One of the martial arts that I studied for 5 years is called Baguazhang. Most of the applications of baguazhang are very secret for some reason. I asked my teacher, Zhang Jie, the reason for this, and he said it was about the character of the student. He didn't want people to learn applications that would go out and start trouble and get in a lot of fights.
After studying from him for over 4 years, he taught me a ton of applications of baguazhang. I also researched a lot of applications of other martial arts, trying to figure out the applications of the baguazhang forms. It was when I started doing this, that I started to realize that a lot of martial arts have a lot of the applications in common. But every martial art tends to do the applications / techniques a bit differently.
For example, a lot of martial arts have a straight punch, like karate, to the face or to the body. http://www.ehow.com/how_12863_perform-straight-punch.html In baguazhang, they use a variety of punches, but the main one is a vertical punch, like Isshinryu karate. http://okinawa-te.info/Images/PatDolan.jpg. Of course, it is used very much like other martial arts. Baguazhang has a 'pao chui' or cannon punch, with a vertical fist that is very similar to moves in xingyi and tai chi.
Baguazhang is different, however, in that a lot of the movements are to get around the opponent, rather than deal with the opponent directly. In this case, it is a lot like Aikido or Aiki-jitsu. Sometimes I wonder if they both baguazhang or Aikido came from a common ancestor martial art from China or elsewhere. There are stories about the sensei of Aikido studying in China, but I don't know if this is the case.
Sunday, May 29, 2011
Martial Techniques
Welcome to Martial Techniques. This is a blog to talk about martial arts, and especially different martial arts techniques and applications.
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