Forever Young

 

拳怕少壯

The fist fears the young and vigorous¹

少時練得一身勁，老來健壯少生病

A whole body strength trained when young, robust, healthy and rarely sick at an old age.

練出一身汗，小病不用看

Training to sweat all over the body, no need to worry about minor illnesses.

身體鍛鍊好、八十不服老

A body well trained, eighty but not acquiescing to old age.

二五更的功夫

Skills coming from an early sleep and an early wake².

A part of old practices, which is almost lost nowadays, is the training of the organs and its deep transformation of one’s body. To stay fit, for old internal practices, was to upgrade one’s organs, the internal alchemy, which, amongst other things, led to slowing down the ageing process and keep one’s vitality at its best for a long time. 少壯, young and vigorous, stresses on such need.

Such training is often misunderstood because it leads to a lot of behaviours opposite to other martial practices and sports in general.

Basic physical exercises, stretching, any sport practised not so intensively one ends up hurting himself/herself is also a means to keep fit and young. The main difference is that old internal practices made this the centre of their training. They devised a training system where one’s organs health was the first priority, not a body looking nice from the outside³. 

In times when technology and medicine were less developed, keeping a body fit and healthy was crucial, especially when the practice was not meant for leisure or the civilian sphere, but for a profession in the military or security forces for example. Hence, if having strong organs did not make a good fighter in itself, it was the grounds on which one could train efficiently to become such. The grounds, the basics... One can make a comparison with vehicles. Every vehicle is built according to its purpose, racing, utility, transportation, delivery and so on... The main aim of such old practices was to deeply transform the body in order to make it as suitable as possible for the type of fighting it was intended⁴.

More generally and without taking specialisation into consideration, speed, accuracy, endurance and strength⁵ were qualities sought, as far as any martial practice was concerned. For internal arts, the main way to improve them was to boost one’s metabolism by making the organs stronger. The rest, including muscles, was secondary. This is why some call them internal arts, because the training is mainly focused on upgrading guts and tripes, not muscles, which would also be upgraded, but only as a byproduct. Oppositely, so-called external arts would stress on how to use one’s muscles and the organs would be enhanced as a byproduct.

Balance and checks to acknowledge the results of a proper internal training were numerous: from looking at one’s extremities⁶ to checking one’s eyes, from the time and frequency of urination and defecation to the food intake, from the time needed to fall asleep to the length of one’s sleep, from the resistance to extreme weather to an always quieter state of mind... 

Still, how one would age was definitely something very efficient to judge one’s practice. 

歲月不饒人, years (and months) are not forgiving, is a Chinese saying which may be quite appropriate. Indeed past the thirties and the start of the signs of decay of the body was a way to check one’s organs real health. The skin, the teeth, the hairs ... and their natural withering was a way to find out if organs training had been done properly. Hence, a proper internalist was supposed to look something like twenty years younger and still able to burn the midnight oil a long time after other friends from the same generation could not any more.

It may seem interesting, then, to revisit how internal practices address the training of the organs and one of their emblematic products, the vapours, the coming posts on the subject.

 

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1 The first half of a saying stressing on the fact that, when using weapons, experience is more important than brute force. Another interpretation is that one shall train the body so that it can remain young and vigorous as long as possible. Basically, one is training to learn how to maintain the engine at its best as long as possible. Then, the second part of the training, ‘棍怕老郎’, ‘the staff fears the old gentleman’, means that a good driving relies mostly on experience.

2 Northern dialect saying. Old practices used to find training in the middle of the night better, mainly but not only because of the quietness and the darkness. 3 a.m. to 5 a.m. is also seen as trying to train around and until dawn, when ‘heaven and earth exchange’, creating dew. And, after all, one of the original meanings of the infamous 气  is ‘vapours rising from a field in the early morning’, another result of this exchange. 

3 These two criteria are actually not excluding one another and looking ‘good’ is also part of the internal training. The main difference is that a nice body will be sought as a reflection of a good health, not as a goal in itself. For example, and contrary to the beer stomach fashion in some internal circles, a flat stomach was sought as a way to put and keep one’s organs physically in their right place and at their right size. In a similar spirit, 髮，舌，齒，指, hairs, tongue, teeth and fingers was another way for internalists to check out the general health of their organs.

4 Like nowadays when you have different army corps and commandos which purpose can drastically change the training, the difference between the Marine Corps and  the Air Force for example. Likewise, in the old days, some martial arts practices could be quite specialised and the body requirements quite different. An avenue of research one can still look for today is the difference between the light and grounding skills, 轻功 and 地功, the former being more famous. Another one, much linked to the organs, was the difference between using an emotional void or, on the contrary, pushing one’s emotional state to its extreme, like the famous Bersek mode. Or, simpler is to consider the difference in the type of body best suited for the heavy infantry and the light cavalry for example.

5 In fact, improving one’s strength main aim was also for endurance. Indeed, with a sharp weapon, it is often more a question of being precise than powerful. The myth of the ‘empty hand’ has brought power as a means, such a powerful strike it can kill someone. Still, with weapons, especially blades, precision is more important than power. Nevertheless, power was an important quality because it allowed more endurance. Hence the sayings like 練長使短, training long for a short use, or 練重使輕, training heavy for a light use, where the added pressure on the organs to make them able to generate more power was actually meant for an added endurance. 

6 Hairs, tongue, teeth and nails, quite similar to an old way to check a horse.