gongfu

 At the pinnacle of all good gong fu systems, is the conditioning methods that they use.

Often, when we first start learning gong fu, all we learn are conditioning drills. Frog hopping, bear walking, duck walking, panther crawling, pushups, situps, dips, pullups and so on and so on. It is grueling at first, later it becomes a reality, like dental work for some people. The thing is, most of the time, actually going through the drills in class, after you’re no longer a beginner isn’t something that happens enough. The reason is, that class time is better spent refining what you’ve got, or giving you new material.

 A problem that can sometimes occur, is that people will stop doing their conditioning at home, and end up losing the ability to perform the new material that they are learning! It really happens all of the time. Once you’ve lost your conditioning, you have to start over. Remember what that was like? This time, you have to do it all alone. You’ll have no one to share your constant failure with and you’ll have no one pushing you except you.

 It is at this point which a person should realize two things. One thing, is the fact that you can, in fact, force yourself to improve, you don’t need a teacher to push you or a peer to go through it with you. You really can cultivate the rawest elements of your gong fu, the elements which give you your physical power and stamina all by yourself, and the level that you reach is only determined by the limits which you set for yourself.

 The next thing you should be realizing, is that the whole secret to gong fu, is it’s basics. The most basic components of gong fu are not only what form the foundation upon which you build all of your skill, they are also the tools you use to form and develop it. They are how your body is able to become strong and flexible enough to perform, develop and refine your gong fu. Really, gong fu is the basics. The conditioning, the most basic type of gong fu training is arguably the most important aspect. Without intense conditioning, where is there any hard work? Without hard work, what you do cannot be called gong fu.

 Now, if you are just starting your gong fu training, I will tell you this: If you take every little exercise that you learn home with you, and train as hard as you can, after a very short time, your teachers will start to notice, and the student that stands out, get’s the most attention. It will prove, simply by observation, that you are truelly comitted to training hard. After some time, it will be clear that you’re serious. A serious student that trains hard is both more valuable and more rare than gold itself.

 Have fun.

Learning Cheng Man Ching Tai chi, I am forced to look at my footwork all over again. Lining up the hips, the feet, etc. with the opponent is deeply explored in CMC tai qi. Looking at my own footwork, I am starting the really appreciate the brilliance of xing yi, long fist and Baji. I never really looked at footwork in the way that these guys do, and looking at my own footwork, with this new information is really shedding new light on old gong fu.

 I think this blog post will mainly be some comments on hsing yi’s centerline strategy.

 Tonight, I was practicing a small part of a very long two man set. The person I was practicing with is a long term higher level student of our teacher. He’s quite small and shaky. Near the end of the loop, before it starts over, there is a place where you exchange the feet. Basically, the feet line up, as they would in xing yi, but the technique itself, wouldn’t call for a lining up of the feet if it was xing yi, the feet would actually cross the center, since the strike is off at the diagonal. The guy I was working with would just keep pointing at where to put my feet, and as graceful, neatly and quick I could move my feet in 8 or 9 possible ways, I just couldn’t seem to position them in the required tai qi manner. Finally I said, “man look, just hold on a second” and just stepped into the right pattern, which felt incredibly wrong, and went about the form. Everytime we would get back the that spot, there was no way I could do it. Xing yi conditioning just wouldn’t let it happen. He started to explain how the feet are actually shoulder width apart, in a back stance and the hips face the opponent. I quickly, turned my hips to 45 degrees and stepped the front heel in line with the rear and explained that this is xing yi. Xing yi, really has nothing to do with Cheng Man Ching Tai Chi, but this particular form, is just a collection of various xing yi, bagua and tai chi movements from many styles of the three pillar schools. I think it is very important however, to learn every little thing you can from everyone else, then compare and contrast methods and approaches in your own training time. So I shut up, emptied my cup, and took in what I could, which I’ve been busting at for the past three hours now at home.

 This is where, I will mention, that if you do hsing yi, you have a slight advantage to students of tai chi at a higher level from you. The reason, is that, tai chi’s strategy, is to get out of the way and neutralize your attacks, plucking and trying to lead etc… while leaving the center exposed for bait. The problem is, if you do xing yi, your hand techniques mutate upon contact, and you’re still pressing the center, since your line up is narrow, and theirs is wide, when they start to retreat, your advances cover too much ground for their techniques to hold up after two steps. After two steps, they are open somewhere in the center, and you’re close enough to strike them in the face with your elbow, or shoulder strike the sternum, let alone just irradicate the center with beng quan or more likely pao quan.

