Xue Sheng
All weight is underside
Assuming this knee ever recovers, when all is said and done, I may be a Sun Taijiquan/Northern Wu Taijiquan guy. I tend to get tired of Yang from time to time and even though I have not done much for over 6 months now, I am still not thrilled about returning to it.
I am slowly coming back working on Sun style, which by the way has considerably more obvious applications based on the individual postures with surprising similarities to JKD and not so surprising similarities to Xingyiquan. And I have always been drawn to Wu style, I later found out it was Northern Wu. When I first started Taijiquan, with my first shifu, I was doing Yang, then some Chen, then my Shifu taught us a Wu competition form. I eventually had to stop doing it because I could not separate it from Chen or Yang. I'd start Yang and somewhere the postures switched to Wu and the same happened with Chen as well. Never had that problem with Yang crossing over to Chen or Chen to Yang.
I seriously doubt I could do any Northern Wu at the moment. Tried some of my Traditional Yang last night and I got only as far as 'cross hands' after the first 'Apparent Closing', then my knee said..."you're done", and it was wrapped in an Ace bandage at the time too.
However I will say this, I do tend to agree with my Yang Shifu (second shifu) that Wu is not exactly taijiquan. It tends to not follow the 10 essentials form Yang Chengfu all that closely. There is a story my Shifu told about Wu; the Wu family was Manchu and the Yang family was Han. So when Yang Luchan (or possibly Yang Banhou) taught the Wu family, they only taught the defensive moves since they did not want to teach a conqueror (aka enemy) anything they could use against them...and telling an imperial guard no might not have been a healthy thing to do at that time (Qing Dynasty).Therefore my Yang Shifu does not think Wu is any good at offense, but very good at defense.
However he forgets one thing, the Wu family, at that time, were imperial guards, they already knew how to fight rather well and could very easily attack, possibly not with Taijiquan, but they knew how to attack. My thinking, is, since this is the case, it could be why Wu taijiquan does not follow the 10 essentials all that closely and also why I tend to think of it as not quite taijiquan.
But, regardless, what I end up doing is all speculation and highly dependant on this knee finally working as I was told it would.
I am slowly coming back working on Sun style, which by the way has considerably more obvious applications based on the individual postures with surprising similarities to JKD and not so surprising similarities to Xingyiquan. And I have always been drawn to Wu style, I later found out it was Northern Wu. When I first started Taijiquan, with my first shifu, I was doing Yang, then some Chen, then my Shifu taught us a Wu competition form. I eventually had to stop doing it because I could not separate it from Chen or Yang. I'd start Yang and somewhere the postures switched to Wu and the same happened with Chen as well. Never had that problem with Yang crossing over to Chen or Chen to Yang.
I seriously doubt I could do any Northern Wu at the moment. Tried some of my Traditional Yang last night and I got only as far as 'cross hands' after the first 'Apparent Closing', then my knee said..."you're done", and it was wrapped in an Ace bandage at the time too.
However I will say this, I do tend to agree with my Yang Shifu (second shifu) that Wu is not exactly taijiquan. It tends to not follow the 10 essentials form Yang Chengfu all that closely. There is a story my Shifu told about Wu; the Wu family was Manchu and the Yang family was Han. So when Yang Luchan (or possibly Yang Banhou) taught the Wu family, they only taught the defensive moves since they did not want to teach a conqueror (aka enemy) anything they could use against them...and telling an imperial guard no might not have been a healthy thing to do at that time (Qing Dynasty).Therefore my Yang Shifu does not think Wu is any good at offense, but very good at defense.
However he forgets one thing, the Wu family, at that time, were imperial guards, they already knew how to fight rather well and could very easily attack, possibly not with Taijiquan, but they knew how to attack. My thinking, is, since this is the case, it could be why Wu taijiquan does not follow the 10 essentials all that closely and also why I tend to think of it as not quite taijiquan.
But, regardless, what I end up doing is all speculation and highly dependant on this knee finally working as I was told it would.
