Lesson 2 – Basic discipline, stamina & automation
Welcome to the second stage of our Kung Fu training
After the first phase of adaptation of body and mind, it is necessary to establish training sessions that are:
- Balanced from the point of view of effort (so as to, potentially, keep the practitioner ready to fight at any time, read Self-Defense: is it possible to always be ready to fight?)
- Calibrated to a gradual improvement (to ensure the acquisition and constant increase of the 6 Dragons Kung Fu’s basic skills, read All the skills of 6 Dragons Kung Fu)
Note – This article has been asked by one of our Core Course practitioners on Patreon (see how to attend our home study classes here Learn Kung Fu online: a beginner-to-expert course).
Physical and technical training
In the second stage of learning, our training has these fundamental objectives:
- Build the discipline of daily training
- Build the basic resistance to the effort
- Build the basic mental / muscular automation
Discipline of training
If you have never seriously trained, at this step, the best way to build your self-discipline foundation is to:
- Be satisfied, with yourself and your training, you always have to include the athletic / martial exercises you like and the ones you are good at
- Focus the practice on giving an outburst to all the failing / annoyances / injustices / frustrations you have suffered in your daily life
- Exclude real problematic people / situations during training (eg. you do not have to focus on the specific people who hurt you but only on the behaviors you disapprove of)
- Find powerful good emotions (you can choose all those movies, music, etc. that make you strong / enthusiastic / energetic)
- Avoid artificial bad feelings (you have to eliminate movies, music, etc. that make you weak / sad / negative)
- Cure your alimentation and especially drink plenty of water (read Qi and proper nutrition)
- Stop using drugs, alcohol, smoking (etc.), all of these things make your mind and your body weak
A note by Master Kongling – With time some of these suggestions will become obvious and /or superfluous but for now, follow them, give them a chance and find the most effective for you.
Resistance to effort
If you follow the indications just mentioned, the resistance to the effort, very simply, will come by itself. The only thing you have to pay attention to is to keep the daily workload balanced on:
- Upper and lower limbs (horizontal symmetry)
- Right and left part of the body (vertical symmetry, in 6 Dragons Kung Fu do not have a preferred side)
You have to maintain the right equilibrium in terms of:
- Development
- Wearying
In any case, as we said, forget the idea of effort (read Intensity of training: depends on what?):
- Train more if you have more energy (but without exaggerating)
- Train slowly if you feel tired but always try to fill the time you have dedicated (30 minutes, 1 hour, etc.)
Mental / muscular automation
6 Dragons Kung Fu has a lot of muscle automation (read The muscle memory) but the very first we want to acquire includes 2 fundamental aspects:
- Basic body mobility
- Basic defensive activity
While the attack may be more tactical / rational, the last barrier that separates us from defeat, the defense, must have a good deal of instinct.
To make it more simple, we must rapidly learn to:
- Move into the space with balance and ease
- Keep the vulnerable parts of our body protected
To accomplish this first goal, we must do nothing but practice the fundamental exercises of 6 Dragons Kung Fu at exhaustion (the ones that we will start to describe in the next lesson).
In-depth articles
- Tips on how to stretch our training times – Some tricks on how to stretch the daily training time
- Sparring type 3: body defensive automation – A sparring type to develop body defensive automation (not for beginners, give it a look)
<< Lesson 2.1 – Index – Lesson 2.3 >>
Author: Master Kongling
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January 13, 2018 @ 7:12 pm
What do you mean with muscular automation?
January 14, 2018 @ 10:50 am
The building of a correct instinctive reaction.
You have no time to think if you’re attacked by surprise, the immediate defensive reaction has to be lightspeed, the second one can (must) be more tactical / reasoned but the first one, even at the cost of being predictable, it must be extremely fast.
During combat muscle automations become tools at the service of tactical reason. The pyramid has strategy at the top, then tactic, then technique, then instinctive body automation and then, last but not list, random variations. We will talk about this in deep.
January 15, 2018 @ 5:57 pm
Why have I to balance each day? It is not better to focus on legs an entire day and one of arms another?
January 16, 2018 @ 9:36 am
What you say it’s not wrong, this is the normal training, it’s a choice but I want you to think about some facts about our method:
– The body is never too much tired
– The body is never undertrained
– You are always ready to fight
– It is impossible to truly train single limb groups
– 80% of the times Kung Fu requires using the entire body applying a technique (muscle chain, etc.); if we never have balanced training sessions this kind of facility is hard to reach
– The normal method alternates the limbs to have an increase in performance but it’s the rest day that will make the real difference
Said this, it’s obvious that even in our method there are days where in percentage we use, for example, more legs than arms (eg. 65% and 35%).
January 17, 2018 @ 6:53 am
What kind of music do you suggest?
January 18, 2018 @ 11:26 am
It depends on you and on exercises, I prefer:
– Fast and epic for explosive training
– Oriental, calm and slow for meditation
– Oriental, active and positive / neutral for repetitive tasks
During training I exclude:
– Sad tracks
– Reflective tracks
– Spoken songs
– Ambient music
– …
When it’s possible I also associate images and videos with music.
January 19, 2018 @ 10:01 pm
Are you for total simmetry?
January 20, 2018 @ 10:43 am
Yes, absolutely. Stay away from people that tell you to choose a left / right guard and especially from those ones who tell you to train techniques only on one side:
– A good fighter must be able to perform a good technique execution from any position, side or with any kind of partial injury
– Everyone has naturally a preferred part (due to the brain directives) but the body must absolutely be trained symmetrically to correct this weakness (power, speed, precision, technique, etc.)
– To force a left / right choice means to increase the disparity between the limbs and (even worst) the 2 brain’s sides, it’s very dangerous and counterproductive
– It’s like imposing your body to have a weaker side (you will lose an enormous amount of time to recover this bad attitude)
– In the process of learning the left side teaches to the right side and viceversa, to study symmetrically helps the development of your brain and make more clear the understanding of technique
In this second stage of training we are working for your body to express but at the same time to let it avoid the worst attitudes, hard to correct.
January 30, 2018 @ 4:43 am
Basic defensive activity is ok, woth “Basic body mobility”, what do you mean?
January 31, 2018 @ 9:34 am
It basically means to be able to:
– Balance yourself with head, arms and legs (the other parts are more complex)
– Move yourself in all directions (on all axes) without too many loss of speed / power
– Do not fall by yourself during fast dynamic movements
– Fall without damages
November 13, 2022 @ 8:19 pm
Starting kung fu helped me strengthen parts of my body I believed behind others.
Praticing kicks and balance is fun.
November 13, 2022 @ 10:22 pm
Exactly, no activity moves your body (and mind) as in Kung Fu.
February 10, 2024 @ 3:31 pm
thank you
February 11, 2024 @ 9:19 am
😉