 The whole thing is, when longfist, shaolin or tai qi advance or retreat, they will first move the leg up to the static leg, then out away from the body. When you advance or retreat in xing yi or baji, your movement is on a straight line. Therefore, if they advance a foot, you only need to retreat an inch, so to speak. If they retreat a foot, and you advance an inch, your in close enough to attack before provoking a response.

 Now both xing yi and good tai qi are in-fighting systems. Tai qi will make use of the long range, xing yi will rush in, sometimes with long range attacks but always to the center, on the center line, and finishing in close.

 The other thing I noticed, and bear in mind I was practicing with a student not a teacher, is that when I locked his leg, he really didn’t seem to grasp why I naturally wanted to wrap my foot around his, and turn my body to a side facing horse stance.

 Here is the thing. While the obvious application of trapping the foot this way is getting the inside of your knee around the back of theirs, locking it, taking out the knee and thus grounding the opponent, there is a lesser known, incredibly effective hidden application, this is it:

 We’ll forget about the hands, and what is going on with the torso for the sake of illustration. Say a person steps there right foot towards you, and puts weight on it. If you simply lift the toes of your left foot (same side) and push your foot out, sliding on the heel with no weight on it, until the heel is lined up with the outside of their heel, then turn your foot in, and set the toes down to “lock” their foot, you can press your ankle up against theirs and start shifting weight onto your left foot, keeping firm contact, until all of your weight is on that leg and it is deeply bent at the knee. By the time your weight is 50/50, they will be heading for the ground, when you reach 100 percent, they should be lying painfully on the ground. This is a leg locking qin na technique.

 Anyway, long live xing yi. Attack the center and advance continuosly left and right as if you were against a wall.

 Peace.

 Dave.

 I decided to check the stats on my blog tonight, and I saw some of the tags that are leading people to my blog, the entries people are putting into search engines, which are leading them here. I was suprised. I also noticed, that a lot of readers, are making return visits. It doesn’t show me, who is doing what, and there isn’t anyway to find out, nor am I interested, so everyone’s privacy, is rest assured, quite in tact when it comes to my blog.

 One of the more common questions leading people to this site is “How to develop flexible legs”. I think this is an understandabley difficult question. Often, it seems to people like “the more I stretch, the more I realize how inflexible I am”. It’s really that way too. Getting flexible, particularly if your going about it wrong, can be very difficult. I would like to answer all of your questions in this one blog. I remember searching the internet, and constantly poking my teacher’s brains for years when I was younger. I found the answers, so I would really like to share them with you. You can feel free to ask any questions you have, on this topic, or any other, via the comment box. If I can’t answer it, I won’t make anything up, I want to preserve, and proliferate real gong fu.

 We’ll start with this. In order to achieve any of the various skills of gong fu, it is very helpful to look at that skill as a part of gong fu making the whole. All of the parts come together to form the whole. It is like a tree, with a root system, the foundation, a trunk, the method, and the branches, the various skills, with the leaves and blossoms, the evident and apparent gong fu. You don’t have leaves without branches, or branches without a trunk etc. The important initial point though, is that each branch of your gong fu, or each segment of your practice, should be looked at independent of the rest for the sake of real study. It should be understould, that it is all tightly connected, and that this dichotamic method of analysis is only for deeper practice.

 If you look at flexibility this way, you can really focus on it, independent of say, strong legs, high jumps or fast hands. This is the first and most important point. Next, it is important to realize that the way we think of the body in gong fu’s practice of flexibility is as “one long muscle” or rather we just constantly bear in mind that all of the muscles are interconnected. Therefore, we stretch the little finger, as often as we stretch the calves, and we stretch them both every single day.

 The next important point, is that warm muscles stretch, while cold muscles just tear. Doing external qigong, warmup exercises, kicking/punching drills or gong fu sequences prior to stretching will achieve real results and prevent injury. Contrary to popular belief, you will benefit more from stretching two or three times a day, than only once per day.

