Ken Gullette's Internal Fighting Arts

I just put a new video onto the online school-- the 8 Pieces of Brocade. This is a qigong exercise -- 8 movements -- that also serves to help in strengthening and conditioning the body, particularly the legs.

The 8 Pieces of Brocade are said to have been created about 1,000 years ago in the Sung Dynasty by Marshal Yeuh Fei for the exercise of his soldiers. It's pretty clear to see when you perform them that these are very effective for stretching and "warming up" before hard exercise or a good workout. In fact, it's possible this series of movements wasn't created as qigong at all, but that qigong was injected into the movements as the centuries went by.

I'm a firm believer in the positive impact of qigong, although I don't necessarily subscribe to the ancient science. When you calm the mind and body, put part of your mind on your dan t'ien, detach from daily concerns and use mental visualization techniques (involving the visualization of chi) it has a tremendous impact on your abi...

This is the kind of video that makes a middle-aged guy like me shake his head and wish I had been able to study Chen Taiji at a young age. This is Chen Xiaowang's young son, Chen Pengfei doing a demo. 

"Jin" means "energy," although that has been misinterpreted by some literal-minded folks who believe it is an actual scientifically real "energy" in the body. It has also been called "power" by some.

I tend to think of jin as "skill" or "method."

The term "energy" is an abstract way of describing the skill that you develop with practice. Liu jin, for example, is "roll back" energy. It's a physical skill that combines reflexes and sensitivity when someone pushes or punches or attacks in another way. The skilled fighter who uses liu can deflect the attack, rolling it away and often causing the attacker to go off-balance. Naturally, this takes a lot of practice. It's impossible to develop this skill just by doing a form. It is a method of dealing with force coming in.

The most important of all the so-called "energies" of tai chi and the internal arts is peng jin. It MUST be present in all of your movements, even when you walk. If it isn't, you're not doing tai chi (or hsing-i or bagu...

I can't tell you how many internal artists I've met during the last decade or so who look at me with blank stares when I ask if they have been taught about the ground path.

I know how they feel. I first heard about it around 1997, when I started reading a network listserve, where Mike Sigman and others talked about it. I had studied martial arts for many years at that point, and had practiced the internal arts for a decade, and this concept was new to me.

I began studying Sigman's material and attended a workshop he held in Minneapolis. I began studying Chen tai chi with Jim and Angela Criscimagna, and learned body mechanics that were foreign to me. As I've seen during the past decade, these physical skills are still foreign to a lot of internal artists. Simply put, there is a LOT of bad instruction happening in the internal arts, particularly tai chi.

When Sigman began telling tai chi teachers and students about the ground path, he was flamed by many of them because they had devel...

There is a cute home movie of my wife, Nancy, when she was just a couple of years old. She's walking down the steps of her home in Rock Island, her hands held up about shoulder-level, her wrists limp just like a girl, and her hands bouncing as she walks.

If we saw a home movie of a boy walking the same way, we would look at each other and our eyebrows would raise suspiciously. A limp-wristed boy? You know what THAT means.

Here in the U.S. particularly, young guys  find out very quickly that we shouldn't let our wrists go limp at any time. As I grew up in the Fifties and Sixties, it became very clear that a limp-wristed guy was ridiculed as being gay. The words used back then weren't quite so polite.

So we grow up very consciously keeping our wrists locked in place. No limp-wristed stuff going on here!

Flash forward two or three or four decades, when the guy starts to learn tai chi, and he begins to learn that proper silk-reeling movement requires him to loosen the joints and ...

If you're ever in a situation that calls for you to defend yourself, it's a complex situation that calls for you to make several fast judgements before taking action.

Connecting with your opponent is essential, but it takes a lot of practice to be able to remain calm enough to do this. You need to quickly understand his mental state, his quickness, his timing, the rhythm of his movements, and when he is deciding to attack.

Martial arts theory can become complicated. In a self-defense situation you must quickly determine your proper distance from the opponent -- this will depend upon his speed and your speed, your reflexes or ability to reach the opponent with your techniques. You must determine your opponent's timing compared with yours, and the intervals that happen between techniques. And finally, you must assess the rhythm that your opponent is using and how you can disrupt or take advantage of that rhythm.

With all this going on, there are moments of vulnerability happ...

A lot of mythology has developed about chi kung (also spelled qigong). "Chi kung" literally means "energy work," and it consists of a series of exercises to calm the mind, calm the body, and focus on breathing.

Chi kung and its medical theories were developed thousands of years ago, by the same people who believed you could tell the future from the cracked shells of turtles. Despite this dubious past, and many of the dubious claims made by people who believe whole-heartedly in miraculous claims of healing related to chi kung, it remains an outstanding way to control stress and ride the ups and downs of a turbulent life.

But it's all in your mind, and it takes practice. It can be a method to help you with mindfulness - being "in the moment," and reacting to stress not with tension, but with calm.

The good news is--five minutes a day can lead to remarkable changes in your health and your relationships. It can lead to a healthier body and a more balanced life.

You Can Learn to Center ...

Martial artists with any experience at all believe they're generating a lot of power with their movements. In my first kung-fu class as a student--way back in September, 1973--we stood and punched, snapping our hips with the punch to add power to the technique.

As I've studied and taught the internal arts, I had to learn body mechanics that are very different from the other kung-fu, taekwondo, and boxing instruction I had received in the past.

A little over a week ago, I held a workshop for all martial artists on the fighting applications of the Chen Tai Chi 38 form. Attendees included students and teachers from a wide variety of arts, from Shaolin and taekwondo to a Yang style teacher. There were white belt students and very high-ranking black belts.

And almost every one of them made one mistake. I knew they would, because everywhere I go--every martial artist I meet--makes this mistake.

Their movements are not connected from the ground through the body.  

Here are some photos ...

I stopped at a Border's bookstore the other day and looked for the latest issues of my favorite martial arts magazines.

There in the Sports section, I found Black Belt and Kung Fu Tai Chi among the MMA and wrestling and karate and TKD magazines. I thumbed through the magazines to find the latest issue of T'ai Chi magazine but it was nowhere to be found. 

And then I had an idea. I went to a different part of the magazine section where all the psychic, spiritual, religious and strange publications are. Sure enough, mixed in with all of this stuff was T'ai Chi magazine.

And there you have it -- the biggest problem facing the art of Tai Chi Chuan. Even a bookstore chain doesn't recognize it as a martial art, and places it with in its mystical and supernatural section.

I'm going to begin a little campaign to get Border's to put the magazine where it belongs -- in the martial art section. You can help by talking with the manager at each store you visit and request that it be moved.

Tai ...

At least 17 people showed up for my workshop yesterday at John Morrow's Academy in downtown Moline, Illinois. Martial artists from all styles were there -- TKD, karate, another tai chi instructor (Yang style), Shaolin students -- it was a great group of very nice people.

Two members of the online school drove in from Dixon, Illinois and another member, Wally, drove in from Chicago.

We went over fighting applications from the Chen 38 form. Each of the participants will receive a DVD -- Nancy videotaped it for the Chen 38 DVD that's due out in the next two weeks.

I knew I was going to enjoy showing internal body mechanics to a variety of martial artists. It was a blast showing them fighting applications from tai chi, and the relaxed power you can generate from the proper body mechanics.

One of the hallmarks of "external" styles is the twisting of the hips. Many martial artists twist their hips too much when they move, and they kink their posture and put themselves into vulnerable po...