bagua from a dvd

[Ramon25]

please point out what advice ABOUT BAGUA i have given, Becuase I just dont see it?

thanks

[Ramon25]

I find it ridiculous how much hype people give to the IMA, that they are some kind of highly spiritual near magical supernatural skills that can only be cultivated in a certain way and if you do them wrong you will be doomed to failure and rejection for the next 10,000 lifetimes.

 

Seriously.

 

Taiji came from a highly experienced martial artist who began to study the human body, and how the body can move naturally and in the most efficient way possible to defeat someone without injuring your own body or doing techniques which will deteriorate your body.

 

The origins of bagua are quite mysterious, but as a daoist internal art, it's safe to say that many techniques in bagua were derived from stillness, listening to the body, observing how the body can move, observing where energy flows most naturally, and moving in such as way as to harness the way the body naturally moves to an effective fighting system.

 

So, what does this mean? It means that if you shut down your rational mind with all the doubts, get rid of all your egotistical preconceived notion about what a badass you are and how you can learn it all on your own, get rid of the preconceived notions of how badass IMA are and how impossible they are to learn, you relax, stick with the basics, listen to your body, and experiment enough, you WILL get it.

 

That said, I highly recommend "Opening the Energy Gates of Your Body" by B.K. Frantzis, as well as "Relaxing Into Your Being" and "The Great Stillness" (The Great Stillness teaches a basic circle walking routine, and Relaxing into your being gives you the foundation for that). All of the books introduce you to Daoist principles which are present in pretty much all the internal martial arts- if you understand those methods, then when you go to learn bagua from a DVD you won't just be learning the technique, and you can incorporate some background knowledge.

 

Learn the basics, and read read read read read. Read everything. There is so much material on the internal martial arts, both for free on the internet and in book form. With a lot of reading and even more amounts of practice, you can get it done.

 

If you are interested in yin style baguazhang, He Jinbao, a lineage holder, has a good website here with excellent articles on how one progresses in the training of yin style bagua here: http://www.yinstylebaguazhang.com/

 

They have a youtube page here: http://www.youtube.com/user/YSBinternational

 

You can buy a DVD set of different animal forms here: http://traditionalstudies.org/Store/YSB_8_Animals.html

 

He Jinbao recommends you start with the Lion system as the base, as that's easier to learn because it is the most overtly physical.

 

 

Don't know about any other bagua or IMA products, but those are the ones I'd recommend, and you can do it!

 

 

Hey sloppy zhang, finally had some time to check out those dvd's. That guy (with the animal forms) is a lineage holder and those dvd's are regarded by alot of sources as the clearest internal martial art dvd system out there. Its funny the person he had trained to carry on the art died and so because of that he created the dvd's so that the art could carry on. Great reccomendation, I will use these thanks! So sloppy have you studied with these dvd's? and if so have you learned well?

Edited April 25, 2010 by Ramon25

[Jesse]

Hey sloppy zhang, finally had some time to check out those dvd's. That guy (with the animal forms) is a lineage holder and those dvd's are regarded by alot of sources as the clearest internal martial art dvd system out there. Its funny the person he had trained to carry on the art died and so because of that he created the dvd's so that the art could carry on. Great reccomendation, I will use these thanks! So sloppy have you studied with these dvd's? and if so have you learned well?

 

you could aso check out BK Frantzis online bagua course when it comes out this spring

 

http://www.baguamastery.com/

[Sloppy Zhang]

Well far from that. It's all about correct body mechanics and a video or a book won't show you that. Neither will they give you Qi transmission if you happen to learn from a high level teacher. Period.

 

The best way to learn body mechanics if you don't have a teacher is to put it into practice-

 

Go down to a MMA gym, BJJ school, boxing school, whatever, or find friends that train in various arts, and spar them. MMA gyms and pretty much any other schools have people sparring from near the very beginning, so if you say you want to test out some stuff I am sure they will accommodate you.

 

And in the beginning as you get stuff down you will lose. A lot. You will fail. A lot. And you know the quickest way for your body to figure out what it needs to do to prevent getting hit in the face? That's right, it needs to get hit in the face.

 

Yes, it's easy to just fall off and decide to just learn boxing, especially when faced with a boxer who keeps beating you. But if you go back to your material, keep practicing, stick with the basics, and play around with the techniques a little bit, it WILL happen. Slowly, yes, and with a lot of humiliation along the way. But that's good for the ego, right? Don't want to get too full of yourself, right? Plus, you will never be without a sparring partner because they will always think they can beat you, inflating their egos, when really, you are the one getting the benefit

 

But Ramon was pretty clear that he wasn't interested in martial application so much as health, so I left that bit out. But if you are interested in functional IMA without a teacher, that is how you do it. You have to swallow your pride and be willing to take a beating. But how is that any different from learning from an IMA master?

 

Hey sloppy zhang, finally had some time to check out those dvd's. That guy (with the animal forms) is a lineage holder and those dvd's are regarded by alot of sources as the clearest internal martial art dvd system out there. Its funny the person he had trained to carry on the art died and so because of that he created the dvd's so that the art could carry on. Great reccomendation, I will use these thanks! So sloppy have you studied with these dvd's? and if so have you learned well?

 

I haven't studied from the DVD's, yin style bagua isn't something I'm interested in studying in at the moment, but I have had a lot of discussions with the two users I linked to previously about baguazhang, they both said the DVD's were excellent, very specific, and on top of the forms gave lots of conditioning exercises and techniques to be practiced on their own (for example, individual strikes, that are incorporated in the forms later on.)

