By Gene Ching                

WeaponUp has been trending like no other movement in the martial arts. This fusion of Chinese Jian (sword) practice and yoga is the brainchild of Sabina Storberg. Her roots are in Shaolin and Wudang Kung Fu, having trained in China. WeaponUp has received attention from news outlets across the nation, along with recognition from the Late Show’s Stephen Colbert, who dubbed it ‘the espresso martini of fitness’ and the Daily Show’s Lewis Black, who compared it to another exercise trend, Pistols & Pilates.

Skeptics are critical of new ideas, and Storberg has received her fair share of detractors. Nevertheless, WeaponUp expanded from webinars to in-person workshops. In May and June of 2026, Storberg launched her first national tour. The Graceful Warrior Tour sold out spaces in 9 cities across the United States, with 3 stops in California. We caught up with Storberg in San Francisco just prior to her workshop there and are happy to present an exclusive interview with her, the first to dive into her original Kung Fu roots.

GC: Let's start with Shaolin Temple.

SS: Actually I trained in a Shaolin Academy, not a temple. So that's the difference.

GC: Was that in Dengfeng or a different area?

SS: I studied in Qufu, at the Qufu Shaolin Kung Fu School. I don't know if you know it at all.

GC: Yeah, not really. I can hardly track all the Dengfeng schools. I’ve only heard of it on the web.

SS: It was a small school when I first went there in 2012 and then the headmaster decided to open up a bigger school, so midway we got into this bigger facility there. It was really, really beautiful. But then one year into my training I actually moved to Wudang Mountain. I moved from the Shaolin discipline, and I transferred completely to study Wudang Tai Chi under the Wudang Gong Fu and Health Academy.  I spent two years total training in China, but I started with Shaolin in the Shaolin Academy and then I moved over to Wudang Tai Chi.

GC: What drew you there?

SS: When I was at the Shaolin Kung Fu Academy, I, first of all, absolutely fell in love with martial arts and Shaolin Kung Fu. I was being trained by the headmaster, Master Wei (Shaolin name Shi Yanjia 释延佳). There were multiple different instructors, masters of different types of Kung Fu within that. Not only did we do Shaolin, but we also did Bagua, Wudang, there was Wing Chun there. I didn't study any Wing Chun whatsoever, but I studied Sanda, for example, so that was kind of like the more kickboxing style.

While I was at the Shaolin Academy, there was one master who would come only in the afternoons named Master Wu. He actually lived in the vicinity and he was a Wudang Tai Chi and Bagua master. It was like this 70-year-old man. I still think about him daily and I ended up training with him for a year. There were a lot of the guys, so I was one of the only girls there, as you can picture. That Wudang Tai Chi master was there in the afternoons when Sanda was happening - so a lot of the guys wanted to do the more powerful Sanda, Shaolin kind of style. And I had the pleasure to train with this master for a year by myself, mostly by myself.

Master Wu is a renowned Bagua master, and I know that he's been author and he has a really crazy life story. The only thing is there was a lot of missing translation between him and I because he didn't have a translator. Often it was just him and I and I don't speak Mandarin. He would say like ‘yes yes yes’ or like ‘awful awful.’

He was teaching me Bagua and Wudang Tai Chi. Through that practice I just fell in love with Wudang Tai Chi to such a high level.  The straight sword itself is so reminiscent of Wudang, so yeah, that’s why what drew me to Wudangshan. After that I decided to move and immerse myself more deeply into the Wudang practice.

GC: I don't speak Mandarin either, so I empathize.

SS: It’s like when people ask me like ‘Which form did you learn?’ I unfortunately don't have the exact terminology and names because they would just teach me the form but would never go deeply into learning more about the history of the form, except for the forms that I learned with Master Wu. I knew that they were part of his lineage - I don't know which lineage.

GC: Wudang lineages are very complicated because they're almost shamanic. Each master has his own take on it.

SS: Absolutely.  And Master Tang Li Long (唐理龙) which is the master that I studied with in Wudang Mountain - I've tried to understand it a little bit more - he was a little bit split off from the rest of the schools in Wudang Mountain. I don't know if you've been there.

