the rum soaked fist: internal martial arts forum

The Kenny Gong style Jiang school I trained in and Ray Hayward's Jiang Bagua train backward circle walking. Ray has a good basic backward circle walking video on his Patreon.

Doc Stier wrote:There is a significant difference between stepping straight backward on a line, as shown in the above videos, and stepping backward on a circle.

True. I've just remembered something an old training partner of mine showed me. He's the German representative of Peter Ralston's Cheng Hsin; this is a technique where you, stepping backwards, lead a forward-moving attacker into a curve going one way, and then once he's following you, after two or three steps, you reverse the direction of the curve as you continue to go backwards. This can really take the attacker off balance and set him up for a strong technique. Done with good timing and distance, this seemed to work well.

This brief video shows Ralston doing the technique (I think). Not as clearly as I trained it with my friend, but it seems to be the same basic backwards circling move.

Just looks like basic Aikido to me

Maybe it is. I know that Peter Ralston cites both aikido and baguazhang as influences, among other things. I don't know enough about either of these arts to say for sure, but the formal technique I described was certainly 'walking backwards in a circle' for 2 or 3 steps. Just throwing it out there...

I only took like a month of Bagua, but we did learn to walk backwards and were immediately shown an application which used it along with the teacup exercises to blend with an incoming attack and pull the attacker's head down as we circled backwards.

Repulse monkey is a fundamental taijiquan form.

Song of Retreat
If our steps follow the changes of our body,
then our technique will be perfect .
We must avoid fullness and emphasize
emptiness so that our opponent lands
on nothing.
To fail to retreat when retreat is called for
is neither wise nor courageous.
A retreat is really an advance if
we can turn it to a counter-attack.

Walking backward along a Ba kua circle is vastly different to repulse monkey
Walking the circle in Ba kua is just like circling the hands in tai chi
It is Wu chi
Emptiness
The changes are place where it manifests
I can’t see how the changes manifest in the backward circle
The way people talk about it here is like it is some fairytale
Is there anyone here who can explain its purpose or if they really trained it

So what I'm referring to, for example, is right hand at dantien, left throat height away from the body.
If I'm remembering correctly you're turning away from the center as you step back, the idea being you're taking them around a much bigger circle that you are at the center of with their right wrist in your right hand and your left hand on their neck.

Maybe kind of like doing roll back with a back side crossover in that 9 palace pattern? But then you keep going on the circle to make it difficult to recover.

I need a demo partner. We really should be trading more demos on this platform.

John Wang has demonstrated the exact same technique here