Category Archives: Martial Arts

martial artist training in snow

How to learn martial arts at home by yourself

17 August 2020

Most people who attend a martial arts class will of course do most of their practice at home.  If they want to advance they will be spending at least a few minutes every day going through their form or practicing a few combinations from the form they are learning.  The real question here is, can you learn martial arts at home without attending a class?  Or, can you learn martial arts online?

From a practical point of view, this is a simple yes.  The Kung Fu Living course was developed to enable anyone to do exactly that.  In some ways it can actually be preferable.  Every single day you are guided through, individually simply exercises so you don’t even have to worry about exactly what to practice each day or how much to practice etc.  You have a master on screen showing you precisely what to do and how to do it, whereas if you were attending classes you would have to try to remember what you were shown, with the risk of practicing it wrong.  People often say it is like having their instructor there in person telling what to do.  In terms of the way our brains learn such skills, doing a few minutes every day is better than doing a long lesson once a week.  Also, there might be a very limited choice of martial available where you live and most martial arts are either impractical or only designed for circus performers or ultra-athletes.

The drawback of training on your own is that it helps to have someone hold strike pads for you or spar with you.  If you can find a friend or family member willing to hold some pads or better still learn with you that would give you the best options for practicing.

The major advantage of attending a class is that its often easier to push yourself when tired if you are a part of a group with an instructor shouting start on stop.  The Kung Fu Living app does guide you exactly what to do, when to start and stop an exercise for example, but only you will know if you sit and watch the video without joining in.  So here are some tips on supercharging your motivation.

Here’s the thing. If you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep getting what you’ve always got.  If nothing has changed since the last time you decided to get in shape, get up early, meditate every day, eat healthy etc etc. then you will have the same success as you did at your last attempt.  If you look through the articles on our website and read through the blogs, you will find most of what you need to know to eat well, exercise right etc.  But where do you find that illusive self-discipline? That motivation, that one key ingredient that will make it all work for you?

What motivates you?  Do you have a clear and achievable target that drives you on, that excites?  Without some driving force you will give up on the first bump.  You have to create an image of your future self that excites you.  Imagine a day in the life of the future you.  Imagine how you will feel, what you will do, how you will look.  Picture yourself doing something ordinary, something you do every day, (that’s easier to imagine) but feeling great, as this is the new you doing it.  Get this image so clear in your mind that it becomes an expectation, not a vague day dream, but something you know is firmly fixed in your future, on the path that you are following.  Once you start on this new path you just have to keep going.  This is made easier when every step, every day is put before your feet.  Re-run this visualisation every single day and get excited about it.  Start to feel grateful that this future is going to happen.  Is it going to be difficult?  No.  It will seem so if you think you have to work out how to jump straight to the final goal, but you don’t.  You only ever have to take a single, simple, little step.  Then the next single, simple, little step.  Spending a moment every day, seeing the future you in your min’s eye and getting excited about it will fuel your determination; it will be the blueprint that you will build from.

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7. Effortless skill takes a lot of effort

6 July 2020

I was talking the other day to someone who said that they practiced Chi Kung, but they didn’t do any formal movements or set breathing.  They did it intuitively, they said.  They also allowed their body’s needs for nutrition to guide their eating and their own instincts would be a better guide to martial arts techniques in the event of having to fight.  Now this got me thinking.  This idea of intuition needs some unpacking.  In the case of this particular person it took a couple of questions to establish that they knew almost nothing about Chi Kung and whatever they thought they were doing; their use of Chi Kung was limited to the name.  However, it did make me wonder, how much can we listen to our body, rely on intuition and follow our instincts?

