Cheng Ming Internal Martial Arts has trained students in Gippsland since 2019, teaching the traditional internal system passed down through the International Cheng Ming Martial Arts Association.
Cheng Ming brings together four major Chinese internal martial arts under a single, carefully sequenced curriculum. Most students begin with Tai Chi Chuan — the most widely known and taught of the four. As experience grows, training opens into the more advanced internal arts: Xingyi Chuan, Bagua Zhang, and traditional weapons work.
The whole system is built to develop two things at once: excellent health and wellbeing, and genuine skill and application in self-defence. Neither is treated as secondary to the other.
Classes run weekly during school terms, Tuesdays in Warragul and Thursdays in Trafalgar, and are open to all ages — young people, teenagers, adults and older students train side by side. There's no fitness or experience threshold to begin; the practice meets each student where they are and builds from there.
Richard has trained in the Cheng Ming system since 1999 — more than twenty-five years of practice that began with one of Grand Master Wang Fu-Lai's first introductory visits to Australia. He continues to learn through his masters, David and Amelia Zarb, who have studied directly under Grand Master Wang Fu-Lai for over twenty-five years.
Alongside a fortnightly session with teacher David Zarb, Richard travels regularly to the International Cheng Ming Chinese Martial Arts Association in Taiwan, attending international Gasshuku in 2011, 2012, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026 — training directly with Grand Master Wang Fu-Lai and Master Huang Shu-Chun, who also travel to Australia most years to teach in person.
“Expanding the knowledge of this marvellous internal martial art that brings exceptional benefits to your health, wellbeing, happiness, and internal beauty.”
See the art in motion — Richard demonstrating Cheng Ming Internal Martial Arts.
Internal martial arts reward patience over intensity. Students are encouraged to focus on a few things at once, rather than the whole system, and let mastery build in layers.
Every movement in the Cheng Ming form carries a health benefit as well as a martial one — the two are never separated in how the art is taught.
Gippsland students train within a worldwide network of Cheng Ming schools spanning Taiwan, Japan, Israel, Europe, Argentina and the USA. See the full lineage & global branches.
