切掌 Cutting Palm (English subtitles - turn on Closed Caption)

八掌/老手八掌 Ba Zhang/ Old Eight Palms is a foundational set of Yinstyle Baguazhang. They include 8 palms which contain a series of techniques that are built upon in layers as one learns these palms and their variations in a progressive way.
Sets like these have multiple objectives. The first is to act as a manner to remember and pass down the system of information in a way that can encompass much of the methods developed through physical and technical experience during a time when the majority of people were illiterate and disseminating of knowledge though the internet or books was not available. Oral and physical teacing was the common method and has been for thousands of years. Forms like this are physical encyclopedias for reference since books and reading ability were scarce. The second objective is to use that mode of passing on information as a method for training a person’s endurance and agility through the training of martial sets which were often designed to run a person through the memorizing and refinement process while also building stamina.
They are not supposed to be a total example of training but rather a minor part fo the reasons i mentioned above. This is a minor aspect of how we in this lineage train Baguazhang as we maintain the Philosophy of the older generations that we train to fight because that is the point of Baguazhang. Therefore, drills, partner application, power building, breath work and other forms of conditioning are the vast majority of our training. The Ba Zhang and other sets are just modes of preserving the system into memorizable parts and communicating the structure of the training to the next generation.