gongfu

 pardon my use of capitalization in this post. my keyboard is restricting the use of the left shift key temporarily, and i don’t feel like retraining my right hand.

  there is an important concept which relates to moving the body quickly and powerfully that is sometimes overlooked. when your techniques lack power and speed they say, “look to the ground”. this sounds good, it is atleast an answer, but what does that mean exactly?

 remember that all of your power to effect other objects forcefully is derived from your root. if you struck someone while laying on your back, your root might be your back. since you are standing for must techniques, your root is your feet. there is another saying “the toes grip the ground”. this can be taken literaly to mean that the toes should seperate, like a claw, extend outward, and press against the ground, retracting slightly to grip with their pads, or print areas. this allows a person to gain a firmer grip initially, but it also eventually develops a feeling of firmly “gripping” the ground with the body as a connected unit and mostly the legs and feet.

 another thing that can be repeated to help a person see this, is that when you stand normally, most people allow the weight of their body to flucuate in different joints and areas of the foot. in kung fu, one should try to concentrate all of the body’s weight into the center/s of the balls of the feet/foot. in order to do this, the legs must gently pull together slightly if they are positioned apart from one another. a constant inward pull however, would not put the weight of the body directy into the ground through the balls of the feet, instead, the body’s weight would be dispersed throughout the feet and the gripping forces of the legs pulling straight toward eachother. instead, in proper posture, the legs are gently pulling only slightly together, while relaxed and very controlled, directing their force straight into the ground.

 now, when you decide to move, in order to do that, you first must press against the ground with one or both of the feet. “corkscrewing” or gripping, is a way to maximize that press to project you in whichever direction with speed and power.

 the best illustration of corkscrewing, or “drilling” the feet may be as follows:

 stand upright with your feet together. sink your weight folding slighly at the hips (the area that I call the literal waist, and what i mean by that is the area where the femur meets the pelvic opening) and backs of the knees. think of taking a step forward, and use this procedure;

 shift all of your weight to the right foot, firmly gripping the ground. the fold is now more dramtic on the right side and your torso trns slightly, naturally, so that your left shoulder is a little forward and your right shoulder thus drawn back.

 lift the left foot, and place just the heel in front of you on the ground close enough to the body that it does not bare any weight. start to transfer to the left foot, and the toes will slap the ground. as soon as they do, immediatly grab the ground with them, the left toes and the bottom of that foot, and release the grip from the right foot. do not rise up or down, but let yor head/torso etc float on the same plane. if you did it right, you will have moved faster, and more forcefully than you probably ever had before.

 storing and releasing slight tension, in a domino effect is one of the key secrets to effectively practicing gong fu.

 For aesthetic or conditioning purposes, a person might want to increase the depth of their stance. But how is that done exactly? You flip through the magazines, watch the Jet Li movies, but just don’t see how they get so low. I use deep stances for two reasons. The first reason is to condition my body. I practice low/deep stances seperate from my “real” kung fu stances even though they are the same stances. I look at this type of stance work as having nothing beneficial except incredible conditioning value. The other reason, is to show off to new students. Haha. I get a kick out of the blank stare followed by “gawdamn”.

 What new students don’t always realize, is that deep stances have almost nothing to do with laying the smack down. What they do have to do with, is getting up off of the ground fast, having very strong legs, and being able to root instead of fall over in a very rare circumstance. The leg strength, and my creative use of that strength so far, is enough for me to keep them.

 Now if you’ve decided that you want the deep stance you need to know how to achieve it. And the first thing you should develop, is a good deep squat. If you put your feet only slightly wider than your shoulders, put your arms out in front of you for balance, and bend your knees, you should be able to make your thighs become parallel to the floor.

 Once you can perform a proper squat, you should try it on one leg, with the other leg stretched out in front of you as if you were kicking with the heel. When you are able to do that, all you need to know is this; And I am assuming your kung fu is good enough to be thinking about something like deep stance work outside of your existing cirriculum:

 You can bend the waist. In other words, while the back must remain fully erect, and the top of the head flat, you can fold at the literal waist so that your torso is at an angle to the floor. You can also open your feet some. The less bend at the hips, and the less open your feet, atleast in appearance, the higher the level of kung fu you posess. You do not need to hold low stances. But if you do them correctly, the fruit of holding them for extended periods is really quite sweet.

