gongfu

 It seems to me, that a vast majority of people in this today’s world that practice kung fu have a problem with doing forms, or solo technique sequences. Forms, they say, are a waste of time, all they train is intent, which you can develop by hitting a heavy bag in the right “state of mind”. I disagree.

 The most obvious problem with this line of reasoning is in how one passes down the essense of kung fu. Without forms, it is next to impossible. It is by seeing the students form, that the teacher is able to make “corrections”, and by doing the forms, that the student enlightens to the method. Forms do hide applications, and only by practicing them tiredlessly, does one become aware of those applications. Each form is sacred, but I’m not talking about sentiment, I’m talking about the vastness of knowledge and skills living, in a sense, in the forms and waiting to become a part of who you are.

 Now, if your aim was to learn how to fight, and to learn very quickly, a wise teacher might extract a few movements from the style’s forms, make you practice them constantly, and simultaneously condition the body heavily for combat, maybe focusing on speed, strength and endurace and in that order.

 Forms also train the mind. Gong fu achieves a type of mind, that cannot be found elsewhere in the world. This is because, the movements of many entry level forms, are very wide and require seemingly odd while truelly brilliant positioning of the limbs, stepping while striking strategies etc. which require a “rewiring” of the brain, which isn’t proven to actually happen in my knowledge, so we’ll say “forces you to become aware of the body in a new way, and therefore your opponent/s, as well as your environment.”.

 Another benefit of forms practice, is that you can build a sense of opponent, and a clear fighting intent, that when projected onto a potential attacker, can be sensed, and even stop some fights, before they really start.  If you seem like you can and will fight, because you can and because you will, most people won’t want to fight you. It will also help you to focus on something continuously whilst maintaining awareness of everything else in your environment, like when chasing a ball while manuvering through a crowd, or navigating the traffic in your car.

 The thing is, in gong fu, there are many practices. Each one, is age old and time tested. To discard the practicing of forms is to discard gong fu. After six months of not doing forms, only certain patterns, conditioning and seated meditation, I started training forms again and noticed an enormous improvement in my gong fu. I would say that each piece, needs to be continuously refined, and rigorously maintained. It could even be thought of as a nice gun, with many parts, forming the overall integrity and usability. You have to clean the chamber and barrel, keep each component well oiled, make sure everything  is tight and you may even want to polish the holster.  Haha, and you wouldn’t want to fire a gun that was never taken care of.

 Peace.

 It has been argued that pushups aren’t a traditional gong fu training method. If not, who cares? They are a great way to strengthen the whole body and improve punching power. Of course there is old saying which might disagree, but most schools train the pushup. The thing is, while pushups are great, pull ups and dips are also important to balance the muscular development. You can’t think of only punching and kicking. There is blocking, parrying, locking… even wrestling, and short distance body stiking. It is important that all of the muscles are strong. This way, the entire body can be used to issue force, and when force is issued, there is a strong physical body doing it. Don’t get me wrong, internal practice can only improve your body’s ability to issue that “force”.

 I think it is a good idea to talk about the various methods of pushups that gong fu usually trains. If your style doesn’t use the pushup, pick it up as a side practice. Different pushups train different muscles, and some even train them in different ways. There is slow, fast, jumping and even stationary pushups. Stationary pushups, which are quite unconventional, are painful and train the mind’s endurance, while turning the entire body into a rock. It is sort of like deep stancework, how your whole legs eventually get very muscular and then very very hard, and dense. The stationary pushup does this to the upper body, including the flank. Some people say this will harm your gong fu. Which just isn’t true. In fact, the harder your body is, the more damage it can take externally. If my floating ribs got punched today, it probably wouldn’t hurt at all. If you punched a fat coach potato in the ribs, they would fall like a sack of grain, usually, even from a relatively soft hit.

 Anyway, these are the common pushup variations:

 Standard. This is the U.S military pushup, used in all branches of the service. You get in position, with the upper arms straight out to the sides, and the hands right under the elbows.

 Wide. This pushup simply spaces the hands out farther from the elbow, and targets the outer pectoral muscles of the chest.

 Inside, narrow. These pushups require the elbows in, and the hands under the armpits. This is the most important one for martial arts since it trains the muscles of the perfect jab.

 Diamond. Also called triangle, for these pushups, you form a diamond shape with the thumb and forefinger directly in front of the chest. This targets the inner chest muscles, as well as the triceps.

 One handed pushup. For this one, you simply spread the feet apart to shoulder width and do a diamond pushup with one hand. The armless shoulder dips towards the ground and then thrusts towards the air.

