My father used to tell me stories about his masters and his master's masters. I remember one about his master Choi, who used to go into the mountains in Korea to train. Inside of a cave he would do a ridiculous work out, thousands of punches and kicks. He mentioned to my dad that he used to punch the wall hundreds of times a day for several years. After years had passed he said that the wall had not changed much aside from the small, smooth groove. But now every time that he hit someone with that punch, they would also feel the wall of the the cave. I don't recommend punching walls for training these days but there is more to the story than that. Every day that you are able to get up and train, you take a part of the day into your technique. The days I train and it's freezing cold I add the frost to my footwork. The days I train in the intense heat I add intensity to my lungs. The days I train in the blinding rain I add clarity to my attack. The days I train when I have no ...
Self reflection is not only important in terms of making progress in your training, it's also beneficial to help you gauge direction by separating your own needs from the "needs" force fed to you by society. Bruce Lee often mentioned that we must use our art to honestly express ourselves, but most people have such a diluted understanding of self that this concept is drowned in many forms of false identity. How do you determine the bad habits in your fighting style from your own personal concepts of combat? Should you accept yourself even though you are overweight? Or should you become the more physical fit version of your self to be true? As early as birth, you are trained to understand a self that may or may not be you. Are you an American? Then you must speak a certain language, be opposed to certain ideas and be supportive of your countries cause. If there is a plane crash somewhere in the world, it doesn't concern you so much because it's not related to ...
Two years ago I finished learning the movements in the system of Gao Bagua and was very excited to begin my journey of developing. Learning all of the movements is only the beginning of our quest. I have spent all of my recent time refining and perfecting all of the techniques. The sword, spear, footwork, combat, conditioning have all been a daily routine for me in finding my understanding of the art fully. I have mapped out new training techniques and ideas that will revolutionize the way people train or perceive the martial arts. My training has been going very well but progress as always has been slow and steady. I have trained everything that my master showed me. Well, almost everything. There is this one exercise that I just hated practicing. It made every part of me ache so much that I didn't have energy to do the rest of my workout. I have never been a lazy person, but this one exercise just took everything out of me. So every time I have set up my workout schedule for the...
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