Village Kung Fu Martial Arts Academy

Save the date make the plan!

Timeline Photos

We are very excited to have Dr. Sifu Chang flying in all the way from Taiwan. It's more than worth a trip for the seminar!
Please pass along, Thank You! Colin Barker David Cheng Matthew Staley Matthew Cohn Yu-Kai Chang

Tung Ying Chieh Demonstrates Yang Tai Chi Chuan

Yu-Kai Chang, Colin Barker, Matthew Staley, Harold Scott Rogers,

taichivideos.org Tung Ying Chieh performs a section of the traditional Yang Tai Chi Chuan long form. This footage was filmed in 1950 in Malaysia on one of his many visits.

[10/09/14]   Tiger Dragon Crane Leopard Snake Monkey Eagle Mantis Lion Bear...what's your favorite Kung fu animal?

The Best Damn Push-Ups Article, Period!

t-nation.com Think you know all there is to know about push-ups? Ha! We thought so too...until we read this.

Functional Core and Total Body Exercises – Mastering the Firecracker

One of my favorite workouts. Colin Barker Harold Scott Rogers Eric Marks Dave Miller Matthew Staley Matt Berry

functionalpatterns.com Here is maybe the most advanced sagittal plane core and total body exercise exercise in the Functional Patterns training arsenal. I will remind that if you

Find Your Fight

This is awesome!!!

t-nation.com What are you fighting for? Why do you do this? Answer that question and all this training and diet stuff will get easier and more rewarding.

An EZ Guide to Sprinting

t-nation.com Sprinting — for awesome quads AND a lean body — is one of those activities we can all do, but few of us do it right.

Just saying this stuff must be good, Yang style for life!

Doug Marcaida

I would like to welcome and introduce you to the writings of a man I will fondly call "Maestro", a worldly and learned retired journalist. I have found his ideas thought provoking and I believe they should be put in writing and share in our community in Facebook

The hour of the Knife
I have often wondered why the ever growing interest in knives, especially the so called tactical knives, an interest which, in all frankness, I share. Now, if you go by the strict meaning, the dictionary definition of the word “tactical”, it has no sense when applied to a knife. A knife, of course, can be used tactically, but as an object, it can never be “tactical”. I guess, then, that what people mean when they call a knife tactical is a knife that is good or appropriate for fighting, a knife mainly designed for attack or defense, be it against or from an animal or human being.
What strikes me as curious is that using a knife to stab or slash a living being is anything but easy. In his book On Killing, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman affirms that only a minor, almost infinitesimal percentage of deaths in combat are caused by knives, the repugnance of a person to thrusting a bladed weapon into another person being almost as great as the fear of this latter person to be stabbed. Col. Grossman statistics come from a wide range of battlefields at diverse times, and take into account the operations of soldiers specifically trained to kill with knives. They also point to the fact that there is less psychological resistance to slashing than to thrusting or stabbing.
Why, then, the widespread interest in the acquisition of knives made principally, when not exclusively, with the purpose of stabbing or slashing a human being? Small companies that started a few decades ago producing fighting knives are today worldwide known corporations. Spyderco, Cold Steel, CRTK, Böker, Eickhorn, Fox…Some of them even produce knives designed by specialists in the field of knife fighting: Spyderco produces the Jojimbo, designed by Michael Jannich, the P’kal, designed by ShivWorks of SouthNarc fame; CRTK, those by James Williams; Fox, those by Dean Rostohar and Borut Kincl, and, hopefully soon, the DART by my teacher Douglas Marcaida.
In part, this popularity is due to technological innovation in the field of knife making. The introduction of the liner-lock and of the frame-lock, plus the addition of the pocket clip, the use of lighter materials like titanium, G-10, and carbon fiber has made it much easier to carry a relatively large knife in a pocket and to deploy it swiftly. Yet, Randall Made Knives were taken to war in Europe, the Pacific, Korea, Vietnam, and the waiting period—today at five and a half years—to get one is usually so long that we have to thank this waiting period for having driven Robert W. Loveless into knife making. True, Randall makes all sort of knives but perhaps his better known model is the No.1 fighting knife.
Names like Bob Terzuola, Mick Strider, Duane Dwyer, Anthony Marfione, Greg Medford, Allen Elishewitz, Warren Thomas and others are today household names. Their products vanish from the Internet stores specializing in knife selling at the top speed allowed by modern technology, even though their prices vary from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand. Many of these knife makers were once soldiers, are or have been practitioners of one or other of the martial arts, and their first customers were front line soldiers. Today, anyone can buy a “tactical” folding knife for prices varying from a few dollars to a few thousand, with blades copied and improved from every part of the world, from the Indian Sub-continent, and the jungles of South-East Asia to Renaissance Spain, Italy, and France… and then some. The size of these blades varies to four inches and more, as in Strider’s SMF: As deadly the one as the other, and as totally legal to carry the one or the other, when not the one and the other, in most of the world. (Here we have another possible reason for their popularity: while firearms are severely restricted in most places, most places allow for the carrying of one or another type of knife).
This proliferation of fighting knives—both folding and fixed—has been accompanied by an equal proliferation of teachers, schools, books, and videos devoted to the art of defending oneself with a knife. They are not all of equal quality but they have all something to teach. What’s interesting about them is that they are all tied to a certain extend by a single string, the discovery and gradual dissemination of the Filipino Martial Arts. These, as is now well known, are exclusively based on the use of edged weapons, and their effectiveness has been so well attested in practice that the armed forces of the greatest powers on earth employ them or a variation thereof to train their most elite soldiers.
And yet the question remains: who would carry a knife for self-defense? What dangers lurk out there that would make a person keep close to his body such a deadly instrument while at the same time believing that he or she would be able to thrust it into the eye, the throat or the kidney of an assailant?
One obvious answer is the fear of criminality. Yet, criminality is not a homogeneous factor. While some parts of Chicago are notoriously dangerous, others have a zero rate of violent crime. The number of homicides has been steadily falling in the US in the course of these last years. The NRA argues—in my opinion correctly—that this fall is due in part to the deterrent factor of a widely armed civilian population. Can it be that knives are starting to play the same role? What is, however, evident to me is that people who carry knives and train to use them are rarely afraid to be stopped in the street and asked for their wallet. They are not afraid of having their property snatch from their hands, they are afraid of something much graver: being raped, senselessly, gratuitously, and savagely beaten, blinded, maimed or killed. In the documentary Poster Girl, a woman who had been raped while serving in the US Coast Guard pulls a big folding knife from her purse and says: This will never aIn an essay in his YouTube channel, We All Juggle Knives, on the use of the reverse or ice pick grip of knife fighting—the same elementary grip advocated by SouthNarc ( who studied under Doug Marcaida)the author states that in order to defend yourself in this manner you need “a vicious will to survive”. In my opinion, this apparently simple phrase constitutes the key to the mystery. Common, decent, law abiding people are building up in themselves, mostly against their natural tendencies, “a vicious will to survive” to counter a vicious will to destroy.
Read the papers, watch the news on television, listen to them in the radio, it is not the occasional holdup that frightens us; it is the suddenness and gratuitousness in which an apparently normal individual turns into a savage beast. A minor traffic accident, a misinterpreted word, the color of one’s skin…
Let’s face it, in more senses than one we are living ever closer to Thomas Hobbes state of nature. Not a state of nature as we know never truly existed even among our animal forefathers but the theoretical construct born of the experience of the English Civil War of the 17th Century, in which the passions reign supreme and each man was a potential or actual enemy to every other man that thought, dressed, spoke or behaved differently from him. Let’s not exaggerate, however, not even in the slums of Caracas, the Corridor between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, the alleyways of Kabul or Karachi is life today totally “solitary, nasty, brutish, and short”. But this incomprehensible jungle made of poverty, ignorance, vice, resentment, bad genes, and only God knows what else, lives in the heart of many. What better instrument, then, to place between yourself and them than a piece of sharpened, pointed metal that can be carried inconspicuously, that has accompanied, help, and protected men from their very beginning, that can be swiftly and silently deployed in almost any circumstance, and can serve as a multiple, life saving tool. It is a remedy, sometimes a desperate remedy for occasionally desperate times.