 The judo pushup. For this one you start with your feet at shoulder width and you butt in the air, with your arms a little wider than the shoulders. You dip down towards the hands, almost brushing your nose on the ground and then snake your head up as if going under a fence. Your track back the same way. This is a great shoulder exercise.

 Fingertip pushups. There are several variations, and they train the grip of the hand and the forearm.

 Expolosive pushups. This is when any variety of pushup is done very quickly as if punching. The highest form of this pushup is to thrust yourself off of the ground to standing, but the more commonly done high level form is simpley to thrust of the ground a short distance and clap the hands to repeat.

 Practice hard and get strong.

 Peace.

 People talk alot of Schlitz about lifting weights in kung fu. Almost everyone that isn’t x-military/boxing/police/actual hardass, will repeat the well known mantra “Lifting weights makes the muscles too tight to properly lead Qi”. Most of the people who actually use that saying, have an “idea” of this Chinese word “Qi” that changes everyday. Most of them, in reality, are people who are physically weak and lazy and like the excuse.

 Qigong feels good. Leading “Qi” or doing relaxed body work led by the breath really feels wonderful, and it’s good for you. People that have done Yoga for long enough to really start to get some results will attest. In fact, the real root of Chinese kung fu’s “internal” principles, is Indian Yoga. It’s just been refined into something else.

 Qigong, is important to gong fu, and if you lift weights and do hard conditioning drills, it’s even better for you and your gong fu skill. Without a body, where is the kung fu? That thinking should lead to the stronger and healthier the body, the better the gong fu/qigong. Really. No ifs ands or buts.

 Now in gong fu, there are so many different moves, so many different punches and blocks, paries, fingertip strikes, elbow attacks, shoulder bumps, palm pushes, palm strikes. Really, there are thousands of different techniques. But in it’s simplist form, it can all literally be quantified into a handful of movements. This might seem ridiculous, but I’m not the first person in the United States to realize this, in fact, among the people practicing real gong fu out there, it is quite well known. With the upper body, mechanically, every single striking technique can be called a variant of one of five core techniques found in the gong fu style “Xing Yi Quan”. Xing Yi has some sketchy origins, but it is a miraculously simple and brutal fighting system. In this system of gong fu, there are five basic techniques: Split, Cross, Crush, Pound and Drill. Really, they are each found in eachother to some degree.

 For strengthening the body with weights, an age old gong fu practice, there isn’t anything better to use as a simple pattern. Here it is. Be careful, doing xing yi correctly will make you unaturally advantaged at fighting to begin with. Haha. Comment if you accidentally knock some fools out after doing this routine.

  Start with two dumbells that you can only curl for 5-8 reps. For most adult males that are just starting thats 20-40#s. Noone cares if you can lift more or less.

 Lay on your back, on your bench, or the floor if you dont have a bench, with the dumbells out at your sides parallel to your body so that you can pick them up if your on the floor, or obviouslly, you can hold them to lie on you bench.

 Carefully lift them over your torso, making sure not to drop them on yourself which could send you do the hospital quite humiliated.

 The first exercise strengthens the “splitting” technique. Turn your fists, as if you just snapped a pencil in half, so that they are 45 degrees down towards your feet from horizontal. Try this now sitting at your computer. Point both fist at the screen, so that the line of nuckles is parallel to the floor, and the elbows point straight down. Now rotate both the fists and the elbows 45 degrees towards eachother, so that the fist slopes downward 45 degrees to the pinky knuckle and the elbow points at the floor diagonally outward. The elbows should stay bent throughout the lifting. Point the elbows in this form at half way between their rotations. In other words, you’ve got out, and down, for normal elbow rotations, rotate them to the middle. Keep your fists spaced just to the outside of your ribs. Now just bring the fists down as far as the ribs if your on a bench, and the floor if your not. Repeat as many times as you can, take a short break and repeat again, do that 3-5 times.

 Te next position is drilling. Start with both fists down at your waist palms facing your feet. Rotate them as you lift them up, so that the palms face the same direction of the top of the head. Your arms will still be pretty bent at the apex of the move, since the weights only should go straight up and down away and toward the body.

 Next is crush. Start with palms facing eachother, with the arms bent 90 degrees. If your on your bench, the weights will be at your floating ribs, if your on the floor the elbows will be. Dont bring your arms up, the fists/weights move in a straight line, just semi straighten the arms.

