Building Kung Fu muscle without weights.

**JingMerchant!** · Posted On: 2/26/2009 8:30pm

I found this article in the Nov/Dec 2005 ed of Kung Fu Tai Chi magazine, I thought it would be fun to post and get the general consensus of the forum. I was going to post this in Physical training, but a similar thread on Traditional training methods got moved here.

I couldn't find a link, so I typed it up ad nauseum; any grammatical errors are the fault of the writer and not yours truly.

On with the show:-

**JingMerchant!** · Posted On: 2/26/2009 8:34pm

Building Kung fu muscle without weights.
By Antonio Graceffo.

Antonio is a freelance travel writer and fighter, as well as a regular contributor to Kung Fu Tai Chi magazine.

Western fighters do push ups, lift weights and hit the heavy bag to build strength. When you lift weights, you only lift a few times, three sets of eight or maybe three sets of ten or twelve. And this builds strength very quickly, as does taking steroids and eating insane quantities of beef. When I was young and peaking in boxing, I weighed around 200 pounds. I trained with weights, following a body building type program. I took hormones and, ate 300 grams of protein per day. That meant I sat down and ate several pounds of steak or pork or fish everyday. I ate two or three cans of tuna and a whole loaf of bread at a sitting. I put eggs in every dish I cooked, and ran through more than a dozen per day. Between meals, and with meals, I also drank high calorie shakes.

The result was that I was very strong. Before a fight, I would diet for several weeks, step up my running, and cut weight by as much as thirty pounds. You can do that in your early twenties. But you will pay the price in your late thirties. I now have permanent problems with my weight. There is evidence to show that former wrestlers, bodybuilders, boxers and other athletes who “cut” weight will permanently alter their metabolism. And, the body will not process food the way it once did. This can cause problems with nutrition uptake, and cause weight gain, or muscle loss. I have joint and ligament problems from lifting to much weight. I also have some side effects from taking hormones.

We think of athletes as being healthy people. But many western athletes only look healthy. In the end, they destroy there bodies. How many sixty year olds do you see playing professional football?

The Chinese, on the other hand, take a healthier, holistic, approach to training and exercise. They are always working on an unlimited time line, building strength slowly, over a period of years. It is no secret that the best taiji and qigong practitioners are the oldest.

If you go into a park in China, Hong Kong, or Taiwan (a republic, completely independent of China) early in the morning, you will see literally thousands of people, most of them older, doing either taiji or qigong. They would probably never refer to themselves as athletes. Most are not even martial artists in the Western sense of the word. They are people who have grasped the health benefits of the Chinese arts. You will see many people in their seventies holding stances and moving through positions which many people in their twenties could never dream of doing. You don’t see a lot of linebackers doing taiji. At a reunion of Western athletes, you see a lot of limps and canes form knee injuries. The talk revolves around “the good old days” or “the glory days” of yesteryear, when we were young and fit.
In Hong Kong’s Victoria Park, you hear old people expressing how thoroughly their life quality was improved by following a regimen of Chinese arts.

Even if you could dismiss the purported internal benefits of Chinese arts, such as lower blood pressure and increased circulation, it is obvious that these old people have more joint flexibility than others of their age.

Whether we are talking about qi gong, taiji or even classical hard style, external kung fu, the two factors which build strength - and ultimately health - are repetition, and using the body’s weight as resistance. In all three arts, practitioners do thousands and thousands of repetitions, often using only the air as resistance. It takes longer to develop strength this way. But it is much much healthier. There are no injuries. And if you want to quit, you can just quit, and you don’t get fat.

Bruce Lee trained every second of every day. Brandon Lee said his only memories of his father were of him training. They say even when he was in his car, Bruce had a punch pad on the steering wheel and would hit it when he was stuck in traffic, or waiting for someone. If he was at a party, he would stand in the doorway and do isometric exercise, pushing the door frame, to build his muscles. He did do some weightlifting after he came to the U.S., but that phenomenal world-class physique came mostly from doing countless repetitions, every day, for twenty years.

My taiji teacher in Taiwan would do his taiji push, step, push, push, across the room, and back, all day. He literally pushed the air thousands of times per day. He did the same with twist and grab or redirecting force. Whatever move he worked on, he did it over and over again for hours. Even a simple move, like your opponent grabs your wrist. You circle your wrist away from his, breaking the hold, then you grab his arm with the same hand and pull him down. My teacher would stand and do that, alone, for hours. If he was waiting for a bus or watching us practice, he would be doing that move. As a result, his grip was like iron. His shoulders were twice the size of mine. And he had never touched a weight in his life. He has certainly never taken hormones or done any of the stupid things I did when I was young.

