Lets see I am not going to point out who said what specifically because I really didn't want to rehash what will most likely turn into the same old argument. This is just going to be a blanket commentary on what differs from all the teachings I had in the past seven years.
If you don't agree by all means please feel free to converse without fear of the usual sarcasm from me since this is going to be moderated heavily from what I've been told, theoretically in a fair and balanced manner. However I also reserve the right to bow out when I feel the scales of justice are tilting
With that said...........
First and foremost the Chinese martial community and as far as I know most of the martial world agree that there are only
3 internal martial arts.
Bagua, Hsing I, and Tai Chi
There are several styles of each of these arts (Chen being a style of Bagua I have never heard of. The closest thing I could find was Chen Pa Ling but I cannot find any connection to the Martial Chen family lineage and more importantly he does Wushu. Wushu is post communist takeover martial arts. The communist made sure that there are no real martial applications in Wushu to prevent another boxer rebellion type incident. The other various styles of these arts were basically developed by people with either smaller or larger frames than the original practitioner causing slight variations but the doctrine and basic movements are the same.
Second the 3 internal arts give power to strikes by using a whipping motion. This is generated from the waste and the body is kept loose and relaxed through out the strike. Any time the frame is stiffened the power is lost. This is due to muscles contracting and pulling against one another. When you stiffen any power is generated through muscular force. This defeats the rule of efficient motion plus it doesn't set up your next strike without having to rechamber your whole body. Not having to rechamber is a whole nother difference in these arts and external arts. The internal arts flow as if one continuous movement at the expense of sounding cliche, like waves crashing on the beach.
Next there are breathing exercises that are for conditioning and promoting more blood flow to specific parts of the body. This is done through specific timings in breathing and using specific breathing patterns. These are not usually applied in combat since your body knows how to breathe already, or it should from the conditioning, and you have much much more important things to worry about in a fight besides how to breathe. If you have time to think about your breathing in a fight then bust out the pillows and get ready to watch a movie afterwards because you and whoever you are fighting are just dicking around.
Finally, does it take a long time lots of work and effort to learn an internal art? Hell yes! It takes all these things to learn
anything new. That's why Shoalin has external arts. When the shit hit the fan they didn't have 18 years to train monks in internal arts when there was a war going on so they taught them external ones to speed up the process.
So you say "What do I do if it takes so long?". My answer is do you live in a war zone? Are you constantly being attacked? Is some one trying to burn down your home on a 24/7 basis? If you answered no to these then you have time to learn an internal art.
On a final note most people prop up their internal art with things from external arts because it's hard to get it right or it takes to long to learn and people want to whore out their art and make money from it now not later. If your looking for something to master in 5-6 years or less so you can open your own Dojo or whatever you want to call your school then internal arts are not for you. In fact people like that art even real martial artists in my book. That's the problem now a days people have polluted the original doctrine of the internal arts because they are in a hurry.