 The last one is Cross, with which you only use one weight, and you may have to use a lighter one. Lay on your side, and do flys. That is, lay on the left side proped up with your left arm, with the weight in your right hand, on the floor or hanging by the bench and lift it as if you were pulling the cord on an old lawnmower.

 Thats all of them. Why no pound? It isn’t necessary. Pounds force is derived from the other four.

Try adding them to your existing workout for a couple weeks and see what happens.

 Peace.

 In external gong fu, the idea of “external” qigong is very important. The premise, is that you build Qi in the muscles/tendons and skin by deep physical conditioning, and when that qi accumulates, it is able to blast through blockages and open meridians, and natural accumulate at the dantiens as necessary. It is physically hard, but doesn’t require any special knowledge of internal theory to gain the same results as internal gong fu/qigong, over a shorter period of time in a young and dedicated student.

 Another benefit of external gong fu, that cannot be said for internal gong fu, is that the body is made very strong and flexible and able to be put to use martially years and years sooner. While the techniques may not be very complex in an intermediate student’s arsenal, there really isn’t any need for complexity. It is valid in all areas of Chinese MA and qigong, contrary to what many masters of qigong have said.

 I would say, one of the real reasons that internal arts like tai qi were taught in secret, is that their students would have been easily beaten before the ten or fifteen year mark. After the point when they had started to develop real internal strength they have already developed real skills, and according to legend, many high level gong fu masters were beaten to death and into the dirt by them. Obviously, Tai Qi and Bagua are quite merited, in proper context and Hsing Yi and Baji are both internal and external and yield martial prowess sooner.

 In external qigong practice, the body is built up muscularly, including the tendons and ligaments. By building strength and endurance in the physical body, and by understanding principle/core techniques, a person’s skill can become quite formidable. Without strength, in the muscles and bones, a person’s external gong fu is useless for most of their training, in some systems like “lohan” and “Mantis” probably forever. If you punch someone athletic, and you are physically weak, it won’t hurt them. Even if you punch some supposed “softspot” it won’t cause you to win a fight. Even with your crazy chain punching skillz or whatever.

 In gong fu, there is a basic formula to achieving a battle worthy body.

 1.) Flexible muscles are healthy muscles.

 2.) The entire body is a muscular network. We think of it as one muscle.

 3.) After the point of exhaustion, is when benefits are gained.

 4.) The harder you work, the more you get out of your work.

 It is a good idea to have a few tools at hand.

 1.) Free weights, or kettlebells.

 2.) A Chinup bar.

 3.)Pushup bars- pushups/chinups and dips will be the bulk of your upper body work. 

 4.)Enough space to work sequences.

 While you are developing muscular strength, it is important to be doing qigong sets and gong fu sequences immediatly after. This refines the muscles to specific tasks while they are still hot, and ensures that plenty of nurishment is going throughout the body to properly grow and heal. If you do your sequences at night, and your conditioning in the morning, which is a perfectly valid way to practice most gong fu, you should still do “martial” qigong sets immediatly after conditioning, even if you use medium depth stances and no jing.

 In the famous words on the now N.Y based Shaolin Monk- Shi Yan Ming- “More qi, train harder!”

 Wrestling is a very important part of kung fu. Most of the wrestling in kung fu, is designed to break brones, dislocate bones at the joints, destroy muscles/tendons and even to kill other people should the real need ever arrise in some practioners life in some generation. Contrary to the propaganda, it isn’t something new to kung fu, in fact, it is probably the oldest form of empty hand gong gu. What is new, is the idea of training wrestling against wrestlers of other styles. Which is a seperate topic. The joint locks of jiu jitsu and judo are derived almost directly from gong fu, as well as the throws and ground mechanics that were the original root of those arts. They are really something quite different today, but kung fu is still passing on those concepts.

  The first part of wrestling in gong fu is standup throwing. You should be able to knock someone down/throw someone, pretty easily without training specifically for wrestling if you really do gong fu. Not only are your legs hard to interupt in rooting, but the postural stances of gong fu are easily used in turning to overturn/toss/take someone to the ground. Once a person is on the ground, what comes next in gong fu, naturally is controlling them, by locking the joints. Once a person is face down, on the ground, and immobilized, they can be arrested, spoken to submission, or injured so that they are unable to present a threat. Many standup qin na techniques will take someone to te ground, making them less capable along the way and finally taking them out of service before, or immediatly after they hit the ground.

 This is important to note, since if you were to use kung fu wrestling as sport, it would immediatly lose it’s essense. Certain softcore techniques have been taken from gong fu, and added to the San Da arsenal. Why not the good ones?

