Warm-Up

From my two trial classes that I had attended, I thought it was interesting that the teacher asked the students to do the normal stretching and loosening up routines commonly found in all martial arts, and then had the students go through the 8 Pieces of Brocade for warm-up, prior to starting the training session.

I noticed that when performing the 8 Pieces of Brocade, despite not fully understanding the meaning or significance of what I was doing at the time, that I developed a true sense of warmth and a gentle perspiration that surprised me, from doing it. Of course, lol, at the time the instruction of how to do it, was sadly lacking in explanation or guidance.

I have decided that this is an important place for me to begin my focus with. Chi gung certainly can't hurt one's training development, and there is quite a bit of information out there on this particular sequence and variations. I have the DVD by Dr. Yang, Jwing-Ming, and in future references on my blog, I will be presenting my findings primarily from his work.

The picture above I 'borrowed' from a tai chi group in Berkeley. My thanks for using the pic on my blog.

As I write more over the next few days, this will help me to better remember the sequence and some of the highlights of the 8 pieces of Brocade. I hope this will help any readers that may come across my blog and choose to follow along. Don't worry, I promise that we'll get to the meat of Baguazhang training soon, but as this is my personal path, I'm sharing my points of development and search and learning method.