 When you stretch, you should not hold the breath, but slowing the breath, and controlling it is ok, as long as you respond to the natural rythm of the breath, i.e if you need to breath in do so, likewise if your body says it needs to breath out, and there should be no gap of hesitation. Otherise, breath naturally and make sure to relax the chest.

 You should hold each stretch, at the maximum capacity of the stretch for around one minute, after you have begun to develop strength in the stretch. That is, once your stretching motion feels stronger, you should hold the stretches longer, until each stretch is held for around one minute.

 The splits are desribed in another entry below, but the fingertips, when held together should be able to touch the top or bottom of the forearm with the assistance of the other hand. There are many other marks of deep stretching ability.

 The last important point, which is the pinnacle of a mind that becomes succesful in gong fu, is that you can never feel satisfied with anything that you attain. There is always much more to achieve. This saying, is not empty words, everyone with any gong fu at all would agree.

 Peace.

 Good luck.

 I was at my Nei Gong class last night, and we were being taught to use an old technique in an old way. The technique is a sternum punch from tai qi, with a relaxed arm, and the fist tilted slightly forward, and hollowed out. The first time the teacher did the technique, I recognized the fist, it was a ming fist, relaxed, with a hollow tiger’s mouth. Nobody at class knew what I was talking about, when I brought up the concept of the ming fist.

 This is the way I was taught. When the fist is held so that all of the first bones of the fingers are flat and level, it is called the flat or level fist. This is the most common way to hold the hand in modern wing chun and southern boxing in general. The punch starts out with the top of the vertical fist level with the forearm, slightly tilted down and forward. As soon as the first knuckle, the big first finger knucle, makes contact with the target, the wrist is flicked outward, with torqing power eminating from the waist, and a push off of the floor. The idea is that a huge amount of power is generated in a very short distance. This is also called “one inch punch” or “six inch punch” technique. It’s more of a kung fu parlor trick than anything, and you should be able to do it, just from studying gong fu body mechanics. The idea behind the technique, is that there are two punches, the first one is light, and they are rapid, with continuous forward motion. This way, the target responds to the first punch by a simple physical law, “every action causes an equal and opposite reaction”. The first punch, draws a response from the targets energy, while immediatly hollowing out and the second punch hits a sort of energetic void in the target that the first punch has thus made.

 It’s a cool trick, and you can send someone quite large, quite far with it, generating a lot of shock to the body.

 There are lot’s of other uses for the “flat fist”. However, there is one other fist that exists in gong fu, and it can be used in a myriad of ways. It is called the ming fist, or sun fist. The idea is that the fist is held in such a way as to resemble the Chinese character for “ming” or sun. It has the hidden meaning of this: pracitioners of a style which uses the sun fist, can be said to be agents of the ming dynasty, or by using the fist it is a way of saying “we must restore China to the peace of the Ming”, a concept now applied to peace and good rulers worldwide. The fist is just held so that, starting with the pinky, each finger sticks out a little further up to the top, and the thumb is pointed out almost past the top of the second knuckle down. It’s uses are myriad. If it is held relaxed, it has qi meridian values. If it is tightened, it is a devastating hammer or backfist. If you tighten this fist, the muscles on the pinky side of the hand become as hard as stone, and you can smash through tables with practice, equally as effective to the floating ribs, collar bone, neck, nose or side of a face.

 Anyway, thats the real ming hand. When you do a “salute” in many styles of gong fu, you make a fist and a palm, and put them together, thats the sun fist, and a moon palm. The fist should be held in the manner of the “ming fist” or sun fist, just two words for the same thing, and the palm curved like the moon, not in the more popular angular fashion.

  Peace

 A lot of people new to gong fu, get very frustrated, when they are told to relax, but can’t. Some people look like they are thinking “piss off dude, you don’t know me, I am relaxed”. Hopefully, the reason that a teacher is pushing you to relax more than you can, is to encourage you to look at why your not able to fully relax your muscles. Your arms are forceabley bent, you keep adjusting your head and back, your legs shake. Your not relaxed.