 Good luck, and have fun.

 Forearms are of immense importance. They are more ifluential to grip strength then the fingers themselves. In fact, I don’t think it is possible to have strong fingers and not have strong forearms, or vice versa, since the major muscles of the fingers are in the forearms. In gong fu, not only does a dense, strong forearm mean the ability to utilise a hard block when necessary, but we strike with the forearm and use the grip extensively. Therefore, if you don’t strengthen the forearms, your kung fu’s usability will suffer.

 One of the easiest and most effective ways to train the forearms are with pull ups. Pull ups will strengthen and harden the forearms, biceps, lats, chest and abdomen, making this an incredibly important gong li exercise. Many people will do them in big sets, for example, repeating the exercises to failure, doing something else for a while, then going back to do them again to failure. If you really tear yourself up from doing pull ups, they say that you should rest the next day. If you do rest, you can still train the forearms with specific exercises.  Also, if you cannot do pullup, just hang from the bar, and relax so that you drop a little then come back up that inch or whatever. After a few days you’ll be able to do half reps, and in a week or two, the pullup. One popular grip training device in kung fu is called an “eagle catcher” but it looks like it could cause tendon problems to me, so I have never used it. I do like the grippers though, and have always been quite partial to those.

 With a dumbell, you can isoloate the forearm with two major exercises. For the first exercise, you simply stabilize the elbow on a bench, or on your leg while sitting and do wrist curls to failure. I will do 6 sets to failure like this: repeat the exercise to failure, switch to the other arm and repeat to failure on that side, then immediatly switch back. This exercise really works the underside of the forearms. After a week or two, your muscles will start to swell up after you do the exercises, and you will have huge forearms for 15 minutes or so. After a month or two, some of the swelling will stay, and you will notice that your forearms are growing, and your grip is improving.

 The next isolating exercise is easiest done standing. I do both sides at the same time, because I like to train the whole body that way whenever possible. Simply lift the dumbells straight in front of you, parallel to the floor, with your elbows at your sides and rotate your forearms through their full range of motion. In other words, fist down, and fist up. Sometimes I will hold at each position, other times I will just very briefly pause at each of the two positions that are the peaks of that direction. Since most gong fu strikes use a rotation of the forearm, this exercise will put some power into your techniques. You don’t want to hurt yourself but need enough weight to only be able to do 12 reps max. You should also toss your iron palm bag around and catch it. Do it playfully.

 I do my forearms and abdomen everyday. Following the lead of Bruce Lee. And I have only had the opposite of injury or poor growth/strength development.

 There is one area of tension in gong fu, that even the begining student knows about and that is the hip. The hip can either be “open” or closed. If you were to stand in a position as if you were fencing, or lunging forward with one leg and leaving the other foot planted, placing most of your weight on the forward leg, you might notice that based on training the motions of gong fu, you can only really do a five things in variations. If you were to move, but not move your feet you can only do three things, with only one of them having possible leg variations. If you remove the third thing, which is transfering weight, you can only do two things, which is what we are talking about. Namely, you can twist the hips. If you twist the hips to the right, and your left leg is forward, you are opening the left hip. This extends the reach of the left arm, and torques the pulling in of the right. It also forces you to use the rear leg firmly to drive the left arm/side of the body into whatever technique you’re employing. If you still have the left leg forward, and twist to the left, there is a little fold at the left hip. With this little fold, you are rooted below the waist, and can present left and right side techniques in virtually all of their myriad ways. This is called, squaring the hips. And it is made firm by a slight tension in the “closed” side of the hip, in this case the left one, where the thigh meets the pelvis. That area, is called “storing energy” or having that feeling of slight tension there is called “kua”, which means “hip” but implies power, firmness or stored energy in the hip in this sense I think.

 I don’t mean to be confusing. Well, maybe a litte, but only so that you reread it. Anyway, there isn’t just kua. There are other folds that are needed to effectively “store jin” or act as areas where you can coil the body to suddenly open up and emit a forceful blow. The knees can be pressed inward slightly, following the lead of the feet for example, and when you pull the elbows in, you create the same sort of tension point at the shoulders, where the arm meets the torso. If you were to carefully examine non-performance wu shu or “gong fu” videos of “masters” you would see that all of those places are very tightly folded, and that they open in an exact sequence.

