Ken Gullette's Internal Fighting Arts

I attended the Martial Arts Supershow this week in Las Vegas. I would never have believed that I would completely feel like a fish out of water.

I believe every good martial arts teacher should make a profit. I believe in making money. Every good instructor should make enough money to live a good lifestyle and save for a secure future. I try to make money at my arts, and I do, but not enough.

It's sad to see good martial arts schools struggle. The image of the kung-fu or karate teacher living a meager existence, taking little for lessons but teaching a pure art is becoming a memory.

Even Chinese masters have learned that they can make big bucks, and they want the money. Chen Xiaowang, I heard, is a millionaire. He deserves it. He has worked hard and has a legacy.

And yet, it's disappointing to me to attend a Martial Arts Supershow like the one in Las Vegas this week and see that it's so geared to the business side of the arts. They taught things such as: How do you squeeze more ...

Bruce Lee said, "I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once. I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times."

This is a profound statement, but I don't know very many Americans who practice the principle behind it. I see it in my students, and I've seen it in myself -- the quest to learn more forms, thinking that it means we're good at what we do.

But learning more forms doesn't make you good.

Oh sure, we can win trophies at tournaments. We can put our art up against our peers and bring home some hardware. And tournaments are good for marketing, but you take a first place performance at most American tournaments to the Chen Village and you'd be considered a rank beginner. Let's not kid ourselves.

In the Chen Village, it is said that students may spend 10 years practicing only Laojia Yilu. Ten years before they are allowed to practice another empty hand or weapons form.

How well do you think they can perform Laojia Yilu at the end of that time?

A little over a ...

 Each time I train with a member of the Chen family, it's like trying to go one-on-one with Michael Jordan. You experience people who are at the top of their profession.

Chen Ziqiang is around 30 years old and is a tough tai chi fighter. He's the son of Grandmaster Chen Xiaoxing and the nephew of Grandmaster Chen Xiaowang. His cousin is Chen Bing.

I got up at 2 a.m. and got to Master Han's school in Skokie, Illinois, a little after 5:00 a.m. Master Han arrived with Chen Ziqiang around 5:45 and at 6, he did a 2-hour workshop on the Chen fan form. This isn't the same form that Zhu Tiancai does on his DVD. This is the original Chen Village form. I've never studied the fan before, so it was an opportunity to add a new weapon to my list. I've always considered the fan to be more of a woman's weapon, but the form is more challenging than I expected, and I rubbed a hole in my right index finger opening and closing my steel-pronged fan.

The photo here is cropped -- in the back row from left...

I practiced 10 forms this evening, as the sun was going down and the shade began to deepen in our backyard.

I've been practicing some of these forms for 23 years, but had to occasionally stop and practice a movement a few times until it felt right. Once or twice, I would skip a movement, realize it a few seconds later, and have to go back and start again until I got it right. Then I would repeat the form to make sure the part that I had skipped was firmly in my mind again.

As a child -- around age 7 -- my mother had me take piano lessons. My teacher told me that concert pianists who have practiced all their lives can feel it if they skip one day without practicing. The best artists practice every single day.

Five decades later, I understand that the same is true for martial artists. We express our art with our bodies, creating beautiful movement that has specific body mechanics at their core, and a potentially deadly meaning hidden inside circular and sometimes flowery movements.

F...

Two years ago, I felt palpitations in my chest. For a few months, I attributed it to stress (I was in a very stressful job). Then I visited a doctor, who became alarmed and told me I had atrial fibrillation -- my heart had developed extra electrical pathways and the heartbeat was all screwed up.

I had two choices -- take blood thinners the rest of my life to avoid a stroke or clot, or undergo "laser ablation," where they go into veins in your groin, send lasers and a camera up into your heart, and burn spots to stop the extra electrical activity.

I wanted to be back to normal, so I opted for the laser ablation.

It was a surreal experience after being healthy and fit my entire life. After the procedure, it was clear within a day or two that it hadn't worked. My heart was still beating strangely -- part of it was fluttering instead of beating normally.

I returned to see the cardiologist, Dr. Bengt Herweg, a week later. He came into the room and looked at my charts.

"What dose of cou...