GC: I have.

SS: So you know the schools. There's many of them at the bottom of the mountain and then you kind of go up a little bit.

GC: And they're pretty spread out, all over the range.

SS: This one was a small school really high up.  I was basically locked in at one point - just me. Everybody had gone and I stayed back to because I was studying at the same time online for my university degree so I was like locked in because there was so much to know. It was really in a secluded area. I remember he would say he was part of the ‘dragon’ lineage.

GC: Yeah, they always say ‘dragon’.

SS: Right, everybody is a dragon just like I'm a goat. Or I'm a sheep.

I feel like my personal training was rooted super deeply in the practice but not so much the theory because of my huge ailment of not being able to speak Mandarin and that didn't allow me to get very deeply into the true meaning of things.  I tried to learn it a little bit more afterwards but there was still a lot of loss in translation that I couldn't really access, but the physicality of it stayed with me for so long afterwards.

GC: What made you want to go to China in the first place?

SS: My China story.  I just turned 19 when I moved to China. I was born in Albania and my family moved to Canada so I'm Canadian.  My family moved to Canada when I was about 11 years old. In Canada, I had come from an immigrant style family, and I had to do really, really well in school. When I was in my first year at University, I started partying a lot and my grades started slipping. At that time, I had been accepted to like a very prestigious program, and I got kicked out of that program. So I had this huge kind of reckoning internally. It felt like my family that had been working so hard for me and then here I am throwing it all away. And I told myself ‘I need discipline in my life.’ I wanted to instill this like self-instilled rehab.

I'd never done martial arts before. I'd only just love movies like martial arts movies. I went to China purely for the discipline aspect because I felt like I had hit my first rock bottom at 19. I don't want to do this anymore. I want to gain discipline and have a steady mind and a strong mind to be able to pursue what I want to do.

And I was supposed to go for four months and that four months turned into actually four years, but I would go back and forth. So that was my initial story.

And then once I arrived there, I started from really the beginning. This is something that I sympathize with adult learners because a lot of people start things when they're young and then it becomes a normal thing. It becomes a thing that they did when they were a young kid and then they don't do it anymore when they're older because they're over it or it's not something older people do.

GC: We get a lot of attrition when martial arts kids go to college.

SS: Exactly, exactly. And for me, I started in college. And then I wanted this to be a practice that I did for the rest of my life, for my whole life, not just something that kids do.

And also the female aspect of it. I was one of very few women that were doing this. So it was just a lot of things at once that made me want to continue and just kind of see.

GC: And then you went to Rishikesh in India, the yoga capital of the world.

SS: Yeah. Rishikesh was at that same time, so I was in China for about a year, and I had kind of a deep interest in yoga as well. I already saw the similarities between the two practices, especially the discipline aspect because for me it was less about the physicality. I would say, it was more about the other things that you gained. When I saw training from Shaolin Kung Fu, not only was it discipline, but there was also confidence there.

The one thing that I always say, like when you would see students, myself included, first coming into the school. It was interesting because there would be the taxi that would take you right there and we're all hungry from training all day. And then we would see the new students come out like they're shy. They have like their shoulders like slumped over, even if it's like a six-foot guy or whatever, like somebody that would have more stature or whatever. And then one month of training in, all of these people suddenly have a posture correction. They're much more confident and they carry themselves like a lot better. And so for me, it was it.

I just love that physical change, whereas you're gaining these skills, there's a physical change that you see. And for Indian yoga I felt I saw the same thing. So I went to Rishikesh. It was close to China, so I went directly from China to Rishikesh, coast and mountain, these great big mountains.

When I went there, it was really, really cool because I went from this more male-dominated situation where I was like one or two women to mainly female-dominated where there was one or two men in that yoga teacher training. I was like ‘Why does one have to be male-dominated and one have to be female-dominated?’  To me it didn't really make any sense because the movements and the philosophy behind each practice didn't have gender. There's no gender. I mean they're both male dominated traditionally yoga came to the west and became female. But it didn't really make any sense to me.

