Right Intensity, Right Time

練功講究火候

Training is particular about the crucial moment

一日練一日功，一日不練百日空

A day spoil for a day training, a hundred empty days for a day without training

If there is an old method definitively lost in modern times, it is the idea of a crucial moment in training, basically having to do the right effort at the right moment. Indeed, modern training not practised on a 24/7 basis and not focusing on deeply transforming one’s body, such method has become obsolete. The timing issue is very similar to forging a sword, when and how are crucial, hence the use of 煉 instead of 練 in some texts regarding training.

Searching for a deep transformation of one’s tissues, bones and organs for the least and taking the opportunity of puberty, the old practices devised training deeply changing one’s body and metabolism, one of the lost methods being the emblematic “virgin training”. Nothing could be left to chance, any unexpected event could literally ruin the aimed result for good, the teacher had to basically monitor his student twenty-four hours a day, even dreaming was an issue.

If not applicable to modern training, it may be still useful to understand how this issue of the crucial moment was managed in the old days and how some of its principles could still be applied in leisurely training.

I. Not a Minute Rest

Probably the best example of timing in the internal arts is puberty, because the body physical rapid changes are obvious. Still, keeping in mind the need to avoid violent exercises, timing was often about when to train with an extreme intensity, and when not, in order to push one’s body at the right time so that it underwent a drastic change.

a. Puberty

For Martists, even if there were some benefits training from a very young age, the crucial moment was actually puberty. In other words, if one’s training did not last through and till after puberty, some of the benefits of learning from an early age could be lost. Therefore, some teachers were keener on not bothering and took only teenagers close to puberty, not very young children.

Here, what was mainly sought for was to influence the changes the body underwent as far as one’s organs were concerned. What is called internal alchemy would target the capacity to get one’s body organs produce an ”as high as possible” heat. To reinforce the body, one would also use a tempering method already described in Train, Refine, Temper. Other special training would be like putting a student in a bag full of Chinese medicinal herbs and have a few students kick the bag. Generally, it was a prefect time for extreme training, because they would influence one’s body for life since at the end puberty grows into the adult body.

Because it was a very precise and detailed process, in order to reach the crucial moment in what was called the “virgin training”, the teacher had to make sure the student would stay at the top of his/her vitality. To do so was a 24/7 monitoring. Sometimes, when the teacher had just one student, he had to find ways to keep monitoring him/her during the sleeping hours. Hence, apart from the skills they may bring, sleeping on a rope, in a small bag, doing an hour headstand before sleeping and so on... are all leftovers from a time when the teacher could not monitor the student and had to make sure he would not fall into an uncontrolled sleep.

b. Extreme Intensity

If puberty brought extreme changes allowing extreme training, timing was also knowing when training even more extremely would bring an added skill, while most of the time it would just simply improve the existing ones.

A leftover of such training is what is often called the “hundred days skills”, certain skills to be trained relentlessly for around such a period of time while adding intensity every day. Past such period, the skill trained would be owned for life. If not, one had to start all over again, hence the second quote*. Therefore, training has been more recently compared to learning how to ride a bike (probably it was how to tame a horse before). You had to try over and over with no interruption until you could do it. Once learned, it would never go away. But if you stopped and left it for the next day, it was like starting all over again.

Another thing was internal alchemy and more especially to reach a certain extreme heat. Apart from the requisite to be in perfect shape and health previously described, training heat to deeply transform one’s organ is an exponential process where timing is even more crucial because there is only a small window of opportunity when the extreme heat sought can be reached.

If such training is not only out of reach when practising as leisure but basically also simply lost, the timing principle can still be applied as far as training intensity is concerned.

II. Leisurely Timing

In a way training according to one’s shape and health described in a previous post is a modern application of the timing principle. Exploring the principle further, it may still be possible, to apply it when trying to reach certain stage or when one’s body is trying very hard to reject any change. Still, such use of the timing principle is limited to people training at least a minimum of three hours on a daily basis. More importantly, it is for those are really aware of their own body, which is not an easy thing, and it may most of the time require the opinion of a physician. Timing, even in leisure, remains for a happy few.

a. Until the Breaking Point

Some exercises, though leisurely, are still about training a skill which is learned exactly in the same manner as riding a bicycle is. Hence, once started one shall make sure that, for the least, it is trained every day, adding intensity when possible (the health factor) until it becomes a second nature. The breaking point is then this time when the body has transformed itself enough to naturally include the skill aimed for.

