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Thank you for visiting our Bagua page, where you will find a huge amount of information regarding this Internal Self Defence/Healing system. 

Baguazhang
To your right is where you'll navigate through all the articles, take your time as there is a lot of information there. To get you started please read on to get a basic understanding of this ancient art.

Bagua means eight diagram palm and is the epitome
of Taoist philosophy based on the I-Jing (The Chinese Book of Changes). Though there is no need to learn and understand the I-Jing in order to learrn Bagua. It's a unique martial art/healing art, with some beautiful twisting and bending movements.
It is possibly the most complete of all the internal arts, covering a greater range of motion through it's movements. Where some some style are limited to a certain way of moving, Bagua moves in just about every way you can think of. 
We twist, spiral, bend, arch and lean in all directions, giving great work to the body. Through the form of Bagua you will stretch and activate every muscle and joint in your body. 

As a Martial Art:
Bagua is fluent and powerful, using mostly palm striking, but also kicks, elbows, knees etc. 

For the most part in Bagua we use evasive movement, trying always to be out of the way of an incoming strike, but if that fails we use strong relaxed structure in the arms or legs to stop that strike from coming through. 
Following the evasion we attack powerful full body strikes, bringing power from the waist, the legs, the frontal core, or a mixture or all together depending on the strike and where you are positioned. 
We learn how to attack to the weakest areas of our opponent (Dim-Mak) Giving us the best chance if the guy is huge. Things like the carotid artery, the trachea, the liver, the solar plexus and the list goes on. 
We also use crashing through power in some cases such as when several smaller people might attack you, being larger than your opponents means it can often be more beneficial to you to attack head on rather than evading.

Baguazhang
Because most of the power is derived from the twisting waist, even if you're not big or strong you can gain as much power as you would ever need, as long as you have the right training.

We use both short explosive strikes (Fa-jing) as well as larger sweeping follow through movements depend on what would work best in any given situation.

The fighting area is trained for self defence and not for competition. 
We train in a series of practice methods with a partner to learn about good movement, balance and timing etc, but most importantly how to stay relaxed under pressure both in mind and body. 
Power and structure is learnt through these training methods, including a lot of bag work, then gradually moving step by step into more free style reaction training and finally into totally free sparing which we train in several different ways to get the best results, with and with out protection equipment. 

As a Healing Art:
It can help to gain your flexibility back, improve your fitness, balance and timing and that's just at a basic level before you've got to the internal level. At a more internal level Bagua is closely related to acupuncture whereby one is constantly twisting the acupuncture meridians to work upon each organ in turn thereby sending life giving Qi or energy to all parts of the body.

It takes more time to get to this higher healing level but to get there your fitness level and flexibility level will be greatly improving all the time, this will in turn help you to gain a much higher level of health. When the internal part starts to work be ready, as your body will be in more harmony than it's ever experienced, and the energy will be in perfect balance.

Bagua can be practiced in many different ways, very slow as a Qigong, where we focus more on the internal movement of Qi than the big physical movements, or you can take the larger frame moves that stretch twist and bend the body in every direction and perform them slowly or fast, or even take those postures further to really focus on stretching of body work, stretching further and dropping deeper into the postures. The form can also be done explosively, either with chosen release points on certain postures, or you can do the whole form in this way. 
The Bagua form gives us a great leg workout, the upper body gets worked in more of a stretching manor, you do of course activate all your upper body muscles, but due to there not being any weight in your hands you will not get strong muscular development from it, just like any empty handed solo form. 
So for our upper body muscular training we have two things we can do, for solo training we can use weapons forms and bag work, then if you have a training partner you can use all your fighting drills to develop a strong upper body. 
You can of course also incorporate body weight training such up push ups and pull ups. 

Then there are of course all the other forms from Bagua, the Linear Fighting Form, the Animal forms, and also weapon forms. 
But I'll leave it there, I think that gives you a nice overview. 





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