 

Here's a copy of a message I got from artemus18 about the structure of the DVD's and the system:

 

Here is how the lion system works.

 

Standing practice - 9 standing postures, 1 Lion posture + 8 attacking method posture ( Sweeping, Smashing, Chopping, Blocking, Hooking, Shocking, Seizing, and Grasping ). Standing practice is designed to develop strength of each type of attacking method. These are not like weight training. When you practice these standing postures, your body will feels connected, expand, flexible and strong. These make you strong but not rigid ( these are the opposite of weight training that make u bulk up but you become slow and rigid). Bad part about this is that ... it will be painful...( you will know what I'm talking about when u try it).

 

Striking practice - These are 8 attacking methods in detail. Each attacking method can be executed in 3 different ways. Making it 24 ways(8x3) of striking. Each of these strike are then practice while with advancing , retreating, and changing direction (1 step, 2 steps, 3 steps striking drills).

 

Form practice - these are like combo in boxing (ie. jab jab then hook) , it strings together different strikes. Each strike has 7 different forms, making it 63 forms(8x7) per animal. I'm not going to go into too much detail as it gets very complicated...

 

About the DVDs. disk1,2 cover standing, striking, and walking circle. Disk 3-10 covers form practices..

[Ramon25]

Thanks so much jesse and sloppy. I am trully grateful for the responses, without your help I would not have found these great sources of info, So Again thank you very much.

 

So sloppy have you studied any IMA?

[Sloppy Zhang]

Thanks so much jesse and sloppy. I am trully grateful for the responses, without your help I would not have found these great sources of info, So Again thank you very much.

 

So sloppy have you studied any IMA?

 

Under a teacher? No.

 

But Chen style taiji really interested me, so I got as many Chen style resources as I could find, books, videos, etc on the form, the application, the standing posture training- then got to work.

 

I'd stand in the standing posture and try to have my friends push me over, and keep examining my form and compare it to the masters (people like Chen Xiaowang, for example) until I started making progress. Not perfect, but much harder to push over.

 

I routinely wrestle my friends who do either wrestling or Brazilian Jujutsu, and put the concepts into practice. I lose a lot at the beginning, but once you get the feel for it, how to listen to an opponent, you start to make a lot of progress. It's a pretty steep learning curve and you encounter a lot of failure at the beginning, but once everything clicks and you see the interconnectedness of everything, you make a lot of progress until the next plateau.

 

And I have a big karate background, and a lot of the people who I trained in karate with were just brawlers- they'd run up to you and start punching the crap out of you, so I always keep fighters like that in mind during my training too.

 

Is it perfect? Not really. But I think it is much closer to how internal martial arts were originally developed. Books like those written by B.K. Frantzis really helped because they show the principles that are always in play. A lot of books on the internal arts say stuff like, "full, relaxed body movement", but what does that mean? B.K. Frantzis goes into detail not only on exactly what that means, but how to do it.

 

The rest is just practice, failure, practice, failure, failure, practice, practice, success, failure, practice, practice, failure, practice, success, practice, success, failure, failure, practice, and more and more of that.

 

Whenever you have a problem, ALWAYS go back to basics.

[Sloppy Zhang]

Sloppy, when you say it requires more work, how productive is this additional work?

 

It's as productive as you make it.

 

When learning on your own, you get exactly what you put in. If you only put in a little work, you only get a little results.

 

If you think of it 24/7 for years, then you will get that much returned to you. But it has to be quality.

 

How can one utilize corrections effectively?

 

Not quite sure exactly what you mean, but you utilize corrections in the situations in which you need to use them.

 

For martial applications, that means you use them in a fight.

 

For spiritual/lifestyle applications, you use them in your day to day life.

 

And how will one know?

 

In a fight, you will know you fail when you get punched in the face, or choked out, or submitted.

 

In a spiritual/lifestyle/health sense, you will know by how much there has been a change, positive or negative, in your life.

 

Some of these things require time to see their efforts, some of them do not.

 

When training with a teacher, you know you are doing it wrong because your teacher says, "you will lose in a fight if you do it that way." And you're like, "yeah yeah yeah, whatever". Then you keep doing your forms practice, or your cooperative two man routine. Or maybe you keep doing your light contact sparring. Maybe your teacher is strict and will hit you on the back of the head.

 

Yeah, well, big deal.

 

But when you are on the ring or on the mat with someone who wants to PUT YOU DOWN, they aren't trying to help you, they aren't trying to make you better, they are trying to knock you the fuck out, well, you are going to learn pretty damn quick. It's a survival thing. Your body starts learning what works and what doesn't, then hard wires it into the system.

 

Yeah, it's hard to practice an internal art in a high stress situation because your body has a natural tendency to, well, tense up. But that's part of the training, and that's why again I say training on your own is harder: you have to be able to step outside of yourself in a highly tense situation, look at yourself as a third party would, and say, "you're doing it wrong, change, I know it goes against what every cell in your body is screaming right now, but you gotta relax/change your structure/whatever you need to do at the time".

 

And the ability to do that extends far, far beyond martial applications.

 

Six months with a teacher making corrections to a form and you going, "okay, I hear you, and I trust that this will work in real life eventually" is absolute peanuts compared to six minutes in a ring or on the mat telling YOURSELF, "if I keep doing it wrong I am going to get knocked out or choked out."

 

As ShaktiMama said, having a friend who also practices is enormously helpful. (I know this, I've said it before. )

 

Yeah, friends are great, but sometimes you gotta go it alone.

Edited April 30, 2010 by Sloppy Zhang