 Never, in gong fu, have I heard it spoken, how it is that the muscles are able to relax to the level needed for a person to become proficient in gong fu. A ton of people that come from countries outside of China, that get well known as gong fu exponents, never get that classic gong fu look to their build. And the reason, is really quite simple. Flexibility.

 It’s something people overlook. Even when they are stretching daily, and really able to achieve something looking a lot like a split. What people don’t seem to realize on the large scale, is that real flexibility is the pinnacle of gong fu. Every single part of your musculature should be supple, and have a full range of motion. That is the only way a persons body can relax. It’s also part of how you are able to transfer power from one part of the body to another, and an enormous part of speed, and changing techniques.

 When the muscles are supple, flexible and relaxed, Chinese medicine conciders the body in it’s natural, correct state. A baby is extrememly flexible. There is even a verse in the dao de jing that goes something like ” living things are supple and soft, dead things are rigid and hard”.  You can still build up your physique and be as flexible as the next student, you just need to work very hard. Nothing in gong fu comes easy, save sometimes general information. Gong fu is usually translated as “hard work” or the fruit thereof. A person has to work very hard to attain true flexibility. But it is an essential component of gong fu.

 I’m not sure if Wong Kiew Kit coined the term “The Art Of Flexible Legs” or if it is in fact, an authentic Shaolin term. Either way, for the purpose of practical study and cultivation, I like the classify seperate arts within my gong fu. Today, I was doing my leg flexibility routine. Seperate from daily stretching, I have put all of the practices that I have learned over the years together into a routine to improve, not maintain, flexibility in the hips, thighs, knees, ankles and all of the leg muscles. Putting methods that achieve a common purpose together and thinking of them as skills or little arts within gong fu is an ageold practice, but obviously no less valuable today. Theoretically, just doing the flexibility enhancing exercises of Shaolin should toughen your legs, and make them faster. The reason, is that when you focus at pressing into the ground with your feet, your mind concentrates heavily on the legs, and the blood and energy of the nervous system rushes into them improving their health. Also, the muscles are torn, but aren’t being built up, therefore, the tears are filled in with new tissue constantly, until the muscles in your legs are very very dense and healthy, making them quite “tough”. This is called “steel” or “iron” leg.

 This is what I do: I start with my feet together, and do the front bend, with my head on my knees, then a side bend, to either side, maintaining the feet straight ahead, and I make sure to come up all the way, so that whenever my spine twists, I am standing erect. Then I do a single leg stretch, touch the elbows to the heels, and a quaricept stretch on each side. Finally, I stand up, and pull my toes to my forehead with each foot. This is normal stretching that, I was taught, should be done for the legs each day.

 After the stretching routine, which takes about 5 or 10 minutes to complete, I go into a front split. Before I could do a front split, I would place a hand on the ground, and put the other hand on my waist, but use this same method. In the front split, or partial front split, the heel of the front foot should gently press into the ground, while the toes pull back towards the head. You absolutely must maintain breathing, if you stop breathing, or hold the breath, you can injure yourself, same as if you force the breath. The back foot should feel the toes pointing and reaching outward, held tightly together. Stretching for improved flexibility does not have to be excruciatingly painful and this is why;

 If you pull to the point of stretching and hold it, it is nice, and comfortable. If you go another inch, it hurts, but after a few moments, is nice again, if you go a little further, it hurts more, but once held, will start feeling great. You can stretch a long ways this way, and your brain will keep releasing endorphines.

 This is the secret to flexible legs.

 The other split goes like this:

 Put your hands on the ground in front of you supporting most of your weight in a deep horse stance. With your feet pointing straight ahead and remaining flat on the ground, slide them out to the sides, as far as you can go. Now transfer weight back onto the feet, and make sure they are pressing straight down into the ground. release the weight, and press them out a little more, then add the weight again in the same method as above.

 A full front split is when the split is performed, and the hands are around the front foot while the chin or nose is resting on the leg. A reverse front split has the back foot in the hands while the top of the head rests on the back leg.

 A full side split has both arms flat on the ground stretched out in front of you, the thighs against the ground, the side of your face on the ground, both feet flat and the ankles at 90 degrees, both feet pointing straight ahead.

 It may seem simple, until you start doing it everyday. It is easy, it just takes a long time to develop lasting flexibility. The keys are to keep going a little further, and always holding it at your peak as long as you can, and to breath naturally, without holding the breath.

