gongfu

 Some people want to learn this but don’t have any information. There are many different type of iron body training, and iron hand training in particular and some of them a kind of strange. Some don’t even use any external methods and claim to achieve hard body parts. That is, they don’t hit anything with their hands, they just do breathing and stretching movements. I would wager, that what those systems really stem from is students that didn’t learn the entire system, but went on to teach the method anyway.

 Either way, here is a simple, painless way to achieve the iron hand skill without any mystical connotations.

 You need some medium sized beans and a receptacle of some kind. Traditionally, the Chinese used Mung beans, but I use pinto beans or sometimes a mix of pintos and pinks. I put them in a rectangular plastic box and use approximately 3 pounds of beans. Ideally, a massive grain sack half filled with beans and the empty half of the sack rolled down for stability would be perfect. It would alow you to really jab your arms in and use some power.

 All you do, is jab your hands into the beans forcefully. You can use various hand positions at your liesure and various speeds. Do it for atleast 5 minutes a day, around the same time, and when you feel like it, do it significantly longer. After you are done, run your hands under hot water, rub them together and massage them. After you dry off you are done for that day, don’t do anymore bean jabbing or other methods until the same time the next day.

 The next part is impact training. Get two wide socks, one inside the other, or something else that would function in the same manner, and fill the inner one with the beans. If your crafty, a hankerchief sewn into a small pillow and filled with beans would be great. You don’t want to hurt the hands, just stress them gently and shock the bones a little each day. Lay this/these if you want to do both sides simultaneously on a sturdy table that will take a beating and not move around. Hit the bag. Use the open hand first, palm, back of the hand. Then the finger tips, crane beak, spear hand, sword secret hand. Then the foreknuckles and finally the fist itself. Over and over.

 The same goes for impact training, it’s porobably best to do atleast 5 minutes a day, but never expect results. It takes a long time. After a while, without noticing it as it happens since progress is slow, you will probably realize the drastic effect it has had all of a sudden.  Just make sure not to rest between jabbing beans and hitting a sack.

 Thats really all there is. The big thing to realize though, is that this is a “living” skill like all gong fu. If you stop doing it, after a while it will go away to some degree, as the hands repair themselves, and if you don’t do it consistently you won’t get any results at all. When you have gotten to a certain point, and the bones have  really hardened and become denser, I would assume that that is a permanent change, but I don’t know. I just know that it is important to keep doing whatever skills you want to really cultivate for the rest of your life as often as needed for growth.

 When you get some skill, try jabbing your hands through watermelons. Lot’s of people break coconuts open with their palms, and I’ve even seen one guy that could put his forefinger through the “eyes” of a coconut. The trick with piercing, is to move into the target at a perfectly straight line. You don’t want the energy of the movement to go up or down, left or right but to pirce directly into the smallest point. 

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