 This is quintessential to the whole theory of gong fu. If there weren’t places that the body could collapse into itself, and then thrust out of, no matter how small the collapse, we wouldn’t be able to suddenly explode and create force. We would thus have to pull telegraph our techniques like bad Karatekas. This, I think, is really what is essentially meant by the sayings like “a needle wrapped in cotton” or “effortless power” and many, many more. It may look like small movements, but they are able to generate and deliver force beyond the perception of anyone unaware of that portion of biomechanics if used in proper sequence and with intent.

 Just realize, that there are several points on the body, where there exists a tension point, other than the hips. If you really realize that, you can strength train those areas of the body to achieve maximum force. Also, by doing your systems qigong sets, and really doing them, you can improve the mind-muscle connection at those points. This is what I am thinking about today on account of being in tai chi class tonight, so that is my blog content. Peace out girlscouts.

 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. 

 Gong li, or training strength, is at the core of all good martial arts foundations. Picture a boxer, that never worked out, and then went into a match outweighted and overreached. Surely, gong fu isn’t about a series of blows exchanged in a ring in the spirit of agressive albeit “friendly” competition like boxing. It is mostly about proper technique, refining techniques that win and using the least amount of strength so that you always have plenty left. That doesn’t imply that you shouldn’t train like Mohammed Ali.

 One of the least respected people in Gong Fu is Bruce Lee. He rewrote the schlitz, and was one of the only people willing to teach non-Chinese actual kung fu… without any BS or outdated, primitive spiritual mysticism attatched. People say things like “What he did wasn’t kung fu”, or “He only learned half of the Wing Chun system.” and the most commonly said I think “He was a good self promoter, buit nothing special.”.  All of it is redicilous nonsense I think. Bruce Lee really had it pretty well figured out.

 The best systems of gong fu, are the systems that put a huge emphasis on gong li. Why? Because their players can easily beat most players from significantly better systems that don’t train gong li. With or without gloves. How can a small child fight a grown man and win? Even with some crazy crane beak skills, a child is going to get hurt. It is the same logic. How can a scrawny Bagua gong fu master with no real significant speed or strength stand up against a completely ripped Tiger (lesser) style master? Unless the Tiger stylist is significantly mentally slow, he’ll win, his physical power ensures it.

 The internal arts proliferate the BS. We won’t get into though. Here are the basics, that you can take anywhere. A hotel room chair, a dry floor and almost anything heavy will be your perfect gym.

 First, is the big five. With these five exercises, you can get consistently stronger throughout your life, and all of them can train different aspects of your Li- or physical strength by being still at different intervals, being done fast, or being done slow, even by slowly doing half the form, and suddenly and explosively doing the other half for striking power.

 1.)Pushups

 2.)Pullups

 3.)Dips

 4.)Squats

 5.)Crunches/Situps.

 Now for dips, you just use a chair. For pullups, a bar or a door frame if you need some arthritus, and pushups can be done on the knucles or palms, flat on the floor, or with inexpensive pushup bars.

 Now, to target specific muscles, and thereby enhance your traveling strength training, you can use weights. You can use dumbells, should you have packed, or milkjugs filled with clay/sand. You can even fill a 40 oz malt bottle with sand and use that for a little resistance and just do huge numbers of reps.

 Here are my favorite dumbell lifts for gong fu:

1.)Bicep curls

2.)Wrist curls

3.)Standing rows

4.)Overhead presses/squat presses.

5.)Shoulder shrugs, but when your shoulders come up, roll the weights up onto your palms with the wirst bent all the way up, and when your shoulders come down, let the weights roll down onto the second knuckles of the fingers. If you have dumbells the is.

6.) Standing tricep extentions. Put the weights behind your head with your elbows pointing at the ceiling, then, without moving your elbows, extend your arms and retract.

 Mess with it. Try everything, and see what makes your gong fu better. But lifting weights and doing isometrics makes the bones denser. That’s medically proven. Not only will you thank yourself as you get along in years, but what fighter doesn’t want dense bones?

 Some people want them. You’d have to be a pretty advanced fighter to actually use them they say, but you never know, you could be carrying something heavy in each hand and the upper half of a two part door swings shut on you. You never know if high kicking skils are usefull until you have them. I can kick comfortably over my head all day long. I would say, the only real benefit, is improved circulation in the legs from the flexibility. The height of a front kick is entirely dependent on the ability of your leg muscles to stretch in a ballistic way. That is, the muscles elongate, with tension as you kick up, and shrink back after the kick. Thus there are two factors which determine the height of a kick, strength and flexibility.