I found myself remembering musicians who did, it seemed, play by intuition.  They could make up the melody as they played it, totally improvised, spontaneous, fitting the mood of the listeners and apparently utterly inspired.  Ah, but hold on.  Did they pick up an instrument for the first time and do that?  I’m pretty sure the answer is no.  What they did was, they practiced with their instrument until it became as extension of their own body, until they played it unconsciously.  They learned how music is structured so that they would stay within a key without giving it a second thought and if they moved from a major to a minor key and changed the tempo during a piece, it would be unconsciously deliberate to change the mood.  Their understanding of what order of notes would ‘work’ was also perfectly unconscious.  Such playing is not really intuitive and instinctive, it is the result of years of learned method and technique, but learned so well that it can be done without the effort of the cerebral cortex.  It is the cerebellum, an area of the brain whose functions we are not conscious of, that is responsible for such actions; much the way most people can walk, use a knife and fork or indeed the way typists don’t need to consider the keys, but simply look at the screen and choose their words.

What we consider intuition is principally the ability to know or do something unconsciously.  For example, you realise that you are aware of a person in a crowded room who is feeling nervous or out of place.  Is that intuition or did you simply notice some body language that implied such feelings, but you were not aware of the initial perception because that happened at an unconscious level.  Of course, the amount of our perceptions that reach the conscious level is truly tiny, in the region of a billionth of the actual information that comes in through our various senses.  The bits of information that reach the conscious part of the mind will depend on what we are habitually tuned in to.  The same will be true for those who just know what the weather is going to do etc.

So, what about intuitively knowing how to eat, exercise or even fight?  Ask yourself this, does your appetite always direct you to the right balance of nutrition?  We appear to have evolved over millennia while sufficient nutrition was a rarity.  As a result, we all have an inbuilt tendency to fill up when we get the chance.  We ‘intuitively’ know that fat has a lot of potential energy, so are automatically drawn to it.  We know ‘intuitively’ that a fruit that is ripe won’t give you a bad stomach, is sweet and also full of energy, so again we are drawn to it.  During the millions of years of scarcity these were useful survival instincts, but today, when we have access to unlimited fat and sweet foods, following our intuition, our instincts, will kill us. Whenever I hear someone say they just intuitively know what is a healthy diet, it always turns out to be a combination of what they were fed as children and what they have learned since.  What they really mean is that they don’t consciously consider it, but of course their unconscious, learned knowledge is guiding them.  It may be that their learned knowledge is, fortunately, correct and in which case, they may well appear to have ‘good intuition’. 

It seems therefore that if, and only if, you have a thoroughly learned skill, you will likely reach the point of using it unconsciously, which will seem to you as if you are not thinking about it, because consciously, you’re not.  You may well think of that as intuition or indeed it may feel like inspiration but actually it just means that you are very proficient.  One person may certainly aggressively fight with what they think of as instinct, but it is most likely just a few moves that they have seen others do, have imagined doing them (which the unconscious brain will have remembered as if real) and they aren’t consciously thinking about what they are doing because they are simply in a fight or flight state.  Such a person will likely lose to anyone with real skill, but they may well do okay against another untrained person by a combination of a simple technique and a lot of aggression.

It is always going to be the case that what seems to be intuitive, instinctive, unconscious skills are always the result of many hours of training.  Shifting skills back to the unconscious cerebellum is the normal process of learning.  Effortless skill, takes a lot of effort.

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3. Sport or Tournament Styles

6 July 2020

Historically, many martial arts have tried to ensure their continuation by becoming a sport once the conflict or social condition that lead to their creation was past.  Although this has proved to be a very successful strategy, no one wants to take part in, or watch, a sport in which one or both of the contestants die within the first two seconds.  Therefore, a set of rules have to be introduced to make it safe.  Which, when you consider the essential purpose of martial art, is a bit like a system of gardening that ensures nothing grows.  Inevitably the style will change to match the rules, often becoming unnecessarily complicated, because when a simple move would hurt or kill your opponent, your need a more complicated technique that will achieve victory harmlessly.  You will hear participants in some competitions say, “I could have won in the first seconds if I’d been allowed to do this or that.”   Sometimes a slimmed down selection of techniques, for example boxing, where the gloves limit you to only punches, means that victory begins to depend much more on fitness and strength rather than just skill.  If we wanted to train people to take part in tournaments, we would have to miss out many of the most effective techniques.  It is not uncommon for people to train to a high level in some sport styles only to find that when they get attacked their skills are of no use, because no one showed them how to win a fight, only how to keep a fight going for minutes without anyone getting hurt.