 *This information is provided for educational purposes only, should you attempt to perform any of these exercises, it is done at your own risk.

 Peace,

 Dave

 There is an old saying that goes with longfist and traditional shaolin. This saying, once understould and put into practice, is what gives the techniques their power. “The hands and the feet should be like stones attached to the ends of a rope.” At first hearing this saying, you’ve just started longfist, plum flower boxing or praying mantis, and most of your techniques are big whirling movements. Meteor strikes, hammer fists, hanging punches, big hooking kicks, big hooking punches, sweeping kicks, big tangling blocks etc. From this perspective on gong fu, it is easy to see the meaning of this saying. The body is loose, almost no effort is used anywhere except for the waist and lower back. The hands, when they make contact, must be stiffened, to issue power. Hands like stones, arms like ropes.

 Later, the techniques change. Really, they are the same techniques, just done with smaller circles and in combinations. At which point, it gets easy to forget the importance of the sayings that go along with a style. If you however “forget” this saying, you stop doing gong fu, and start doing your own thing. This saying contains the very essense of northern shaolin gong fu. Recently, sometime last year, I found an incredible discovery for myself, that many people may have already found. It took my longfist to another level.

 I was studying wudang qigong methods, up here in central Maine, under a teacher that studied for years in Taiwan. One qigong punching technique, that is shaolin, he pointed out, that our fists should be held firmly but the arms very loose. He shook his fist, and it looked like a stone attached to a piece of rope. My appifiny stopped the class with a loud “No f’ing way, thats so easy!” obviously directed at myself, followed by a  ”did I just say that outloud” look of embarresment with my hands on my head. All he really did was reword that saying a little, and shake his arm in demonstration of nothing but that one concept.

 I got home and tried it out, and would like to simplify all of my findings throughout my longfist study in this article with two very basic great exercises for shaolin gong fu, including the ”firm fist loose arm” concept, that I think should be done every single day throughout your training.

 The first is the posture that some schools call “preperation” and some call “WuJi” and some call “crane”. It is with the hands at the sides, slightly in front, while you stand upright with the toes pointing out 45 degrees. Often in shaolin, the feet are together, but that is all irrelevant. When you are in this position, simply think of the hands as being heavy, full of heavy liquid. As you feel them filling with heaviness, let the torso become completely loose and relaxed keeping the spine suspended by holding up the head. Standing like this even for a few minutes a day in the bathroom at work or school, in the basement while your doing your laundry, in the kitchen when your cooking whatever, when you aren’t going to be distracted, will greatly enhance the transmission of force in your gong fu.

 The next exercise, is to take your ma bu stance, with your arms at the sides like holding a staff through your abdomen, and try to firm the fists while keeping the arms loose. Using the waist to generate the movement, and the loose shoulder to direct the arm, punch out keeping a loose arm and a firmed hand, when the hand returns to the waist repeat on the other side, and do as many as you want. Even 30 on each arm should show some benefit.

  Enjoy.

 Peace.

 One thing I see a lot of on youtube and at tournaments, is people with very low skill executing techniques in sequences with full power. It is obvious to the on looker, that the technique’s power comes from slightly relaxing then tightly contracting the muscles and spending a lot of mental energy in doing so. A person who practices that way all of the time, cannot improve after a certain low level of skill is met.

 Part of the problem, is that when these types of people are home practicing their gong fu alone, going through the drills and sequences, they are either using self resistance, power and speed, or all three. That isn’t how gong fu is practiced. The important things to do, when you are studying your techniques, is to fully concentrate your mind and completely relax your body. When your mind is really concentrated, you can feel the rythm, see the uses, get a feel for the movements and really absorb the practice time. When your body is completely loose, signals and blood are properly delivered, and there are no distractions coming from your body. You can really flow from one technique to the next, understand the transitions, the places where there is a little power, and where there is alot etc. Remember that you memorize the sequence, so that you can go home and let it teach you, your not teaching your gong fu anything, your gong fu is teaching you. This is how I was taught:

 Before examining your forms, or any pieces of your forms lie flat on your back. Listen to the rythm of your breathing and relax the belly completely. Then relax the chest and the face, then the pelvis and the legs, the toes, the toenails, conciously relax every single part of the front of your body. Then the top. The sides, the bottom and the back. When you stand up, stand up very slow, and keep close attention to the breathing. Just pay attention to it. When you do your forms, concentrate on the area between the navel and the hip bones. You don’t need to picture energy or time the breathing, just concentrate on that area. In every movment, stay completely soft. When your done, throw a few punches and you’ll see what I mean.