 There are a few simple exercises for kicking power, these are pretty softcore but will get you all the height you need.

 Lay on your back and rest your hands behind your head. With your feet together, and your toes pointing out, lift your legs until they are perpendicular to your torso. Lower them back to about an inch from the ground, spread them apart, still pointing the toes, and hold that position for 3 seconds. Bring your feet together again, and bring them up to 45 degrees, or half way, spread and hold, bring them back together and perpendicular, spread and hold, then back to 45 degrees etc.

 After resting a few seconds, or minutes if you need it, lift your feet again a few inches off of the floor with your toes, again, pointing straight out. Kick your feet, as if you were swimming, just little flaps. Do they for as long as you can keep to the form.

 Lift your legs and roll onto your shoulder blades, using your arms to brace yourself at the hip. Ride an imaginary unicycle. Forward, and backward. It is good to vary the speed and duration of each direction. Using this method, you can use this same exercise for a very long time without your body getting used to it and see improvement consistently.

 The front fold. Standing with your feet together, fold at the waist keeping your back ramrod straight, but with your head up, looking forward. Bend as deep as you can toward your feet, but make sure your back is straight, and that you therefore bend at the hips. Stand up, and don’t ever do this stretch if you are cold or have any kind of back/neck problems, fold over at the hips, but do so by relaxing the vertabrae in the neck and all the way down the spine, so that each one opens up as you bend over. Keeping the legs straight, plant your face against the shins and grab the backs of your heels. Do both of these stretches, not just frontward, but sideward, and on each side. When you do them sideways, you keep the hips facing forward.

 Try for the front splits, stretch as deep as you can, but there is no need for a static stretch, or hold, just keep stretching each side. You don’t just need to stretch the back of the legs, but the front and your spine muscles. Adding the quadricep stretch, where you stand on one leg and hold the other leg’s ankle in your palm with your thighs together, you will get the right flexibility.

 High kicks don’t take very long to achieve, but it is easy to pull muscles if your not careful, by overstretching while cold, kicking too hard too often etc. and that will set you back. Just kick as high as you can, in lines back and forth, over and over, do your conditioning and stretch everyday and high kicks will come that way.

 Jin, or martial power, can be expressed physically at any point in the body. It is shaking, or trembling power. Fa jing, or emitting jin, doesn’t mean that a person is building up a mystical energy and shooting mind bullets at somebody. It means “The whole body, working in nearly perfect unison, instantly gernerates and directs all of it’s energy into a single point.” It requires a relaxed firmness and a sudden muscular tension. It is driven by the core muscles in the abdomen, hips and lower back. The correct muscles must act like a whip, from the foot to the fist, and the motion must stop abruptly… BAM… releasing all of the energy into the target. When you hit a heavybag with good jin, the bag will move very little, but you can use it to break bricks thrown into the air .  It is the “force” that seperates gong fu from everything else.

 All of the techniques of gong fu are designed to employ fa jin. Because of that design, the patterns force you to learn it. For the average person, if you don’t have fa jin, though you may have techniques, there really isn’t anything seperating you from anyone else. Because of their structural nature, neither the Japanese, nor the Korean martial arts, are able to use, or cultivate the use of jin. Sadly, this is why unless a karateka spends several hours a day, just strengthening his physical body and spends a few days a week doing hard sparring and wrestling, if he should find himself in a threatening situation, it is up to the gods, so to speak, what the result will be. When people doubt the power of fa jin, I am aways happy to demonstrate it. It is very simple, and quite dangerous. So have at it. Here is a brief, but powerful introduction. Let this be a point of reference, for all of the faux kung fu players I’ve seen on youtube. Yourwelcome.

