About
Joey Nishad
Internal martial arts practitioner and teacher, author, and the person behind #BEWHOLE.
01 / 05
Portrait — placeholder photograph
Joey Nishad specialises in Taijiquan and Wuji Yi Lik Kuen — arts built around a single, difficult idea: that a body can act as one connected system rather than a collection of strong parts. He has spent decades inside that idea, and the last several years checking it.
The work
His writing and teaching sit at the meeting point of two traditions that rarely talk to each other. On one side, the classical internal arts, with centuries of refined instruction wrapped in language that resists translation. On the other, biomechanics and motor neuroscience, with instruments precise enough to test some of those instructions and no vocabulary for most of them.
The result is unusually plain-spoken material. Where the evidence supports the tradition, he says so. Where it does not, he says that too — and where something is still a beautiful hypothesis waiting for an experiment, he labels it as one.
The books
With co-author Rob Liberti he has written Move. Dance. Fight., with One Part Moves and The Connected Body to follow — a three-volume argument about how skilled movement is actually built.
The channel
The #BEWHOLE channel shows the same material in the only form that settles most arguments: demonstration, at speed, with resisting partners, including the failures.