Caution - this story contains an image that might be disturbing.

On November 2nd, I was lying in a hospital bed with tubes down my throat -- on a respirator -- and watching TV through a haze of sedation that relaxed me so that I wouldn't gag and choke on the tubes. I had entered the hospital on October 19th, thinking I was having a 2-hour procedure that would fix a bleeding airway. I had been coughing up blood since February and the residual blood in the lungs made breathing a real challenge.

My kung-fu practice had been seriously affected throughout 2009, but I had no idea -- and neither did my doctors -- that I was losing the function of my left lung because the pulmonary veins going to the heart were closing down. They discovered this at the Cleveland Clinic, but when they tried to open the veins, they accidentally pierced my heart. They led Nancy to believe a couple of times that there was a good possibility I wouldn't make it out alive.

On November 2, I discovered that I was un...

Like a lot of people, I used to think that if you had a black belt in a martial art, you were capable of killing people with your bare hands, a walking lethal weapon. It was a world shrouded in secrecy and mystery.

When I earned a black sash in 1997 and started teaching, I realized the holes that I still needed to fill in my knowledge and experience -- holes the size of the Grand Canyon. So I continued to study, learn, and through the miracle of videotape, I could watch my tournament performances and cringe at the improvements I needed to make in my own body mechanics and form.

I was only beginning to study.

Now, I've been teaching for 12 1/2 years and only two students have achieved a black sash. Yesterday, Chris Miller went through the test -- drilled through the basics of Hsing-I Chuan, Chen Tai Chi, Baguazhang, plus sparring in all three arts, sparring with straight sword, staff, broadsword and elk horn knives, plus chin-na, push hands, fighting applications -- all the material...

I spent the morning yesterday studying the energies and directions of Tai Chi. I have had some good teachers who have touched on these topics in class, but they've never really been organized in a way that brings it all together in a systematic approach to learning.

After a few hours of study and reflection, and getting up to practice some movements for even more insight into the physical mechanics, I had crystallized my thoughts -- and some outstanding information -- into five pages of a document that I'll put on the online school tomorrow, along with a video that I plan to shoot this evening with my students, demonstrating each of the 13 energies and the five moving directions of Tai Chi.

There are six main physical skills you need for good Tai Chi (and Hsing-I and Bagua). Along with the 13 energies and five moving directions, this makes up the core of an amazing martial art.

The Six Main Physical Skills:

1. Establish and maintain the ground path

2. Maintain peng jin at all tim...

In Taoism and Chinese culture, the term wuji (pronounced "woo-zhee") means a state of harm ony and balance -- emptiness, stillness and peace. It is limitless, infinite.

It is when everything begins moving and you lose balance that you also lose wuji.

In the Taoist view of the universe, if we were to look at it from a modern scientific view, the universe was in a state of wuji just before the Big Bang. There was a state of perfect peace and then all hell broke loose. Things separated into yin and yang. Dogs and cats living together -- MASS HYSTERIA! (Sorry, I watched Ghostbusters a lot when my daughters were little)

In Tai Chi, the goal is to maintain a sort of wuji -- balance and harmony; to remain centered. When someone attacks, and you must adapt and change to accept this person's force, your goal is to return to wuji -- the state of balance you were in before the attack. 

I enjoy working with people who have never studied the internal arts. Almost every time when a newbie is wo...

Jieh Jin is translated from Chinese as "borrowing energy." It's one of the many concepts that are abstractly described as "energies" in the internal arts.

As with each of these "energies," borrowing energy doesn't mean you're sucking the energy out of your opponent literally -- it isn't mystical, it's physical just like all the other skills of Tai Chi, Hsing-I and Bagua.

 These three photos show an exercise you can do to practice and demonstrate borrowing energy.

In photo 1, my partner is rushing at me to push me off my ground. He will push hard into my folded arms, using his momentum and weight. I'm establishing the ground path, maintaining peng, and setting up the body structure that I need for good internal mechanics.

In photo 2, he makes contact with his force, or energy. I ground it and give it no place to go but back at him. It actually feels as if it bounces back at him.

In photo 3, you can see him bouncing back slightly. All of the internal mechanics are coming into ...