 One of the most ancient methods of Chinese gong fu, most basic to the craft itself, is the relaxed repatition of techniques. In other words, holding a horse stance, loosely, or “soft” and repeating one thousand vertical fist strikes in a medium pace very smoothly, with no interuption or jerking motions. It is important that the mind is really concentrated, and all of the ideal structural requirments are met.

 One of the things that you are training, perhaps the most important  is your speed. The reason of “how” is simple. First, relaxed muscles move faster. Second, relaxing the arm minimizes the amount of energy expent on unecessary muscle contractions and allows the muscles actually needed to get more attention. Third, if the mind is concentrating, it will see how simple the technique is. Therefore, there is no extra thought, just this one move, this simple idea, shortening the amount of time from decision to action. Fourth, it cuts out extranious movement, the technique is refined to meet the highest level of economy of motion. No pulling back, no unecessary lifting or turning, just “wack” in succesion. This same thinking is applied to all the rest of your gong fu, making you appear super fast.

 Really, it’s mostly how deep you understand economy of motion, how relaxed and flexible you are, as well as how clear your mind is. Your speed, also has amazing benefits. For one thing, the velocity of a strike is somewhat dependent upon on it’s speed. The faster you hit, in a sense, the harder the hit. Obviously it’s also difficult to defend against a really fast attack, who can catch a bullet? Maybe somebody, but who can catch them in rapid succesion?

 That’s the real the meaning of the old sayings. You should also practice combinations that same way, over and over, and keep changing what combinations your practicing. That way, not only is gong fu built into your gross motor skill, but complicated techniques are simplified. Which is how they should appear to you, really simple, since they are, once you realize that each complicated technique is built on the combination of simpler techniques.

 One of the biggest problems people have in learning gong fu, is effectively and smoothly going from one to stance to another. Once sequence or form practice makes this possible, the problem that follows is usually either choosing a way to stand to execute a technique without thinking about it, or finding the right height to stand at in a stance. If you are free fighting, and you have to evaluate what your doing, your probably going to lose. Unless the other person is evaluating themself even more scrutinizingly. Should something ever happen in your everyday life, requiring you to use your gong fu, it’s useless if you have to plan your attack or worse your defense with a lot of thought. Especially when it comes to something as basic and natural as where and how to stand.

 Lighten up. The reason that we practice stancework is obvious, and it has nothing to do with making sure that your  standing a certain way when your fighting. Stancework was discovered and refined to find all of the possible ways to move while upright, and strengthening their functional ability. At a very high intermediate level, your stances still won’t look proper when actually used. Perhaps, a real deep master of gong fu would have perfect stancework while fighting. I can tell you though that 6 hours a day, 3 years later, you will probably still have high partial stances in fighting, though you’ll be able to use the skills gained from stancework at every point in the fight. There is nothing wrong with high partial stances. In fact, I think it demonstrates your practical understanding of real gong fu. The problem would be, if you were doing sequences, or training and were using high partial stances. But that would require a stupidity too akward to suggest.

 When your stancework is strong, which, the way I was taught, takes three years, you can easily “outstep” people. People can’t approach or retreat from you for example  unless you let them, an other thing is that if they aren’t swinging at any given moment, you can use a proper stance to knock them over, even if they significantly outweigh you.

 Stances are a way to examine your own body mechanics. Stances are a device first, and a tool later. Since through stances, you discover how to use any way of standing to various ends, even proper stances can be effectively applied, which is when you start to be able to use the actual stances. A beautiful thing to watch. When that happens, the stances take on a different form. But that doesn’t matter if we’re still worried about how to get from one stance to the next.

 The answer is in understanding. Gong fu is simple. But it takes time to unravel it into the simple. Once you digest what you know, you’ll see more.