Ride Like the Wind

髮舌齒指

Hairs, tongue, teeth and fingers.

The “leisure for all ages” repurposing of ancient martial arts practices has brought to light a cornerstone of internal practices often overlooked before because, training teenagers, performance and endurance seemed quite similar. Still, if youth and a body growth which could be influenced towards heavy duties made teenager training look like searching for performance, the actual aim for internal schools was endurance and the rule was never to stretch one’s body over its limits, only to reach just below the breaking point.

Revisiting the principles of such training, in times when a lot of sports are performance orientated, may be interesting.

The aim of internal practices was to train a lifetime very enduring body, create elite fighters who could last, not just cannon fodder, soldiers trained in just a few days. The original means being influencing teenagers' growth, training was extreme and the difference between endurance and performance was a very fine line. Leisurely training makes it more obvious, intensity being set aside.

Old training revolved around three major principles, health status, gradualness and timing. The present post will deal with health status.

In the old days, one of the methods for screening students was their health. Then, training very healthy students, health at the time of training still remained a limit to be taken into account.

Choosing a Horse

To train an elite force, one would have to select people who could physically bear a heavy training. The old saying “hairs, tongue, teeth and fingers” indicates the body parts one shall look for in order to determine the overall health state of a student. It does not include the eyes, which were also an important part of the selection process.

It was, of course, almost impossible to really determine one’s passion, genius and determination for martial arts training, only time, hence endurance, would tell. Still, one’s physical capacities could be quite easily checked.

Therefore, while selecting students, bone structure, organ health through the eyes, the other external signs indicated in “hairs, tongue, teeth and fingers” and a body generally well balanced were signs a master would look for. Furthermore, contrary to the practice for all and all ages, a sturdy and short person would be directed to a totally different training than a slim and tall one for example.

It seems obvious, then, that modern times have to adapt these very selective training made for strong and healthy people when dealing with the masses in leisurely training. This is quite a challenge for modern teaching, especially because a lot of skills seemed as natural as walking for most of the teachers who trained 24/7, the actual aim of real training. This issue is, of course, why a lot of old practices cannot work properly in the leisurely world, they cannot achieve their goals when not deeply imprinted in one’s body. Still, useless is actually only one part of the problem, they become, trained as a hobby, a performance, quite the opposite of what internal training was looking for. A simple example from extreme flexibility can be given, doing the splits:

In the old days doing the splits was a basic training. Children or teenagers, it would take more or less three to six months to reach a perfect front split, allowing then the student to look for more advanced flexibility exercises. Three to six months for a child would probably be the equivalent of the same in years for an adult if done correctly and progressively. One is talking about every day, regular and long training, certainly not once or twice a week for ten minutes. One of the aims of the splits was to imprint a deep and lasting flexibility all over the deeper and harder to reach tissues, hence it was trained in a certain way which made sure to avoid any injuries. Indeed, injuries would in the short, medium and long terms stiffen one’s body, the thing to be avoided at all costs. Nowadays, as the splits became a performance training for a lot of leisurely Martists, it focuses only on the parts necessary to reach it, forgetting its actual goals, often leading to injuries because performance precedes health issues.

Therefore, in the old days, in order to avoid injuries one would never reach one’s limits during training.

Always Under the Limit

Once selected, being strong teenagers and in a controlled environment, health would be then a question of how far they could be pushed. For them, it was more a question of how healthier one would get, hence very steady and gradual (the next post) was the main rule to be applied to keep students from doing something their organs could not handle.
This issue is, of course, very different in the leisurely world and deserves further explaining though it has been already described in previous posts.

Bringing into the leisurely world such old elite practices raises a lot of issues, one being that already grown bodies are not strong enough to cope with a lot of the intense training. Hence, a lot of them are out of the realm of nowadays so-called Martists, their knowledge having thus disappeared or reduced to a much more light and useless version. Indeed, iron shirt, coton palm, most of the so-called “spirit training” are things of the past, now more legend than anything.

The other important issue is that modern hectic lifestyle has an impact on our general health, which cannot be as steady and growing as was the one of the professionally trained teenagers, but instead undergoes ups and downs. Therefore, one has to learn to adjust his/her training according to one’s health at this precise moment.

Just a reminder of a few rules one shall stick to when including the health factor in his/her training:

• Acknowledging previous day(s) pattern, i.e. stress at work, hours of sleep, harmful substances consumed, strong emotions undergone...,
• Looking at the eyes and face (dark circles, white or yellowish face, no glitter in the eyes...),
• Cough, nausea or feeling like throwing up,
• Feeling in good shape is not a sign, feeling in bad shape is one most of the time,
• Avoiding injuries at all costs, they weaken the body in the short, medium and long terms.

Even when training sturdy healthy teenagers, violent exercises were prohibited, gradualness was the motto.