the rum soaked fist: internal martial arts forum

really agree, oragami_itto, Giles, Steve.

There are old drawings of gymnastic/neigon/marital exercises, where there any such drawings accompanying the Taijiquan classics?

My skills always get so much better in my head the less I spar and fight. LOL.

Never heard of drawings. The Sun and Yang Chengfu books have static images. They seem less useful to me. :shrug:

"He plays the game like a meditation" is a phrase that Ray Hudson used to describe Andres Iniesta (which is so true). Iniesta moves with the grace of a ballerina, as if he embodies what these "classics" say about movement, under pressure from the world's top defenders. He looks totally effortless most of the time, as you might look doing form with no one there. Reading these writings seem to me a reminder of how things should be in their most ideal state. If you truly read this and think "yup that's what I do all the time in form and in sparring", you deserve plaudits. But yeah, reading will be totally useless w/o practice.

Slightly on a tangent, the Fedor book is excellent, with great pictures, and is definitely a how to manual. Definitely is all his style for better or for worse. That whole series is quite excellent.

everything wrote:Never heard of drawings. The Sun and Yang Chengfu books have static images. They seem less useful to me. :shrug:

"He plays the game like a meditation" is a phrase that Ray Hudson used to describe Andres Iniesta (which is so true). Iniesta moves with the grace of a ballerina, as if he embodies what these "classics" say about movement, under pressure from the world's top defenders. He looks totally effortless most of the time, as you might look doing form with no one there. Reading these writings seem to me a reminder of how things should be in their most ideal state. If you truly read this and think "yup that's what I do all the time in form and in sparring", you deserve plaudits. But yeah, reading will be totally useless w/o practice.

Slightly on a tangent, the Fedor book is excellent, with great pictures, and is definitely a how to manual. Definitely is all his style for better or for worse. That whole series is quite excellent.

Yes I just ad this thought that maybe some accompanying drawings might have been lost or newer found from the salt-store classics, maybe the drawing are kept secret only for the initiated to see (now I actually don't know what I'm talking about since I never read the classics,drawings might be totally useless to them) But as I thought drawing seem to been a thing throu out history, early drawings such as the TaoYin for example to texts as WubeiZhi and JixiaoXinshu and there are the murals in the Shaolin temple for example. Even here on RSF when someone theorize on the IMA's a video is often asked for to back up the theory

Tom wrote:

Yeung wrote:

Yeung wrote:打手要言

I am skeptical about the Taijiquan skill of Paul Brennan ....

Point of information: Paul Brennan has trained Chenshi taijiquan for more than 20 years and has also taught it.

Thank you for this information, and maybe this sort of explained some of the difficulties in interpreting the basics in connecting the Chen to the Yang and to the classics.

It's interesting because a lot of you say the info is basic, vs., I interpret the description as representing mastery (such as Iniesta from a different activity). I kinda thought how can we be so far off? But then only a master can do the basics so well under high pressure, that it looks easy. To call something a "classic" probably has to have both these meanings. You can say "that's the basics" and you can say as you get better "whomever can do this well shows mastery". Otherwise we can't call something a classic.