A great suggestion! Thanks, we'll probably color the swords before our next video. Please keep watching and keep up the great suggestions.

+Giovanni Gabrielli I'll start from your last question first! I would personally recommend a heavier, stiff bladed jian. The lighter flexible ones are used principally for form demonstrations and competitions (of forms, not actual sparring). The heavier, stiffer jians are truer if you want to learn jian as a combat art. As for the 'climax' in Chinese weapons, many people see the jian as the top refinement of the Chinese weapons, though there are a lot of people that simply learn the jian. If jian is what you want you can just jump straight to it, but if you have the time to invest I think it's a good idea to begin with the dao. Jian technique contains all the dao techniques and builds on top of them with more distance and tip cutting and I think having a good grasp of the basics from dao can really improve a person in their jian practice. Dao also requires a degree of comfort in close engagement combat where the jian focuses more on longer distance striking. Because of this it's been my experience that people that move from the dao into the jian are comfortable fighting from all distances, where people that jump straight to the jian are often good at longer range, but nervous upon closing ground. Just my opinion, but hope it helps!

Thanks for your answer Justin! I'll follow your advice, your lessons made clear quite a lot to me on the use of the dao and the concept of flowing momentum

Glad I could help. Please let me know if you have any more questions. When you start looking at jian, I do have a similar course to this one at Curious.com you can check out. Here's the link: curious.com/practicalqigong/basics-of-the-chinese-straight-sword/in/the-art-of-the-chinese-straight-sword?skip_course=1

Great! I'll take a bit more confidence with the dao and go straight to the jian course. Thanks again Justin!

Alvaro, thank you for the excellent question. You are not doing something wrong. Your observation is correct as it applies to both gong fu and tai ji. The thrust is the fast attack in the sword fighters toolbox, a very quick and economic movement as well as very agile. The headwrap is a much larger movement and so typically takes too long to execute against a quick thrust. There are a few ways to get around this, the first being to practice your headwrap a lot and make it faster, but usually it is still too slow unless the opponent is very clumsy in their thrust. The most successful way of bringing a headwrap to bear on a thrust is by using footwork and opening distance as your opponent makes the thrust. This increase in distance will force the thrust to travel farther to reach you, and therefor take longer and give you more time to execute this more complex defense. What I usually recommend against a thrust however is a faster block, one of the basic line change blocks as you can see executed in our fourth video of this series 'Defense'. This tighter block has a much better chance of intercepting the thrust! I hope this helped. To illustrate what I mean about using distance we'll film and put out a video midweek of the coming week that shows visually how this works. In the mean time, keep on training and thank you again for your question! Sifu Justin

Taoist In Black Thanks a lot for your insight, teacher!

Alvaro, Another excellent question. There are of course both similarities and differences in Eastern and Western fencing. They are similar in that all armed combat relies on a sense of timing and distance for success. Without writing an entire book here I will summarize the differences by talking about the basic character of the movement of each. In Western fencing the movement is very linear, from the footwork through the bladework. Even the cutting methods in Western fencing are based on a line, with 'push-cutting' being one of the prime methods. Eastern fencing however tends to follow a more circular path in its movements. Even in a thrust, the most linear attack there is the circle out of the hips to drive the power. Western fencing also focuses the movement more in the hand, where Eastern derives its guiding movement through the hips. As for fencing as a method of armed combat; it suffers from the same thing that wu shu and tai chi suffers from, which is to say that it is rooted in a system of actual combat, but has moved away from that over the years. It is certainly possible to learn actual armed combat from Western fencing, but what you see the most is a sport style. I've been fencing as a sport for over 25 years, but throughout this I've always focused on the more functional combat techniques. I don't always win at the sport because of this, but it's about knowing why you're doing something. Despite this I think the popularization of the sport of fencing has been good, and I think a growth of this type of sport combat in Eastern fencing would be a good thing. More people can get interested in a sport or competition than in a self defense method, and this increased interest would only help the art. I differ from a lot of combat oriented teachers in that I've never felt that if you don't do the full combat art you're 'not doing it right'. I think that there are a lot of different approaches to sword play and each of them offers their own benefits. There is room for both sport and applied combat, and one can certainly support the other. I am personally interested in combat so that is and continues to be my focus, but that isn't the only way to do it! Thanks again for another great question! Keep them coming! Sifu Justin

This sort of motion is very common in both tai chi and wu shu broad sword work. What creates more of a 'tai chi' feel to the technique (if such a thing exists) is the focus on rolling and moving with the opponents energy in order to capture space. That's not to say that in wu shu the movement is not very similar, but that yielding idea is so synonymous with tai chi that it might be truer to say wu shu borrowed from tai chi on this one and not the other way around.