It was Ashtanga Vinyasa, not Iyengar or Hatha. I love some yoga teachers. I still really look up to the way they move and practice.

GC: Sure, I think the West has a very limited perspective on what yoga is. It's actually quite expansive.

SS: Absolutely, absolutely.

GC: Were you at an ashram or an academy?

SS: It's called Ajaria Yoga Academy. It was another academy.

GC: There are so many in Rishikesh.

SS: There's so many, it's just packed.  It was very small. I don't think it's famous, 'cause I went to one nearby, just to eat, and it's like this big academy right on the water. They taught Hatha. I didn't stay at that one.

I never taught yoga until 10 years later. 2012 is when I went to China and 2013 is when I got my yoga teacher certification and then up until 2016, I was consistently going back to the school and getting my degrees at the same time, doing double.

And then at the end of my Wudang Kung Fu journey, there was a point with Master Tang when he was taking disciples that weren't Chinese.  There was a point where he basically was asking the students that were there long term, you’re either a disciple or just like do something else, you know, just whatever. At the same time, I was working really hard to get my university degree. It was kind of the choice there: do I go down the traditional path like this discipleship opening to you to become like a legitimate monk or whatever you want to call it?

GC: Part of the lineage.

SS: Yeah, part of the lineage. Or do I go out to the like real world, outside of this space, and try my luck to get a career and whatever.

I actually chose to go down the career path. I moved. I left China in 2015 and I started working for the United Nations. I had my master's degree and then I lived in Geneva for nine years. That's where I was working for the United Nations, for Children's Health, Children and Women's Health. I worked for UNICEF.

But throughout that whole time, I was practicing my yoga and my martial arts at home. And I was doing it all, combining the two. And that's basically how WeaponUp came to be.

Since I traveled a lot for work, I was never going to go back to a martial arts school. After having been to China, it was almost impossible for me to go to like my local Wushu Academy, you know what I mean? Or like my local like yoga school or whatever. There were amazing yoga teachers so I did actually go to more yoga classes than I did martial arts classes, sure. Basically after seeing the masters, I was ruined. I couldn't see anybody else.  They kind of wreck you. You go to the source.  

So I was combining those practices at home on my yoga mat and that's basically how WeaponUp came to be.  The straight sword was just always the weapon that I was obsessed with. I traveled with my sword for years, like this one practice sword that I bought maybe for like four dollars in China. I still have it.

Even the other practice swords that we were sharing with our members - everyone's like ‘well, this is like so flimsy.’ I'm like ‘It can last you 12 years. It's not flimsy. It's just flexible.

GC: What do you think WeaponUp brings to the table that's new? What does this fusion bring me that I don't get out of just practicing yoga or just practicing a traditional sword.

SS: No, I think that's honestly a really good question.

And I think for me, the best way that I can describe it is that throughout the 10 years that I did it at home by myself before launching it, it grew bigger and bigger into my own personal practice. So what I get from it is not one thing or the other. It's truly the fusion of both. And it felt like I was combining the breath work - the longevity work of yoga where you're breathing into it. As you probably know with martial arts, sometimes you just get straight into it. And it's very tough on the knees and on the kicks and the jumps and all of these things. It's something you rarely see practiced until old age. Tai Chi practice is the more low impact work. So for me, I wasn't seeing Jian really taught.

I think what WeaponUp does is make a practice that is a fusion accessible to people that would have never even thought to pick up a sword, that would have never even thought to do yoga. A lot of people that are part of WeaponUp don't even work out. They never did yoga before. They never did martial arts before. When I first launched it, I didn't even know that this group of women actually existed because I came from such the two lineages that were so traditional.

I was hoping to get martial artists and to get yoga people into WeaponUp. That's what I was trying to portray because I was like, if it worked for me, it should work for you guys as well. But I didn't get that reception from them. I got the, you know, ‘this is not good’ perception.  And that's okay. What I got instead was this incredible community of women that wanted something empowering. They wanted to do something different that would have never given them the opportunity to move in this way unless they went through the like very traditional which is not what that specific group wanted.

