The Academy of Traditional Martial Arts (where I teach) sees this as a plus: attempting to re-enact specific applications might seem like a good idea until you realise that the more application-specific your palm changes become, the more circumscribed or limited they are in their scope. By contrast the swimming dragon baguazhang of Chen Pan Ling is quite sparse it is stripped back to the basic principles and does not try to capture the exact movement of all the applications. Some schools of baguazhang have quite complex palm changes corresponding to the bewildering turns and twists that characterise those applications. There are myriad possibilities for applications arising from each palm change so many they are not possible to tabulate. This stepping is however not used in Chen Pan Ling swimming dragon bagua which prefers a more natural stepping method. In many schools of bagua this "circle walking" is performed with a characteristic "flat footed" stepping, sometimes called "mud stepping". The even height, low-slung walk used in bagua is in this respect the antithesis of ITF taekwondo's "sine wave" theory. "Circle walking" provides important conditioning for the legs (the circle allows you to cover endless ground without needing a large space) and teaches you important principles of acceleration in stepping. In most systems of bagua, the practitioner walks in a circle, then abruptly enters into one of the palm changes. Once you understand these principles you will be able to negotiate your opponent’s changes in movement and be able to control him or her. It is important not to see the 8 palm changes as “techniques” but as a series of movements encapsulating an important principle of “change”.
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