Warfox Bagua 錦園八卦掌

As we get deeper into the movements it becomes important to discuss planning. There are roughly 2,500 movements in our system and each one must be practiced a minimum of 10,000 times before you reach an initial understanding. This sounds like an impossible task, but in actuality time can be manipulated to our advantage if we learn how to plan outside of time. This requires a keen understanding of the rhythm and pauses within your own daily schedule. The good news is you actually only need one move to be effective in most self-defense situations. Of course, an internal movement when practiced a thousand times, descends into a deeper level of intuition and quickly becomes 10 movements. Through further research, you find that a single movement is an infinite number of techniques and by learning to change the shape of your body, range and angle of the attack, you can paint a beautiful picture with only one color. In fact, for students who want to really have a deep understanding of Ba...

It's crucial to remember that all of the elements of Bagua not only represent techniques, but they also teach us to stay within the parameters of the fighting strategy. After all, in a real fight, there is no time to select a technique, especially with a style like Bagua that involves literally thousands of different movements and hundreds of strategies. Yet, the movements themselves serve the same purpose as weight lifting for a football player or climber. You don't lift weights to use the exact same motion as you do when performing a bicep curl, yet by doing bicep curls repetitiously, the body changes shape and is able to perform at a higher level. By repeating the movements of each section in Bagua, the body changes shape and gains the understanding of power generation in both the muscles and ligaments so that when it's time to fight, it is able to perform at a higher level of combat. Just as a seasoned boxer amid combat, who no longer thinks about throwing a hook or ...

Each of the eight sections of Bagua are named after elements that follow certain characteristics both for the purpose of documenting information and making it easier for practitioners of the future to comprehend. In a word Heaven is direct, Water flows, the Mountain is immovable, Thunder is startling, Wind is un-containable, Fire is consuming, Earth is deceptive and Lake is depth. Each of the 8 elements consist of 8 techniques, totaling to 64 concepts to deal with possible dangers, be they physical or health related. However these movements are just a framework of what the technique actually means: a physical riddle, designed to teach freedom of movement outside of these patterns. Yet to obtain freedom, without mastering restriction, is to obtain chaos without purpose or control. A baby with the strength of a man would only cause damage to itself and loved ones, especially when having a tantrum. The strength of baby is naturally restricted for reasons of safety and responsibility, as i...

As we move into the next section of movements, it's crucial to remember that the techniques themselves are only patterns of energy designed to illustrate how to disrupt the human body and psyche. They are keys that open possibilities, but they can not be forcefully or unnaturally applied. Think about it like downloading information into your body. When the program is ready, it will happen automatically. If you try to use it mid download, you are going to get server errors. Or you will get served because of your errors. Just as in grappling, you can't do an arm bar anytime you feel like it, but must be skilled enough to place yourself into a position that the possibility more easily arises. After doing a technique 10,000 times, it becomes much easier to use it at the right time, but never underestimate the determination of the human spirit. These are not only the notes of my own personal research that I have gathered through sparring (heavy and light), security and even real c...