Introduction of Tai Chi Plum Blossom Praying Mantis Boxing 

Present By Hong Kong Tai Chi Plum Blossom Praying Mantis Boxing Association (www.mantismartialart.com)

To be a warrior of mantis boxing: In Shangtung province, the motherland of mantis boxing, the mere familiarity of hand skill of mantis boxing will not warrant one as a warrior of mantis boxing. To be a warrior of mantis boxing, one must fully master the knowledge and manipulation of force or power generated by the body as well as the effectiveness of body movement on both attack and defense.  The body movement is being driven by concentration of your mind and the control of your breathing pattern.  Among the different styles of Chinese kungfu, Tai Chi boxing has done in-depth research on such kind of theory.  Actually, the ancient masters of our style of mantis boxing had already fully understood the essence of this theory and they had been integrating the principle into mantis boxing style for quite a few generations. With hundred year of practice, the principle is now the core of our style.  In conclusion, the building-up of body power is the basic of the aforesaid theory; the way of transferring this power is through the mantis boxing hand skill and footwork.  Therefore, our style is formally named as Tai Chi Plum Blossom Praying Mantis Boxing.

Another difference between our styles and others is our intense focus on the technique of close- contact-combat.  Our contact tactics is called “attack by interception” which combines the attack and the defense actions, so as to block or terminate our enemy’s attacking movement during counter attack.  In addition, we emphasize a lot on shortening our attacking route.  In order to minimize the time of the attack and to do a faster strike, we will reduce the forearm drawback distance in between each attacking action.  As the attack route is shortened, the acceleration distance is also shortened.  Under normal circumstance, the force generated would be less strong with less momentum. However, with the application of the Tai Chi theory, we use the whole body to generate the power and then transfer the power by our body limbs in spiral line.  To note, if we measure the distance from our feet to our hand, the acceleration distance is good enough to generate the strong force.  In addition, as the force moves in spiral line, it will increase in strength.  The ultimate objective that our style is persevering, is that our body can be trained to become full of tension, just like a balloon, which can dissolve or rebound any external force applied to us.  During the time we prepare to attack, our body could act like we have a spring inside which could be compressed and released.  In this way, we can act (attack) and react (defense with counter attack) as we like.

For more details, please contact Alex Au on admin@mantismartialart.com