Arts, Crafts And Entertainment

Are your ready for some action?

Among all the remarkable action/martial arts movie stars over the last 20 years or so, several of them truly stand out such as Jackie Chan, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Chuck Norris, probably Jean-Claude Van Damme.(Maybe you have your own favorites that haven't been mentioned here. Let me know by sending in your comments.)

There are movie performers most people remember and who are quite frankly household names.

One such martial artist and movie performer I am always impressed with is Li Lianjie.

Read more...

I consider myself fortunate to have also studied the Chinese martial art of Wing Chun Kung Fu (or in Cantonese also known as Gung Fu).

Coming from a Shotokan karate training background I will admit that studying Wing Chun was a real change of pace, if you know what I mean.

But after having read about some other famous practitioners such as Ip Man, Bruce Lee, Ip Chun, Leung Ting, Emin Boztepe, I just had to give it my best shot.

I studied under Sifu Francis Fong, one of the finest kung fu instructors in the U.S.

Read more...

The Benefits of Tai Chi and Internal Martial Arts for Self-defense: Part 1 of 2

Internal Martial arts such as Tai Chi, or Ba Gua can be extremely effective for self defense if trained correctly. There are a few strategic principles in Chinese internal Martial Arts that can provide a tactical advantage in melee combat. I will outline them in the following sections: Body Alignment and Changing, Friction and Sensitivity, Timing, Initiative (these last two I will explain in part two of this article). You will notice there is no magic to any of this – it is all science. For more information on tai chi, self-defence and kung fu please visit Martial Arts London Ontario (MALO).

Body Alignment / Posture and Body Changing

Read more...

The meaning of aikido is old but new, simple yet profound. Aikido is for realizing that fascinating fact. The inner world has nothing to do with the mental skills of the conscious sort that we use in the scientific study of the cosmos. That's a world we already know quite a lot about. It's the one we enter while reading a book like this.

The inner world is the world of our intuitions, for example. It's a world we tend to know much less about, though, like the intellectual conscious world, it's a world of thinking too. The thinking done by this part of the mind is fuller and richer and more encompassing than the thinking done by the intellect. And the "knowing" it provides is a knowing without doubts or questions.

Aikido's caring gestures open both the heart and the mind. They lead quite naturally, without force or fuss, to deeper levels of awareness. Aikido is one way, in other words, to develop better intuition. It is one way to access our most comprehensive capacities for understanding, and like those capacities, it is both mysterious and fascinating. It has a magic all of its own.

Read more...