Why You Shouldn't Practice Iron Shirt Qigong

The Shaolin Temple is famous for its hard Qigong styles such as Iron Shirt or Shaolin Steel Jacket. When a student comes to me and asks to learn, I ask, what is your motivation? Our motivation is one of the most important aspects of this practice. Some people think of Iron Shirt as something cool to do or an experience like sky diving or a way for their ego to believe this is a high form of Qigong and therefore by doing Iron Shirt they're an accomplished martial artist

Iron Shirt can only be practiced after training in the preliminaries. The student must have exceptional fitness, mastered - at a minimum - The Eight Treasures Form and all of the Shaolin stances. If a student can run 10k then train intensively for an hour afterwards, only then, may they be ready to learn.

Shaolin training is some of the hardest in the world. Anyone who trains with my kung fu DVDs experiences this first hand. If they become disheartened this means they are not training with belief in themselves. If we don't challenge our mind and body then our mind and body will never achieve inner peace and internal and external strength. Under no circumstance should you lose hope in what your mind and body can accomplish. Shaolin training is like the fire that forges metal, forging our mind and body, cutting away our ego and our desire for an experience. It's only then that we enter the real practice which is to practice just to practice.

I made my Iron Shirt DVD with reluctance. Disturbed by the misinformation I saw on the internet and encouraged by my faithful students who have been studying with my graded DVDs for  many years, most of whom I've never met, I decided that it was time to share my more than twenty years knowledge of Iron Shirt.

Iron Shirt Qigong is only for those martial artists who dedicate their life to the art. It's boring. It's lonely. It's tough mentally and physically. It teaches us the limits of our mind and body and how to go beyond them. It's potentially dangerous and if we're not careful we can easily get injured.

If you're thinking of learning, ask yourself, what is your motivation? Have you mastered 8 Treasures so you know it so well you can do it backwards? Have you trained in Upper and Lower Body Qigong? This is a combination of hard and soft Qigong. You can still use the metal brush for these practice as a massage before moving on to Iron Shirt so long as you warm up with the bamboo brush. This will give you a taste of what hard Qigong is. We live in a shopping market culture where there are many things on offer. We must use this information wisely and not get lost in it. Learning lots of new things only keeps us busy. It's best to master one thing and know it well.

For more information on the graded path to Shaolin please visit: www.shifuyanlei.com

3 Essential Ingredients For Powerful Kicks - Part 2

In last week's post I wrote about the 3 essential ingredients, here I show how to make these ingredients work for you. 

Strength
People sometimes think if you want to make your shin and feet strong you need to kick hard things all the time but this is  wrong. If you want to make your leg hard then the first thing you need to do is have good stamina, if you don’t have stamina it’s not possible for your leg to be strong as you won’t have energy. It’s like a car without petrol, it simply can’t move, you won’t be able to lift your leg up or kick therefore you have lost everything.

This is the reason why stamina is so important. After you have gained stamina you then work on your flexibility and then you can work on your speed and power and then you can start on the conditioning training for your leg.

Iron Leg
The best way to warm up is to do the Si Bi Quan form from my Workout One DVD. This form consists of two ingredients: stamp and punch, the more power you can use with the stamp, the more you will build the power of your leg muscles and bone.  This movement is simple and useful. After doing this form you can then start to do bag work.

Kick Bags
It’s best to kick different bags, some hard and some soft so that your body can get used to kicking different weights. Soft bags eat energy and if you have a powerful kick then you have to hold your power otherwise you may get an injury. This is all part of the training.  When you go in the ring, people’s bodies are different, people move differently so it’s best to be as adaptable as you can when you train. Keep changing your combinations and the bags that you work on.

Kick Bamboo
After we have kicked bags we then kick bamboo. Bamboo is better than wood because it is both soft and hard at the same time. If you have ever been into a bamboo forest, then you will have seen the trees bending with the direction of the wind and this is why  they are  incredibly strong.

When you embark on kicking bamboo you have to be careful. Never try this alone but always train under a qualified teacher. You need to have a good understanding of your body, take the training step by step and keep listening to your body.

Qigong
When we do this hard training we also practice Qigong to look after our bodies and our legs. One of our Qigongs is called Bone Marrow Cleansing Qigong because it literally cleans our bone marrow. We use an Instant Health Massage brush to massage ourselves. This is the first step to body conditioning and it is a powerful way to open our meridian channels.

After we have finished our body conditioning we then use traditional medicine. I make my medicine every two years. It comes from a traditional recipe from the Shaolin Temple but there may be slight variations depending on the Shaolin Master's  personal experience and the type of body conditioning that they do. It is very different from fight oil that many fighters use. Fight oil only penetrates the skin where as the body conditioning tincture goes right into the bones and helps to strengthen the bones, helps the blood to flow and protects the skin.

How To Use
All of these ingredients make your leg into a weapon but this doesn’t mean that you know how to use this weapon or that you are a good fighter, it just means that you have a sharp weapon. So the first thing you need to do is link your punch and kick together and learn how to trick people so that you can get through their defenses. How do you fight with different people? Some people have good kicks, others good knee, other good elbows. At the Shaolin Temple we usually choose one good traditional technique and combine that with our fighting punches and kicks. We then spar against many different opponents to test ourselves and hone our skill.


Mind Control
When we fight in the ring, the judge says start and no one knows what will happen. This is why we practice our fighting kicks over and over again and we imagine many different opponents so that we can be ready for anything and even though we have no control of the outcome, in our mind all of our training gives us an inner confidence and this gives us the control.

Fore more information visit: http://www.shifuyanlei.co.uk/

Shaolin Body Conditioning Tincture

At the Shaolin Temple, once a disciple begins to study one of the seventy-two styles, they are given a specific Qigong and a specific recipe to make a body conditioning tincture. In the past, the monks used to lie in baths of these tinctures but today we apply this tincture to our body. After making up this tincture, the disciples then adapt it slightly and each disciple has his own recipe.  Mine is made from twenty-five natural herbs, roots and barks. Some of the herbs help the blood to flow, some help to strengthen the bones, others help the muscles to relax.

This medicine can also be used for injuries, bruising, and some people say that it can be effective for repetitive strain injury though I have no experience of this so I don’t know if this is true. My own experience is in body conditioning. I used it when I was learning Shaolin Steel Jacket and I could never have endured this hard training without the aid of this special medicine.

The first thing we do when we do body conditioning is warm up our body then we rub the medicine into the part of our body that we want to condition. You need to rub the medicine in hard so it really gets inside the skin. The medicine works in three ways: protects the skin, reduces the risk of injury, and strengthens the bone.

I get asked many times about the difference between my Body Conditioning Tincture and the oil that some fighters use especially Muay Thai fighters. This is oil and not a tincture and the main ingredient is camphor, which has a warming effect on the muscles, but doesn’t penetrate the bones or help to prevent injury.

Another misconception is that Shaolin tincture is the same as  “Dit Da Jow”. Dit Da Jow uses alcohol as the base for their medicine where as we use a very high quality vinegar. Why do we use vinegar and not alcohol? Vinegar can take the varnish off a table; it strips the medicine of all of its good things and preserves it.

We also use a secret blend of herbs, roots and bark which is individual and unique to each master. Just as there are varying qualities of olive oil or wine, so it’s the same with this medicine. I take great care in finding the best quality herbs and then I brew my medicine for four years before filtering it. This makes it very potent.

If you don’t do body conditioning but you do martial arts or fighting then I would recommend you use this oil before you train to strengthen your bones and reduce injury. But remember to warm the body up first so that the tincture can penetrate through your skin and into your bone.