The Cascadia Gong Fu Club is an affiliate organization of the North American Tang Shou Tao Association. Our mission is to research, promote and preserve East Asian martial arts. We teach our students to use martial arts as tools for personal cultivation; to maintain a calm, radiant spirit in the face of adversity, and to strive continually for mental, physical and spiritual balance.
YOUTH CLASSES
Youth Gong Fu
WEDNESDAYS & Fridays
4:00 -5:30PM
Youth Gong Fu focuses on learning dynamic movement principles to strengthen, improve balance, and stretch the entire body. This is a fun, energetic class that teaches practical self-defense while building a true warrior spirit of self-respect.
We believe in creating a family style learning environment for our youth classes. The youth program includes students ranging from 6 to 15 year olds, allowing the students to create a mentor/mentee relationship. Although we have all students together in the same space for training, we are aware of developmental levels and approaches to learning. Each class begins with 20-30 minutes of warm ups designed to build strength, agility, and cardiovascular health. The core of our training focuses on technical martial skills – breathing, tumbling, kicks and punches, and precision of movement – along with an understanding of how our training serves our daily lives. Focus, listening, and respect for others are the three most important values at the core of this class. For our older and more advanced students, this class incorporates more mentally and challenging martial arts and asana practice, including forms-work and two-person drills. We will require our older students to be more mentally and emotionally present than the younger students. At this level, we begin to incorporate a stronger focus on discipline and self-control into our teaching. We also believe in having fun! Much of our curriculum is taught through games and cooperative learning.
All students will be expected to display respect for themselves and others at all times during class. Belts are used to acknowledge students’ development and progress through the curriculum, and represent a level of training that the student is striving to attain, not one that they have already reached.
ADULT CLASSES
Xing Yi Quan
mondays 4:00- 5:30 pm
Xing Yi Quan will offer the most vigorous workout of any of our arts. There are three basic rules for all those who choose to study Xing Yi: never hold your breath, never tense your muscles, and always keep an inner smile.
In this class, we focus on long, slow movements that lead us to excellent, precise motor control and coordination. Each class will begin with an hour of vigorous warm-up exercises, and progress into forms-work and two-person drills. An emphasis is placed by the instructor on reigning in the breath and coordinating breath with movement. As with all of our arts, our Xing Yi practice follows the breath of the seasons in Nature, so you can expect a wintertime practice to be significantly slower and more meditative than the same class in the middle of the summertime.
Liang Zhen Pu Ba Gua
Not in session
We are privileged to have such direct connection to the roots of this complex and beautiful martial art. Ba Gua combines rigorous physical training with mentally challenging forms and movements that keep mind and body fluid. Initially, students find this art form to be mentally challenging. As students progress, the physical practice becomes equally as demanding. At the beginner level, Ba Gua emphasizes hand-eye coordination and long, low stances, which allow new students to develop a powerful, yet agile base. Ba Gua offers an exquisite combination of internal and external training -- a blending of movement and stillness, firmness and gentleness, and the cultivation of strength and vital energy.
Adult Kajukenbo
Not in session
In the Cascadia Gong Fu Club, we use Kajukenbo as adults to cultivate a warrior-spirit, which we learn to infuse into our daily lives and the rest of our practice. When a student turns 16, they are asked to take their belt off and train with the adults. This is an indication that in their adult training, they are no longer focused on rank and advancement as the central goal of their practice, but instead have “graduated” into a family-oriented practice. At this point, students who have demonstrated a specific desire and ability to learn more advanced Kajukenbo material will be invited into a closed-door class. A fully-developed martial artist will use this skill-set like an iron fist wrapped in silk -- never seen, but fully present -- a source of inner strength.
San Miguel Eskrima
Fridays 4:00 - 5:30 pm
The North American Tang Shou Tao Association (NATSTA) celebrates and embraces the rich, complex history and the intrinsic value of the Chinese internal martial and medical arts. We aspire to respectfully preserve these arts in their purest context by honoring the founders and inheritors of the appropriate lineage through research and historical documentation. We are also committed to training the arts (both martial and medical) by adhering to the unique expression of their spirit, application, and intent. To this end, our vision is simple: to build a viable community of individuals dedicated to the research, practice, preservation, and dissemination of the traditional Chinese internal arts, both martial and medical. We insist on excellence in instruction of these arts so that they do not become diluted from one generation of practitioners to the next. The mission of the North American Tang Shou Tao Association Cooperative (NATSTA) is the preservation, research, and dissemination of the traditional Chinese martial and medical arts. The North American Tang Shou Tao Association Cooperative is a fully-recognized 501 (c)(3) non-profit organization.
To learn more about the North American Tang Shou Tao Association (NATSTA) visit www.natsta.org.