Maestro

[07/06/14]   Do Kung fu more, live better.

Yang Zhenji Performs Yang Tai Chi Saber

Hey Sifu Yu-Kai Chang is this the same as our schools?

taichivideos.org Yang Zhenji (1921-2007) performs the Saber Form of the traditional Tai Chi Chuan of the Yang Family. Yang Zhenji, the 2nd son of the famous Yang Cheng Fu, was a 4th generation master of Tai Chi Chuan of the Yang Family. He began his training in Tai Chi early at the age of 6 years old from his...

This will be a great fight. Check out his stance! Colin Barker Matthew Staley Eric Marks Dave Miller

Had to get into my Kung Fu stance to represent! Cung Le vs Michael Bisping #venetianmacao #ufc #ufcmacao #ufcchina tickets on sale now. #TheStormsComing

Village Kung Fu Martial Arts Academy's cover photo

How to Punch Harder with UFC Fighter Jeremy Stephens part 2

This is really great stuff on striking and maintaining a stable base. Really important for what we do. Colin Barker, Eric Marks, Harold Scott Rogers, Matthew Staley, Yu-Kai Chang

functionalpatterns.com For this weeks video we cover how to hit harder via the implementation of thoric spine rotation.

[05/22/14]   Countdown continues, little more than two weeks until Sifu Yu Kai Chang arrives!!!

T Nation | Reflexive Strength and Spider-Man

We have to try this tonight!!! Colin Barker Harold Scott Rogers Dave Miller Eric Marks Matthew Staley

t-nation.com There's a simple movement you can do literally anywhere that'll improve your strength, increase conditioning, accelerate fat loss, and even serve as a valuable corrective exercise.

[05/16/14]   Internal Friday! all Yang Tai Chi and Gao Bagua makes one a strong person, getting ready for Shaolin saturday!!

MOST REALISTIC FIGHT SCENE EVER !

http://youtu.be/dKzXGTrfX-Y

Start your training today!!

youtu.be Funny as hell.

[05/10/14]   "If you learn something new, you are then required to make mistakes in order to fully understand what you have learned"

Good hand wrapping video for the 180" hand wraps.

TECHNIQUE VIDEO: http://youtu.be/Nf6Qb3EWr-0

Hand wrapping tutorial with Kro Oh.

If you've ever wondered how to wrap your hands correctly, check out our newest technique video!

Share this with your friends!

VIDEO: http://youtu.be/Nf6Qb3EWr-0