With that said, many tournament styles are exciting sports in their own right, and often they give great physical confidence too.  That translates into an ability to stay calm and in control in the face of aggression, which is often enough to enable the participant to demonstrate confidence and their skills may be perfectly sufficient. They need to be careful though and understand the limitations of their style, as they simply won’t have been taught how to quickly win against someone with a more practical style.

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2. Introduction to martial arts

6 July 2020

A passion pursued with discipline and a discipline pursued with passion; both an art and a science.

It is, of course, from Mars, the Roman God of war, that we derive the terms ‘Martial’ and ‘Martial Arts.’  So long as humans have felt (or indeed been) threatened by other people they have developed skills to defend and/or attack.  Many of these skill sets developed into complete systems; systems that could be structured in a way that made them easier to pass on or teach.  I say ‘easier’ because once you have a codified formal structure nothing gets missed out, like learning the alphabet ensures that you, at least, know all the letters.

While there are only so many useful martial movements that a typical able bodied human can make, some movements will come more naturally to some people and be more applicable for them.  If I run up and down hills every day, or ride a horse over vast pastoral grassland and have very strong legs, it might be more natural for me to use a kick.  If I spend my days wielding an axe and lifting cut logs around, I might find a punch comes more naturally to me, taking advantage of my upper body strength.   Among the ancient Greeks a martial art, referred to as pancratium in the Olympics, developed differently in different areas.  In some city states they specialised in kicks, in others, throws, grappling or hand strikes.  In China a similar thing happened; different styles developed in the various regions.  Styles will even vary from one school to another and between individuals in the same school.  With identical techniques available to them, an eighteen stone, six-foot four guy will apply his skill differently to a seven stone, five foot nothing woman.

All styles developed in response to particular needs/threats and particular social/political conditions.  Will the other guy be armed?  What with?  Will I be armed?  What with?  Will I be unarmed in the middle of a battle because my weapon has broken and I’ll need to take one off an enemy, preferably killing him in the process?  Will my opponent be wearing armour, rendering strikes ineffective and require me to use limb manipulation?  Will I be unarmed because the military dictators of my country have forbidden weapons, meaning I have to work out how to use agricultural hand tools as weapons?  Am I from a race of small statue banned from having weapons by the conquering enemy who are generally bigger and armed?  The answers to all of these questions have produced particular styles of martial arts.

Over years, generations and even centuries, the original need or social conditions framing the development of the martial art may have gone or changed.  The practice of a style may have become a tradition within a culture; continuing because “we’ve always done it like this.”  One way to practice skills and keep them sharp is to develop a sporting contest that uses the skill, hence Jousting, Discus, Javelin and Archery.  Of course, sports in which competitors die soon become unpopular, so they have to be developed to make them less dangerous.  However, fencing can be practiced if suitable armour is worn.  Two guys can practice punching each other if they wear gloves and agree not to hit each other on the back of the head.  It’s possible to practice grappling on the ground if you agree not bite or rip each other’s eyes out.  In this way many martial arts have flourished.  To a greater or lesser extent, all of these martial ‘sports’ have retained many elements that could still be put to use in a real fight.  Boxing, Muay Thai or Tae Kwon Do may be of more use in self-defence than Jousting, Tai Chi (when taught as a meditative exercise) or Discus.  It is for this reason that Tao Te Kung Fu is not a tournament sport; it is first and foremost a martial art designed to work in real life.  No effective technique is removed on the grounds that it is too dangerous to use in a sport.

The disciplined practice of almost any skilled activity, whether sport, dance or art will result in a range of benefits; perhaps physical fitness, a more astute analytical mind, or the deep self confidence that any expertise tends to grant the practitioner.  The martial arts are the perfect example of this; a discipline that strengthens the body, the mind and the spirit.