 Stand with your feet a little wider than shoulder width apart. The center of the tops of your feet point straight ahead. To do this, your toes are pigeoned in slightly. Position your knees almost over your feet, relaxed and bent. Tuck your hips forward all the way, and then back all the way, feel where they are slightly tucked under but not tense and keep them there. It should feel like you are mounting a horse. Straighten your back hard, starting at the base of your spine and rolling each vertabrae up as straight as you can, thrusting the flatened crown of your head straight up, then completely relax the spine, keeping it comfortabley erect, and the head gently thrusted up. Position the shoulders in the center of their backward and forward range, but drop them, keeping them sunken. Relax the whole body into the ground, feeling that the weight is going straight into the ground through the center of the balls of your feet. It isn’t in the spine, or the hips or the knees, it is in the ground, straight into the ground not out to the sides.

 Now without letting the body go up and down, or moving the feet, bring your palm across your waist with the fingers pointing down to the center line. Now straight up to the center of your chest with the fingers pointing away from your body. Keeping your whole body relaxed, rotate your palm outward to strike an imaginary target, keeping your elbows deeply bent.

 Useless. A completely useless technique unless you were like super strong right? Now try it with fa jin. Make sure to keep the body relaxed.  This time, think of the right knee moving one inch forward and striking. Next, the hip, then the spine twists and you strike with the shoulder, then remember that the elbow is directing the palm as you shoot it out. If your body doesn’t have any locked joints, everything is bent, you did not go up or down and you stayed relaxed, then you felt that.

 Here is the other thing. Every action, creates an equal and opposite reaction. So, it stands to reason, that if you are spiraling the right side of the body outward and finally emitting the hand, you are withdrawing the left side, into the left hand. If you were studying yourself carefully, you would have seen that it is just so.

 This time do the same thing, but first retract the left knee an inch, then stike an inch forward with the right knee, and feel the chain reaction to the right palm with the left palm at the waist. Do it slow until you feel it. When you are ready, do it all as one undifferentiated motion. Remember to stop the hand, as it makes contact, as if the object you were striking was red hot.

 That is Jin. Haha. Use the force wisely mah ninjas. There are even deeper levels of fa jin. But I will save that for me. Muahaha. Naw. It’s just too difficult to try to blog complex biomechanics tonight, and if you got that far on your own, you might want to think about finding a teacher that can hook you up hands on. I hope this recap gets out there, to people that need it. I am sick of seeing people do weak ass gong fu, karate style on youtube and looking proud of it. 

 Some principles, are common to all gong fu methods. If these principles are adhered to, one is able to eventually begin to discover the right feeling for practicing gong fu. Before this feeling manifests, the feeling of the proper way of moving, a person’s gong fu is really no more than poorly executed series of techniques.

 Here are some key points, elaborated on, about gong fu in general.

 All of our power, even physical strength needs to have a root source. You have to push against the earth very hard in order to push a car. Why would punching someone in the head be any different. With this in mind, it stands to reason, that the firmer your root, the more powerful your attacks. This is true. It is true in boxing, muay thai, or any kind of fighting. The thing is, when you read kung fu books, they almost always talk about a “firm root” as if it just meant having strong legs. Maybe it is because most of the good teachers still don’t have the best english, or maybe it is because to someone who has been doing gong fu for 40 years, it just seems common sensical. While strong legs are important, having a rooted punch doesn’t just mean an arm that is connected to a torso which is connected to a strong set of legs. To firmly root a hand or elbow attack, a person should practice moving the muscles from the foot to the hand in the correct order. We do this, by understanding the postural requisits of gong fu. The knees are slightly bent, the hips are slightly tucked, the spine is straight, and the shoulders are rounded etc. All of these things have to do with transfering your force into your feet, and from your feet to other areas of the body. Don’t let that resonate mystically, I am talking about muscles and physics.

 This is the whole reason why we get that sinking feeling, which we direct to the center of the balls of the feet. When you really relax, and have a feel, you’ll notice why in order to do that, your knees must point in the direction of your toes etc. We lower our center, and grasp the ground with our feet, not only making us hard to move and well balanced, but able to deliver powerful blows.

 Sunken elbow. When you sink the elbows straight down, not only do you protect your joints and are able to deliver more force in a punch since the muscle has more power when it is somewhat contracted, but you can very quickly move the arm, generating more inertia, and also withdraw the arm easily to protect the ribs, minimizing the exposure of your body to your opponent.

 Don’t bob up and down. By moving the body up and down as you are traveling, not only do you waste an enormous amount of energy, but you lose your root, and your speed is minimized.