 There are two reasons.

 Most people that really teach gong fu don’t teach competitive fighters.

 Most competitive fighters don’t use techniques that could easily damage a persons body permanently.

 Forcing someone to go down involuntarily isn’t particularly hard. The problem is, if they struggle, they will be injured badly.

 Here are some examples of very basic, simple standup techniques in Chinese martial arts that employ “grappling” skills.

 Hopefully I can figure out how to transfer video from my camera into a readable format to post on this blog soon!

 Person dressed in white, and person dressed in black. We will use this simple system for the sake of illustration.

 Person dressed in black, puts arms on white’s shoulders and gets in close to prevent him from striking and presses forward to off balance him, which he is about to follow up. White feels his hands under blacks arms, while stepping into black and “locking” his legs to root. White continues his hands behind black’s shoulders and around to the front of his throat, locking them. He forces his hip into black’s pelvis below the center of gravity, if heights permit, and turns his body, to fold black backward while pressing his hands forward on black’s throat. All happening simultaneously, and almost impercievably fast. Black’s neck/back could be broken, if something went slightly wrong.

 Black grabs whites shirt in the center of his chest. White grabs black’s hand whith his left, and steps outside of black’s right foot, while knocking his elbow towards white’s right in with the right arm from underneath and continues  the motion to grab the his face, and turning the entire body at the hips, and folding down at the waist to the left, planting him on the ground, on his back, and probably the back of his head/shoulders first while wrenching the arm, so quickly, he cannot defend once he is locked and so that he cannot adjust himself in the air.

 Two examples of simple gong fu wrestling that cannot be used in any type of freefighting situation except a real fight.

 Qigong, is usually concidered to be of immense importance to real martial arts. Part of gong fu is fighting. Another part is achieving longevity. Another part is possesing a body that recovers quickly from hard labor. The real aim of gong fu, while sometimes concidered “spiritual enlightenment”, is usually really concidered self preservation in a total sense. Part of what self preservation entails, is being healthy, which is something that gong fu develops naturally through whole body fitness.

 Many people who teach gong fu, place a great emphasis on medical qigong. The reason, is probably that if the body is strengthened internally, or the tendons, ligaments, lung capacity and blood flow are strengthened, our gong fu is enhanced. Some medical qigong sets, have other martial merits as well.

 One very famous set, called BaDuanJian, or the “eight brocade sections” or “eight strands of silk brocade”, is something that I have been practicing in depth as of late, and I would like to offer some of what I have noticed about the sets obvious martial origins. Now, this set is usually concidered medical qigong, and often taught in it’s softest variety to elderly and sickly people on account of it’s simple, easy to perform sets. The thing is, I was taught that this set was created by Marshal Yue Fei, and used to strengthen his troops for battle. I have learned it several ways, and when done for martial arts, it can be demanding to the begining and intermediate student.

 The first set, holding up heaven and earth, is an ancient asian folk exercise posture, common from India across the East even reaching Japan. This exercise has the martial merit of strengthening “lifting” Jin, but also improves the strength deep in the shoulder for punching out. Double dragon’s Play With Pearl, the reverse punch, and other techniques common to many systems, can be greatly enhanced by doing this exercise. It is also a good precursor to tumbling, and handstands.

 Seperate heaven and earth. One hand presses up, the other hand presses down. This exercise not only helps the upper body get used to directing the two arms independently in opposing directions, it also strengthens each arms full rotation, which increases the speed of our punching techniques.

 Look left, look right, also called Wise Owl Turns His Head. This one helps us to better coordinate the movement of our head with our intention, and obviously thus our eyes. This is important. If you ever spar lightly with a friend that never played sports as a kid, you might notice that their ability to watch your movements is usually pretty much non-existant. Several of the sections will help with this if done right. This is one of the better ones directly relating to it, I think.

 Toes lift the body. Again, this should be obvious. By lifting your body with only the ankles, you are developing/refining the gracefulness in which you step, since you are learning to control the whole body from the root in a very strong and balanced way.

 The rest of them should be pretty obvious.

 The point is, medical qigong is not simply an innocuous part of the cirriculum, it is really a quite valuable one. My report, of doing the eight strands in significant quantity as of late, is that they are of immense value to our craft. Don’t toss them out, make sure you really get the movements, then do large numbers of reps every day to see some results. Eight strands of precious silk. Haha. Like that really means anything to us today. The name should be changed to like, “The Eight Great Exercises”.

 Peace.

 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