But what I've noticed is through Webinars, they're learning that they might actually like the practices that are separate from it. There's many that have said, ‘Oh, I really want to study Shaolin, like where have you studied?’ And so now I've shared with them where I studied. And the same with the yoga aspect. It's just yoga is so much more well known so most people dismiss it. And then the Kung Fu is what becomes a bigger conversation.

GC: Do you envision yourself ever teaching the traditional stuff? On a higher separate level or a different level?

SS: I think with the traditional stuff, it's very hard for me because I have such an honor towards my teachers that I feel it's like I don't know why I would teach the traditional when they're still here, you know what I mean?  I feel like there's better traditional teachers than me.

Whereas with WeaponUp, I provide what other teachers want. I don't see any of my Shaolin masters being like ‘Oh I'm gonna teach Weapon Up now’ or any of the yoga teachers saying ‘I think the vehicle of Weapon Up is what I'm meant to teach.’ I leave the more traditional teachings to the masters that I learned from, you know?

GC: Do you think you might ever incorporate sparring or cutting practice?

SS: I love sparring and cutting practice, especially with the Jian.

GC: Very few Kung Fu people do cutting and sparring nowadays. Even with sparring, usually it's pre-choreographed.

SS: We do a lot of choreographed moves. A lot of people feel like it's a dance. So it's very easy to add two people combos. And then that could be a choreographed sparring move.

But it's I think this is a bigger conversation within Kung Fu versus other types of sword arts like HEMA and whatever. I don't think a lot of people understand the Jian because it is the more graceful out of all the weapons, even the like broadsword.

GC: The ‘gentleman’ of weapons.

SS: Exactly. It's the gentleman's weapon and the scholar's weapon.

There's the story of that beautiful dancer with the Jian. She was this dancer in ancient China that elicited this great poem out of this poet. I'm just picturing that every time I practice with the Jian. For me, it's the sparring aspect. I think it's a long road and I feel like that's a road that like the Kung Fu community should take to do more education around. You can actually spar with the Jian.

I think most people look to HEMA. It's like this big great sword and heavy and, you know, ‘This is like real sword work.’ Sure, sure, right. I think for us, for WeaponUp, will there be more sparring? What I hope to do actually is just teach the technique so that if anybody wants to spar later, they know how to do it. But they don't know that they know, if that makes sense. They'll have the basic skills that they need to get to that end point.

GC: Sure. That's very Mr. Miyagi. ‘Wax on, wax off.’

SS: I think all of WeaponUp is basically the ‘wax on, wax off,’ and then people don't take us seriously, but that's okay. Yeah, I mean, the prospect of sparring sword is kind of ridiculous in the modern age.

GC: Hey now. I practice Iaido and Iaido is probably the least practical martial art. I love it for what it does for my awareness and my sense of discipline, but when am I walking around with katana on my hip, you know?

SS: I mean, my vision is that’s everybody's right. That's best. There was a point in my life when, you know, after practicing in the academies and learning the Jian and just being so in love with it, and then being out into the Western world because most of my life I lived in Canada and Switzerland (I just recently moved to the US because I got married to a US citizen), I would just notice people walking around with yoga mats. I'm like ‘How did this happen?’  A yoga mat - it's not a normal thing to walk around, like a little carpet that you're just walking around with.  And I thought why not walk around with a straight sword? It's just as beautiful practice.

GC: Right. Which you would see in China all the time actually…

SS: Exactly! You would see them in Wudang mountain. It was super cool.  Everybody is walking around with Jian.

GC: Even in Beijing at the parks, you see old ladies with Jian and vendors selling like wooden swords and such.

SS: Absolutely. Exactly. And it's just such a part of the culture thing too, see? And I thought this can be worldwide.  It just needs to be shared, and I think people need to understand weapons.

GC: We’re speaking here because your WeaponUp has really caught fire. Everywhere you go, you get interviewed by local news stations. You even got mentioned on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.