Even more, because he was using kung fu to build his strength, two things happened. First, because he built the muscle for a particular move, by doing that move, it was impossible for him to become muscle-bound. His muscles developed exactly as they needed to, in order to perform the move perfectly. Second, because he did the move so many times, the move was perfect. This is why when you wrestle with your teacher, you find yourself on the ground so quickly. In a kung fu scenario, whoever has done the move correctly the most times, wins.

Just like Bruce Lee, you should take every second of the day to practice. You don’t need special clothing or a special place to train. My best friend in Taiwan is named Lou Ze Wei, and his father is a taiji instructor. Ze Wei told me his father sits and does hand circles while he is reading.
And what does he read? Books about taiji, of course.

When I was at the Shaolin Temple, we would hold a position like horse stance, pu bu, or crane stance, or an hour on each leg.
We would stand in bow and arrow stance, with hour arms straight out, in a punch, and someone would hang on the arm. We would practice punches with a partner. Your partner would press against your fist while you were punching, so you would need to use all your strength the complete the punch. It was a good exercise for both partners.

In China and Taiwan, I learned to throw all of my punches in the air, instead of against a bag. This way there were no injuries. And if you do 5,000 punches in the air per day, you will feel the burn in your muscles. We would sometimes get in a very deep horse stance and do curls, but without weights, hundreds of them on each arm. Other exercises you could try are punches out to the sides of your body or over your head. Any movement you choose will work; just hold a low kung fu stance and do at least one hundred reps on each arm.

My teammates in Taiwan would stand perfectly completely still and do very slow kicks, using perfect form, taking perhaps 10-15 seconds or more to complete a single kick. Every tenth kick should be very long, 30 seconds to one minute. Do that ten times on each leg, for each of your kicks, and you are throwing thousands of very slow kicks per day. If you can kick slow, you can kick fast. Kicking slow takes more control and more muscular development. But there will be no injuries. Kicking fast or kicking to high can rip tendons. Using your body weight for resistance and doing slow kicks precludes the need for a warm up and a cool down. It also eliminates the need for a gym membership. This saves you tremendous amounts of time, which you could apply to practicing your kung fu moves. It also saves you money, which you could use to buy my book.

Standing still, and slowly bringing one foot up over your head in a controlled movement, would probably intimidate your opponent and you wouldn’t have to fight.

So, build strength slowly. Use your body, or the air for resistance. Do thousands and thousands of repetitions per day. And train constantly. Every second you are not using your hands for something else, you should be training them.

**Tom Kagan** · Posted On: 2/26/2009 8:43pm

Originally Posted by JingMerchant!

... If you can kick slow, you can kick fast. ...

Ah .... no.

As for the rest: Meh.

**It is Fake** · Posted On: 2/26/2009 9:46pm

Ewwwwwwwwwwww..............

The inferences in the article are horrible.

**jspeedy** · Posted On: 2/26/2009 9:49pm

Bruce Lee trained every second of every day.

Although he may have trained frequently, somehow I doubt this.

You save time by doing thousands of reps a day, and doing them more slowly?

Maybe in the long run it's better a least a little bit, but there's no way you save time with this method.

I even tried doing an exclusively bodyweight regimen (yes I even talked w/ guys at bodyweightculture.whatever) Sure I gained some strength but nothing like what weight lifting does. Sure you may be stronger than the other 90 year olds one day (even "able to hold positions 20 yr oldscan't") but the first 60 or so years of your life you were weaker and sucked more at fighting.
I believe bodyweight and these similiar type exercise work and may be healthier than taking a crapload of 'roids in the long run. If you lift weights the right way and incorporate some body weight exercise you're still way better off than doing 1000 or more repitions of one move against air (if your goal is to gain overall strength). That mentality is old fashioned is ignorant. I'm all for pure TMA, but until some of these guys can prove themselves in some sort of documentable/official way (predominately, real full contact licensed competition) the athletes win. Anyone can do a move they've practiced 1000 times well- in a demo, but what about when there's another guy resisting? What, you haven't practiced that move against another guy giving full resistance? Than that move you practiced 100,000 times againsty air isn't so effective.

**mike321** · Posted On: 2/26/2009 10:33pm

Western training methods =/ Roids

Cutting weight is a different issue.

Football players in my humble opinion get "old" because of trauma from the sport. There workouts are not the cause, it's the hits.

Static exercises are great for devloping the ability to be static.

**Jack Rusher** · Posted On: 2/27/2009 10:59am

In terms of these goals, I prefer this approach to the one outlined in the original post.

**Matt Phillips** · Posted On: 2/27/2009 11:39am

I don't know what Antoinio is complaining about. You are a man. It is your destiny to end up a shattered wreck. Your great-grand daddy didn't break his back so that you could do yoga postures at 114 years old. In the wild, male Homo Sapiens lives to be around 45. Anything after that is gravy.