"It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken from you, not by angels or by demons, heaven or hell"
~ Buddha
2nd July 2024
Best Way To Practice Kung Fu: Speed Up Your Progress.
In this video,taken from his online training course, Master Iain explains the fastest way to learn and then perfect new techniques. This is something that all Kung Fu teachers and students should know. In fact it doesn’t matter what style of martial arts you do: this simple tip will speed up your progress massively!
- Get your movement correct. Even if it means doing it slowly!
- Relax as much as possible so that your energy can move.
- Develop smooth flow.
- Then speed.
- When you have smooth, relaxed, fast, flow, power will follow naturally!
To Train directly with Master Iain at the Kung Fu Retreat. Contact us today!
Full Video Transcript
I'm going to teach you now one of the most very important lessons in learning Kung Fu and if you pay attention and get this right it will speed your progress up massively you get much better, much faster. And if you get this wrong it will hold you back it will slow you down and until you learned this you're never going to make it.
When you begin, when you start learning something, new concentrate on getting it right. Don't bother trying to do it with too much speed or too much power. When you begin get it right so we think about practicing the punch.
Get the punch to come out straight in front of the shoulder, keep your shoulders, down correct stance. Relax, that's really important. Relax, throw power down to the end but do it just gently. If we're learning the Sum Chien, just relax get the fingers in the right place, keep the shoulders down, arm stretched out.
Shoulders, elbows, wrists, make sure they're all right.
Okay so a lot of people when they start they're obsessed with power so they're trying to punch
really hard and it's completely wrong. When you practice doing something wrong, you're training yourself to do it wrong you're ingraining it deep down into your body brain how to do it wrong and that's bad. It's if you learn to do it wrong it takes a long time to get rid of the wrong and replace it with the right.
So concentrate to begin with on correct technique and full relaxation.
When you got the technique right, and it will take a long time, the next stage is to speed it up. Relax, speed, relax, and gradually get faster and faster.
When your strike connects with speed it's very destructive.
You get hit by a bus moving at 2 miles an hour you get up and sue the bus company. You get hit by a motorcycle moving at 180 miles an hour they're picking up the bits of you and putting them in plastic bags to take to the morgue. Speed counts. When you got correct technique and you're relaxed, speed will come fairly easily. When you have speed power follows naturally. So relaxation that's really important.
If you train it properly, if you train relaxed from the start, you'll get it and if you don't you won't. Every time you start learning something new, you have to go back to step one, be relaxed and be precise, and it doesn't matter how you good you are, how many years you've been training, it's always the same. You know if you see a really really good Kung Fu Master and they got to learn something different, they don't try to do it fast, they don't try to do it hard, it's like okay, ah, first of all let's get the movement. yeah movement.
Movement, get the movement
Right okay. Then you get it to flow naturally. When you can do that then you can think of about speeding up and getting the power.
Get it right at the outset, you progress fast. Get it wrong, be stiff, be tight, do the moves incorrectly, you hold yourself back and you may never make it.