SS: Yeah, that's crazy. It's been – honestly, I can't even - because I've been wanting to do WeaponUp and share it with the world for so long. It's been 14 years since I started training until WeaponUp was launched and the whole time what I was nervous about was putting this fusion practice that combines these two ancient practices. I was scared of what was gonna happen actually happened.

I did get criticized.

GC: Sure. You know, I always say ‘You're not in the martial arts world if you're not getting criticized.’ If you don't have a martial adversary, do you really even count?

SS: Right and so but the crazy thing is that there were all of these women; Our community is 98 to 99% women. There's a few men that train with us but it's mostly all women.  I think it's because I represent. I'm a woman so I think when they see that it's like ‘Okay maybe that's something for me.’ Being able to go on all of these different news channels, being mentioned on Stephen Colbert - which I wasn't expecting at all - that was completely random. We just saw that, and it's been like a dream come true. I can't even. I'm still living in it right now and I'm just trying to get today. We have a class of members and my main goal is to just share this humbly and just have people get all the benefits that I did.

Just the movement practice itself - that's all I want to do.  And all these avenues help us share it. And making it something that's accessible because there's older women that practice with us and there's young women that practice with us. They all get something different from it. All sizes, all shapes, you know.

GC:  Aside from you being a woman, why do you think it resonates so much with women?

SS: I think it's the Jian movement that's just so beautiful. In my opinion, it's the most graceful style of movement. I can't picture if I'm thinking like European sword arts.  It's just cuts. Even the broadsword, it's just big cuts and it's just a straight-to-the-point kind of movement, which is like kind of masculine, if you will. Whereas the Jian, there's like there's an elegance to it that I haven't seen in other forms of movement that I think appeals to women in different ways. Even when you look at the Tai Chi straight story, even when in practice Wushu, I feel like women do a better job than men. Especially with double straights.

That's why I think it draws women. You can be lethal and graceful at the same time. I don't think women want to be looking manly, but they still want power, you know?

GC: Well, there's this great tradition in the Chinese martial arts about the symbolism of the weapons. For example, the Taoists will use a Jian almost like a magic wand, for exorcism and such. And then, of course, you get Chinese opera and all those aesthetic elements. I think a lot of modern day, at least Western practitioners, are in denial of that. ‘That's not real. We’re real fighting. This is real stuff.’

But that magic and showmanship is real too. I think you miss a whole part of the culture if you deny that.  There's an aesthetic to Kung Fu. I think this is why there are a gazillion Kung Fu movies and what? A few dozen Karate movies, a few dozen Judo movies.  

SS: I think this was on your magazine and website most. What I've noticed most movies use Kung Fu as a base for their choreography.

GC: Oh absolutely.

SS: They're not using HEMA or like these others because there's just much more beauty when it comes to Kung Fu movement. And there's so many weapons in Kung Fu, right? Which is very, very appealing.

For example, there's a little mini-niche within our members that just are big Star Wars fans as you can imagine with the lightsabers. They don't understand when I teach half flower, like symbolic Jian movements, that those are lightsaber movements because that was taken from Kung Fu. It wasn't that they were just like made-up for Star Wars.

You're laughing…

GC: No, no. I mean I sit on a board for Terra Prime Light Armory, which is a lightsaber combat group, one of the leading ones in the United States. But now there's so many lightsaber combat groups. We’re associated with the United States Fencing Association.

SS: Very cool.

GC: But back to your point, there’s Darth Maul.

SS: Wasn’t Ray Park a Wushu champion?

GC: Exactly.

SS: What is interesting to me and what I hope to be able to do with WeaponUp is that it just opens up such a bigger space for this movement to go into different areas that would have never gone before. Like all of these women practicing out of nowhere. They would have never ever stepped foot into a traditional martial arts or Kung Fu class and now they want to go to China and learn Kung Fu, you know? That's really cool to me, sure. Or they just practice with their straight sword at home with their like kids running around and stuff like that. I think it can be part of regular daily life. It's a practice that you can live on.

