Monday, May 10, 2010

Mike Garafolo's Xingyi Resource Page



I was browsing through Mike Garafolo's Blog "Cloud Hands: Mind/Body Movement Arts" earlier today.
Mike has collected hundreds and hundreds of resource links for various Chinese Internal Martial Arts. While there is generally tons of information on Tai Chi Chuan (so many people practice it) it's harder to find stuff on Bagua and good stuff on Xingyi (Hsing-i) is really sparse.
The Tai Chi stuff is obvious. But I wonder about Bagua. There seems to be more stuff available on Bagua, beginning to rival Tai Chi. It must be the mysterious ways of Bagua, the spiraling animal forms and grappling applications. But Bagua is undoubtedly much harder to learn and apply in combat.
That leaves poor Xingyi, the red-headed stepchild of Chinese Internal Arts in third place for information distribution. Xingyi is hands-down the easiest art to apply for the time spent training. It is the only CIMA to have actually been taught to be used on the battlefield. This is why I am so amazed that there is so little published in English about the art.
Fortunately Mike Garafolo has spent a great deal of time collecting links to Xingyi schools, books, video's and links to articles. I intend to review it thoroughly.

The link for the "Cloud Hands" Blog is HERE

And here's the link for the Xingyi resource page

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