 Economy of motion. Each technique is designed to use as little movement as possible. There are almost no techniques in any style of gonf fu which require you to withdraw, or wind up for a motion while you aren’t doing something else at the same tiem. There is just open, and closed. When one side is open the other side should be closed most of the time, so that it can open, and thus follow up, while the other side closes, guarding the body and preparing for the next attack. Wasting movement wastes power, energy and time.

 The limbs are near the body. When you have attacked, you follow up or withdraw the limbs unless baiting the opponent. You do not punch, even in your forms, and leave your arm sticking out unless it is a qigong or li building set. When training fighting movements, you do not leave the arms or legs out since they can easily be grapped or attacked.

 Relax. Even in the hardest or most external/physical types of gong fu, when fighting, the body is very relaxed. This is essential to speed, freedom of movement, and more stamina.

 To master gong fu, master it’s basic principles, core techniques and conditioning. Gong fu, is the basics.

 In kung fu, it can be difficult to obtain information about the mental aspects. Even with decent teachers, some teachers neglect this important part of gong fu training. There are various methods to develop various qualities, and various teachers will help you train the mind in several ways. If you aren’t paying attention, you might miss it. For example, if your teacher tells you to focus on something during training a certain posture and to remain that way for a certain length of time, this, among other things, is training the mind. If instead you just assume the posture and watch t.v, your not doing anything but wearing out your joints. It isn’t secret information, you can find different real ways to train the mind in most good books on gong fu. It is however, sometimes easy to overlook. I think it is better that way, since until you master the rest of the content, you probably won’t go back and take the mental training too seriously. When you get to the point that the body is pretty competant with gong fu’s moving patterns, mental training opens the door to a whole new realm of gong fu. “One thing at a time, and a little each day is the best way.” my Grandfather always says that.

 In this article, I would like to present a relatively simple, ten minutes per day way to radically tranform the mind from a mushy unorganized mess, into a sharply focused weapon. This method is great for aggressive linear attacking, like that found in xing yi, since it trains the mind to focus itself into something, penetrating. This is an external method. The only internal method that I know uses the same concept, only it is applied to the body instead of an external object, and not to sound too hokey, but since I do know enough to know that doing that wrong could be dangerous, I admit that I don’t know enough to talk about it.

 This is the external method:

 Sit half lotus, or full lotus, depending on your ability to sit in the lotus position, which is the position where you sit “indian” or crossed legged and have either one foot on the opposite thigh or both feet on the opposite thighs respectively. 3-5′ or about a meter away from where you will be sitting, place and light a stick of incense. Sit still and watch the glowing ember. What I mean by “watching” is not that you stare, or deliberatly focus, just that you watch it carefully and intently. The mind, naturally bringing up everything from physical discomfort to your studies and personal life is completely ignored. What I mean, is that while your mind may start to wander, don’t think about whatever comes to mind, just ignore it. it is after all, you, your mind, and you can either think about what comes up or not think about it. Not that thinking about that thinking is anything but redundant nonsense. What is important is just not thinking, instead watching, carefully and intently, that glowing ember at the end of the stick. Not for any purpose, or reason, except that because it is glowing. forget about yourself and anything else in the room, just watch. Slight physical discomfort from twisting the legs will help you in not thinking about anything else.

 Everyday, watch a stick of incense burn all the way out. It is best at night, when it is really quiet, but it doesn’t need to be otherwise dark. Eventually, you will notice a calm of mind in your daily self and an ability to think about one thing for a very long time. Next, you might notice that you can pay attention to anything, no matter how lame. At this point, you could go on to the next stage, which is training martial intent. For this, you simply do the same thing as before, only now as you watch the incense burn down, you watch it spitefully, with bitterness or ferociously and with courage. You can train the martial intent in many different flavors depending on the style you do, and the spirit exhibited. You should look at what constitutes the “spirit” of your style, and what that spirit means to the method by reading the old poetry and literature of the style if you are interested in this aspect of gong fu.

 It sound easy, and maybe you will find it easy. But most people find it difficult to concentrate like that. As soon as you realize you have lost concentration, just start concentrating. This practice is one way you can build concentration.

 Originally, this method was used to train archers, so it would make sense to train like that if you were a police officer or another professional using a firearm. The most important result of this practice is your minds ability to focus very intently on one thing, whether it is a target or a concept, this practice is as beneficial today as it was centuries ago.

 Peace.