Unfortunately, in some martial arts the training techniques have become bogged down with an over emphasis on tradition.  It is not unusual to find some styles that, to this day, use exercises that cause chronic injury, in spite of better practices being available.  The reason for this is usually that when the exercises were developed the instructors were aiming to ensure a soldier’s fitness to survive the next year or two on battlefields with no consideration of their long-term health after the age of thirty.  Blindly following tradition is not a good reason to continue such practices. 

For many today the emphasis and goal of their training is the all-round physical conditioning that it can provide; not simply strength, endurance, flexibility and balance, but precise coordination and asymmetrical fluidity of movement. 

For some it is the rich depths of tradition, ceremony, theories, principles, techniques and metaphysical philosophies that even a lifetime of study couldn’t hope to truly master.  Many find that the meditative focus of coordinated thought and motion aid both concentration and relaxation.

Some, most value the humble, quiet confidence and the sense of security that strengthens the human character and overflows into all aspects of life, from business to relationships. 

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1. Five Reasons to train with Kung Fu Living

6 July 2020

Focus & Self Mastery
The best Kung Fu training will have a primary emphasis on developing focus & mastering your own reactions.  Kung Fu can be translated to mean something like ‘mastery through hard work.’  The greatest struggle faced by most people on a daily basis is mastering their own nature.  Students should be taught to understand and control their physiological responses in the face of confrontation.  You can have great martial arts techniques that you use wonderfully in the Dojo or training studio, but if you haven’t learned to control the way your body reacts to such a stressful situation, you could find yourself frozen or barely able to move when a real self-defence situation arises.  This is why, traditionally, many Kung Fu classes will include some meditation instruction and have an emphasis on those philosophical concepts that help to mature a person’s outlook on life; how they see themselves and their relationship with the world.  Such ideas are the bedrock of character development.

Discipline & Self Esteem
The humble, dignified, quiet confidence, that grows with martial expertise and self-knowledge, inevitably overflows into every aspects of life.  As students increase their self-esteem through Kung Fu, they become increasingly content with who they are, saving them from self-doubt and insecurity.

Confidence & Grounding
Good Kung Fu masters will make every effort to increase a student’s confidence and sense of their place within the world.  It is the sense of being grounded and the corresponding comfortable contentment that enables students to feel more confident in all their positive life choices.

Flexibility, Balance, Fluidity, Strength, Speed
While good Kung Fu training will enhance these, principally, physical attributes, the best training will take into account the development of the psychological attributes that they parallel.  The flexibility of easily coping with different approaches to problems.  The balance that comes with having the presence of mind to pause in otherwise anxious situations and reflect on the alternate perspective of others.  The fluidity to adapt and take change in one’s stride.  The strength of character that means others can rely on you to be a calming and reliable presence.  The speed of thought that takes challenges with ease, quickly & calmly responding appropriately.

Courtesy & Respect
Some historical traditions should always be maintained because they can help create a separation between our everyday lives and the training studio.  In classes we bow as we enter to mark the transition to a space in which the ego, competition and life’s stresses are left behind.  We bow to our training partners to acknowledge their co-operation and friendly intent as we enable each other to achieve our best.  Even if you are training at home on your own, it is important to take a moment before you start your practice to be sure that you are training with a humble attitude, intent on personal growth.  Picture yourself as the calm and dignified master you are becoming.

Give some time to consider your personal standpoint on the ethical use of violence and develop a sense of what you would be prepared to do in various scenarios.  This will spare you the possibility of reacting quickly when you don’t have time to evaluate your response and find yourself morally compromised.  While we are qualified to teach the legal aspects of self-defence in the UK, your local laws are likely to be very different and for this reason we cannot advise you in this respect.  Therefore, it is your responsibility to find out what your legal limits are.  In Britain, for example, many instructors aren’t qualified to teach self-defence within the context of the law, in which case they are merely teaching you to fight.  This might seem helpful until you are confronted with a real-life situation and you are either paralysed by indecision or find yourself arrested because you didn’t know what was permitted.