Met up with Kraig Stephens of Ching Yi Kung Fu

Discussion on the three big Chinese internals, Yiquan, Bajiquan, Piguazhang and other similar styles.

Met up with Kraig Stephens of Ching Yi Kung Fu

Postby greytowhite on Mon May 27, 2019 6:39 am

Saturday I had the privilege of meeting up with Kraig Stephens for a couple of hours. He was kind enough to share a number of anecdotes of his teacher, Jerry Alan Johnson, and Robert W. Smith. Interesting listening for sure. He shared with me 8 postures from their Xiantian Bagua. It's basically Jiang Rong Qiao's bagua reformulated to fit Dr. Wong's understanding of the 64 trigrams. There are 8 basic postures for each palm change that one could say were the Animals for basic shape turning too. Only two of the postures weren't taken directly from the Jiang form but feel as if they belong. More than anything I appreciate his help with circle walking.

Now that I'm pretty much back to "normal" after the stroke I'm working on being symmetrical as the left side is still a shorter stride and has a different range of motion. He helped me with my stepping a bit to focus on placing the whole foot flat. He also gave me some seated and standing exercises to help increase my range of motion. Kraig was really nice and spoke about some of the people that taught him in China. I would recommend anyone look Kraig up. I'm a disabled researcher and haven't fought much since my early 20s so there's very little martial in our session. There were some times where we went through some cooperative strike scenarios for Kraig to demonstrate the purpose of some of it. In those moments where he wanted to demonstrate I could feel pain where his fingertips contacted me but nowhere else - I haven't encountered that one before.
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Re: Met up with Kraig Stephens of Ching Yi Kung Fu

Postby Greg J on Sat Jun 01, 2019 8:48 pm

It sounds like an interesting evening for sure! I wish you well in your recovery, and your training.

Take care,
Greg
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