Thanks in large part to Pavel Tsatsouline and the dragondoor crew, people are becoming more and more aware of the benefits of training barefoot.

According to Vibram, some of the benefits of being barefoot are:

1. Strengthens Muscles in the Feet and Lower Legs - wearing FiveFingers will stimulate and strengthen muscles in the feet and lower legs, improving general foot health and reducing the risk of injury.

2. Improves Range of Motion in Ankles, Feet and Toes – no longer ‘cast’ in a shoe, the foot and toes move more naturally.

3. Stimulates Neural Function Important to Balance and Agility - when wearing Vibram FiveFingers, thousands of neurological receptors in the feet send valuable information to the brain, improving balance and agility.

Even if you only practice a stand up art, primitive movements are still important to practice as part of you conditioning routine since they are those that mimic the process we all under went as babies. Rolling over, pushing up, crawling and then standing.

Here is the famous Steve Cotter (also of the Tang Shou Dao lineage) doing the "fuhugong" 伏虎功是 (lying tiger exercises). As I understand it, Xu, Hong-Ji took these movements from Judo and added them into the TSD curriculum.

Hong, Yi Xiang (洪懿祥) founded the Tang Shou Dao (唐手道) association in Taiwan, and taught Xu, Hong Ji, (許鴻基) who in turn and taught noted American CMA practitioners like Mike Patterson, Vince Black and briefly, Tim Patterson. (I've written about the TSD before).

I recently met some contemporaries of Vince Black who started out training in kajukenbo together, and they sent me a link to this documentary below about HYX, which initially aired on BBC television over 20 years ago. As is was explained te me, one of the main producers of this documnetary was a student of Hong.

This is 13 year old Dmitri Smelkov, fighting his first fight against a (Kyokushin ?) Karate student from a neighboring school in Vologda, Russia. Dmitri has only been training in I-Liq Chuan for one year.

I-Liq Chuan is quite popular in countries like Russia and Poland. They have large groups who all train very hard. They're an inspiration to I-Liq Chuan students all over the world!

Well done Dmitri!

One of the most common questions I used to get about I-Liq Chuan's spinning hands training was "if we ever did it with stepping?"

Of course if your training method is to be viable for actual fighting it HAS to be done with free stepping, but up till recently I haven't been able to get any video I could post of me doing anything close to something "up to standard". This clip is from our workshop here in Phoenix two weeks ago. It's still not quite "there", but based on the feedback I got from my Sifu after we spent a little time working on it, I feel confident enough to post it up as an example of some of our approach to this type of training.