Thursday, April 5, 2007

Obstruct and Sweep

I'm going to add this to our basic training as the Tai Chi equivalents of parry 4 and parry 5 in western sabre (high inside and outside). What's nice about this motion is the automatic step and riposte.

The question that is buggis me is if you block left and then step and cut right, you're leaving the opponent's blade behind, right? Why the when you block right and step and cut left is there a high block with the guard hand?

http://www.egreenway.com/taichichuan/sword.htm#Sword63

Wednesday, April 4, 2007

Added links to Tai Chi videos

I didn't know TT Liang had such excellent English!

I was surfing through YouTube and found some decent videos of old Chinese masters doing Tai Chi or Tai Chi sword. They're historically interesting even if there turns out to not be much we can learn from their sword clippings. Check out the right-hand margin for the links.