A very simple example from the old times still applicable today can be given, posture. Indeed, most of the old practices knew one main posture, often confused as a guard to be taken nowadays. The idea was to train it from the start, every day and at any training session until one’s body could take the proper angles perfectly, automatically and unconsciously, especially when it came to the pelvis area, legs and feet. If so, it meant the breaking point where the body had gained all the fascia suppleness needed to achieve the posture and the brain had put it in the everyday not conscious moves had been reached. Then, one could go on to train something else, like keeping the correct angles while moving.

b. Against All Feelings

Those who have a regular three hours or more training may have experienced the different ways the body is trying to reject the new transformation one is training for. This would be faking tiredness, getting into heighten emotive state, making one feel or even become sick or just pain for the best-known ones. If, at that time, one is not forcing oneself to keep on training, the body will manage to revert itself to its previous state. Thus, trying to reach again the transformation point will take a lot of time.

All those factors are actually maybe a sign one is reaching the famous breaking point and the body, being a very conservative machine, is protesting and trying everything to keep it from happening. Still, the issue is that all those signs can also naturally come from a real physical and/or physiological problem. Hence, the need to deeply know oneself physically and mentally, especially the flaws one constantly tries to hide, is of utmost importance. It is also necessary to see a physician, an outside professional assessment, to ascertain whether such state is “breaking point” related or a real physical and/or mental problem. Each problem usually is actually coming from a separate issue in one’s training, but again in any case a doctor’s advice would be required if faced with it to check out first if it is not a real health issue:

• Tiredness comes at a time just before the body may transform itself almost irreversibly. At his stage, one may experience sudden fatigue just right before training (similar to the reluctance to go in the water when it is cold). A stronger but similar protest would make one feel sick.
• Pain when not due to an injury (again, go see your doctor) or pushing your body over its limits, which shall be avoided, comes most of the time for an adult from repairing a certain part of the body. Fixing one’s body comes with pain and if one cannot go over it, the hurting part will never correctly heal. Pains also comes from doing postures were one tries to relax as much as possible (a lot of people experience it in the shoulder for example).
• Sickness, apart from a health problem diagnosed by your physician, comes because one is either starting to clean or rebalance his/her organs. Such things make the body weaker and often the flu is on the way. Students very healthy could sweat it away but most of the leisurely practice cannot provide with such great health, which makes it not advisable. So, as an exception to the “keep on training”, it would better to first take the rest needed to recover and train again the exact same of training before getting sick. The process may become quite long then, but trying to sweat a flu out if not done when in perfect health and in a particular way would end up making the student even sicker. Hence this old martial method to get rid of the accidental bug cannot unfortunately apply for our modern hectic lifestyle.
• Heighten emotions are another problem. There one has to remember the difference between the regular and abnormal practices. The latter uses heighten emotions to generate power while the former search for a void. Our body being an emotive machine, it will resist very fiercely when one is trying to tame his/her emotions, which regular practices do when trying to reach a void. Furthermore, the closer one gets to reaching an emotive void, the stronger will be his/her remaining emotions, especially outside of training. Breathing and working on the heart are the solutions to maintain calm until one becomes totally used to be less emotive. Abnormal practices do not have such issue, of course, since they actually follow more what the body originally needs. Their issues would then rest more with the reality of their emotive state outside training.

A lot of people nowadays come to martial arts to become stronger. It is true that, both physically and mentally, martial arts can make someone stronger. Still, the fact that most of the practices were for already mentally and physically strong teenagers has long been forgotten. This raises the issue for some of the training which were totally not adapted for weak people, especially some of the mental ones. Indeed, some of those require a mind with no trauma, not even a little one. Training while mentally unbalanced makes demons come back to live, a known problem from which originated a Chinese saying later used to describe someone spellbound, totally obsessed “走魔入火”.

*To be compared to the similar one in Many a Little Makes a Mickle.