Kung fu means hard work. It means that you have to practice hard and for a long time, in order to acquire martial arts skills. Kung Fu in internal Kung Fu means exactly the same. Except that the martial arts skills you are trying to develop are different. Just because you are training internal kung fu, does not mean that there is a short cut, which would allow you to become skilful fighter without putting in an effort.
In the old times, people started practicing internal martial arts when they were kids and they kept on practicing for the rest of their lives, many hours every day. The reason why you need to practice for a long time is because internal kung fu trains small internal muscles, tendons, ligaments and your whole nervous system.
In order to train internal muscles, you need to do low intensity, high repetition rate exercises. You need to use low intensity exercises, because you want to switch off your big external muscles in order to engage, or activate your internal muscles. If you try to put too much force into your practice, the body will try to protect itself by switching the big muscles on, and your exercise becomes ineffective. You have to do these exercises for a long time with high repetition rate, because it takes a long time to strengthen internal muscles. They are just difficult and awkward to isolate and train.
In order to train connective tissue, you need to do a lot of dynamic stretching and twisting. This will increase the thickness and strength of the connective tissue. But this can only be done slowly. If you try to rush this, you will injure yourself.
The main reason why you need to do low intensity, high repetition rate exercises is because you are not just training your internal muscles and your connective tissue, both of which take a long time to grow and stretch. You are also training your whole nervous system. You are training your nerves to increase the speed and clarity of message transfer. You are also training your brain to change the order in which it fires activation and deactivation signals to different muscles and connective tissue as well as the intensity of those signals. This in particular requires a very long time.
So Kung fu means hard work.
How can you find all that time to practice every day? It’s simple. You need to start living your kung fu. What does that mean? It means that you start doing everything as if it is a Kung fu practice. And if you understand the fundamental principles of internal kung fu, everything can be a Kung fu practice. Waking up and stretching in the morning becomes a kung fu practice. Getting out of bed becomes kung fu practice. Walking to the toilet, sitting down on a toilet seat and getting up, even actually going to the toilet becomes a kung fu practice. Getting your breakfast ready, eating your breakfast, it all becomes kung fu practice. You spend at least 12 hours every day doing things that involve standing, walking, sitting down, getting up, moving, lifting, pressing, pushing, holding, bending. All of this can be done in an “empty” way, or it can be done in a “full”, “mindful”, kung fu way. By doing this, your life becomes kung fu practice, chi kung practice, meditation practice. You start living your kung fu. If you add to that an hour of formal martial practice a day (I think this is a recommended daily amount of exercise in order to maintain a good health), then you easily end up having more than 5 hours of training a day.
I know that this sounds like karate kid “wax on wax off” practice. And it is. Don’t do your kung fu. Live your kung fu.