GC: Where do you foresee yourself in 10 years?

SS: I don't know. 10 years is so long from now. I know it's going to come like tomorrow, but I honestly don't think that far off. I think where I'm living right now, it's honestly a day-by-day kind of situation. 10 years into the future, I would like to just kind of retreat from the public face to be honest.

GC: Really?

SS: Yes, I definitely want to be able to bring all of this into the world and have it be taken up. My true dream is just to have my own studio that I practice in every day and teach. But in order to get the movement off the ground, there's a lot more moving parts than just the practice itself. So I think in 10 years, if I can return back to the just the practice that would be like a good goal for me.

Even the tour right now that we're on, I haven't been home in a month and a half because it's been from one place to another. It's been incredible but there's no routine. There's no grounding in it. It's just kind of pushing and pushing to create this baby to come home to the world and grow up. And then after that grows up, I just want to be like ‘I'm ready to just train again.’

GC: Personally I love that rockstar lifestyle.

SS: Honestly, I don't know about rockstar. I'm like a rockstar on decaf coffee. You know my baby's also with me. My team is with me. So we're just like a little traveling band but it's been really fun. That's great.

It's been really cool to see people that are practicing in a way that they never ever would before. And how I hear that it's changed their daily practice or some of them, even their lives - and I could have never imagined that doing it myself. I know how it helped me, but you don't know how it's going to impact somebody else. Hearing those stories has been awesome.

GC: Do you have any comments for your detractors?

SS: Yeah, no. I think for my detractors it's always hard because I take all of it personally. Actually it hurts a lot when I read the comments, and there's a lot of comments that are like ‘You suck’ or ‘Like this is so bad, you don't know how to do that,’ you know?

GC: Yeah, welcome to the martial world.

SS: I would just say I still stay in touch with the masters that I trained with. At least two of them,  they're really impressed by what's happening. I don't know what to say to be attractive. Maybe learn a little bit more about what we're trying to do.

GC: Well, you know, I will say one of my good friends who is a very skilled martial artist was super pissed off at you because he's was doing a Jian seminar and couldn't get any Jian because you bought up all the Jian from the US suppliers.

SS: Yeah, we've definitely sold out all the Jian in the United States. All the companies scrambled to restock. But it's a good problem to have, though.

GC: It is, it is. Our magazine runs on selling Jian.

SS: Really?

GC: Well, nunchucks, whatever.

SS: Right, all kinds of martial arts weapons.

GC: Right, right, all kinds of everything for the martial arts. But definitely Jian. I know that all the major vendors were empty for months in your wake. Still are a little. Everybody's still struggling to restock.

SS: It is true though, that in the beginning especially when we had, you know, less like positive reinforcement, if you will, the negative stood out even more because it was so shocking. And I read everything. I see everything and it's just like, whoa, whoa.

GC: Take it from me. I've managed KungFuMagazine.com online forum for a quarter century and we used to have the most ridiculous flame wars. It was like my 36 chambers in that it hardened me for web trolls.  Whatever they say online, none of that really counts. I don't even know if they're real anymore. Maybe they're just an aggro AI bot.  I don't really care anymore. You gotta let all that just wash over you. Don’t waste yourself.

SS: You know it's hard though. It's definitely hard especially when you put your heart and soul into something and then somebody just takes you down for no good reason.

GC: It's just a malicious thing.

SS: Absolutely, yeah.

One thing that I would like to do, and this is partly because I'm very new to the US so I feel like I have less community in the US than I did outside of the US, what I'd like to do more is work with the communities in the United States that are already pushing different forms of this, which we haven't been able to do because we've been working on growing WeaponUp as a movement. But I think as we're growing, it would be great to work with both these different yoga communities, different martial arts communities.

Author

To find out more about WeaponUp, visit weaponup.com.

Gene Ching is the Publisher of KungFuMagazine.com and the author of Shaolin Trips.

Thread

https://forum.kungfumagazine.com/t/weaponup-sword-yoga/63076