs you in a clinch, and tries to take you to the ground.

Can you use your Tai Chi skills to take HIM to the ground instead?

I have been working on this since 2006, when I was practicing push hands with Chen Xiaoxing in my basement and he kept putting me on the ground -- over and over again -- and he did it so easily, I could not understand what he was doing until about the tenth time I found myself on my back.

He was breaking my structure and controlling my center.

The insights from that training have driven me for the past dozen years to explore how to use the "energies" of Tai Chi (Taiji) for close-up self-defense.

How do you use ward-off, roll back, press, push, split, pluck, bump, elbow, empty, advance, withdraw in a real fight? How do you use these methods of dealing with force to take your opponent to the ground without using muscular force or "wrestling?"

My new DVD answer...

On April 7, 2008, a vice president at the university where I worked as the director of media relations walked into my office with a Human Resources manager and closed the door.

Oh, crap, this is not good, I thought.

It was not good. After almost a year on the job, I was being let go. A month before, I went to lunch with the VP and he said, "Ken, you have been set up. I don't know if it was intentional, but you have been set up."

So I had an idea that this would happen, but it is still a shock when you lose a good job, even a very political and public job where you are placed in front of news cameras to hold news conferences on sensitive university issues, then you walk away from the news conference and realize there are arrows in your back, fired from within the university. It was a very interesting, intense job. I loved it, but I was, as the VP said, "set up" for a fall.

After the VP and the HR person left my office, I quickly cleared out my stuff and within a couple of hours, I w...