A Great Internal Strength Workshop in East Lansing, Michigan
I met a wonderful group of people in East Lansing, Michigan yesterday. Sifu Doug Lawrence sponsored me for an Internal Strength workshop. For six hours, we drilled on what I've identified as six key skills for the internal arts -- the ground path, peng jin, whole-body movement, silk-reeling, dan t'ien rotation and opening/closing the kua.
Sifu Lawrence teaches Yang tai chi, Hsing-I and Bagua. He knows what he's doing. I was really happy to meet an instructor like Doug -- open-minded, constantly researching, trying to get better and searching for good information. I could tell within a few minutes that he is an outstanding teacher.
We started with standing stake and I corrected some posture issues. From there, we worked on the ground path, peng jin, and then silk-reeling exercises. All of the exercises we did can be found on my Internal Strength and Silk-Reeling DVDs.
The foundation of internal strength is the ground path and peng jin. Chen Xiaowang likes to describe this in autom...
Workshop Training in Davenport
We had a great turnout of around 14 people at our two-day training workshop in Davenport, Iowa. It was great to see everyone and we spent about 5 hours training on Day One. We worked body mechanics, Hsing-I fist postures, a couple of Chen tai chi movements with a focus on body mechanics, and we finished shooting the next DVD on the fighting applications of the Five Fist Postures. Not pictured here is Chad Steinke.
The workshop started with standing and corrections on posture. We then took Buddha's Warrior and each person demonstrated it in front of the group and received feedback. Everyone seemed to learn by seeing other people move and seeing the corrections they received. We also worked Single Whip, focusing on whole-body movement and silk-reeling.
This workshop was intended to focus on fundamentals because when you learn the principles and you can apply them to one movement, you can then apply them to all movements. Often, we try to learn a lot of forms before we're able to ...
Author - Instructor
Ken Gullette
I have practiced martial arts since 1973 and began studying the internal arts in 1987. My goal is to cut years off your development time by coaching you in the real skills for high-quality Tai Chi, Xingyi, Bagua. To see more about my bio, click the "About Ken" link on the menu at the top of this page.
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