Formosa Fitness

How about a few martial arts posts? We haven't done those in a while.

Many people have weapons forms but nothing else. How to put meat into your weapons practice?

The chances of you finding someone with usage knowledge is slim to none. Here in Taiwan, I've found only a few people that were really knowledgable about weapons usage. I was happy to get what I got from one or two of them.

Fortunately, Dr. Yang Jwing-ming has done all of us a great service by putting out three DVDs based on application and weapon drills to fill out your weapons knowledge.

You can get all of these DVDs here:

http://www.ymaa.com/publishing/dvd/weapons-collection

What I liked about them is that Yang gives you a ton of stuff that is useful no matter what style you do. Most people don't know this, but CMA weapons knowledge all has a common basis. The individualization that you see in weapons today is a relatively recent thing -- especially since weapons fell out of actual use. Weapons are now taught as vehicles to further knowledge of the style rather than for usage. But the basic use of the common weapons was fairly standard in the old days and Dr. Yang was smart to stick to that in these DVDs. So what you get is useful across the wide spectrum of Chinese styles.

What surprised me though was the amount of material he gives for the price. YMAA products were pretty good in the past, but these days their DVDs are running into hours long presentations giving you a ton of value for the money. For example, I owned the old YMAA taiji push hands tapes back in the day and thought they were very good. I looked at their re-release set this morning and they've reshot the footage, making it into a 6+ hour DVD set. You can't beat that.

So if you're looking for great fundamental weapons knowledge to add to your practice, start here. Train hard.