My journey into trigram palms started with baguazhang (eight trigram palms) lessons with Zhang Jie of Beijing, China. He started me out with something called warmups, and then moved onto 24 palms of eight animals.
It took me quite a while to learn the applications for the forms. He would show me some applications to the forms, but it wasn't until I started applying my older martial arts knowledge, and doing a lot of research into applications, that I started to understand the applications to the forms.
After a while, I was hooked on studying baguazhang! I would train daily, in addition to my daily workouts. I trained for five years, and then got really tired! I also tried to do some taijiquan, but dropped it because it took too long to practice in addition to my baguazhang practice.
IMHO baguazhang is one of the most effective martial arts around. The difference between it and other martial arts is that it teaches stand up fighting, and stand up grappling, in a way other martial arts don't teach.
After 5 years of practice, Zhang Jie taught me a LOT of applications of baguazhang. He answered a lot of my questions about practice. IMHO he is one of the best teachers around for martial arts, but it takes a lot of patience to learn the fundamentals before getting to the applications, and the proper martial attitude (wude).
No comments:
Post a Comment