Flat Stomach Improved Vitality, The Method Behind It, Endurance

夫氣足耐寒，血足耐暑，神足耐饑，精足力綿

One can endure cold when vapours are sufficient, heat when blood is sufficient, hunger when spirit is sufficient, the strength is continuous when essential liquids are sufficient¹. 

一日練一日功，一日不練十日空

A day spoils for a day training, ten empty days for a day without training.

肛門不提，丹田氣散，内中空虛，元氣虧損

When the anus is not pulled up, the vapours around the cinnabar field disperse, the inside becomes empty and one’s vital energy depletes.

As leisure and for show, training has evolved towards performance arts. Most of the classes being taught in a short format, less than two hours, and the proliferation of demonstrations have forced the old practices to reorient themselves in that manner. The goal of ending a fight as quickly as possible has unfortunately all but reinforced this trend. It is, after all, just a sign of times, a necessary adaptation to the civilian sphere and a fast world led by the pursuit of a better performance. On the contrary, before science and technology took over, one could not rely on medication and machines, the body had to cultivate endurance. This still remains in elite units of modern warfare, soon maybe to be replaced by robotics. In other words, old practices came from a time when both endurance and performance had to be achieved. The latter was always preferred for the simple reason that the former reaches a peak, limited to a short or a mid-term goal by nature.

This is another explanation why so many exercises from old practices do not reap today the promised benefits. Indeed, while the aim was actually to attain a durable physical transformation, it has become nowadays something that one tries to do only while training, reverting after to old dying hard habits. On the contrary, endurance implies permanent changes coming from an everyday training until they occur.

I. Tempering, 鍊

Already introduced, 鍊 is also useful to understand the training method, as far as aiming for endurance is concerned. Deeply transforming the body indeed means to train regularly without any exception until a certain point is reached. It is arduous with no guarantee to success. Incremental and the crucial moment are the basis of such method. Finally, the difference also lies in the fact that this kind of training is 24/7.

1.1 Incremental

In performance, one tries to improve by training above its present capacities. Performance never goes beyond them, which is the main difference. For example, while training weights, if one can lift five kilos, performance will dictate to train heavier but for a relatively shorter time. Endurance, on the opposite, will have the person train with a lighter weight but for a relatively longer period until he/she does not feel the weight any more.

Another way to distinguish performance and endurance is breathing, as far as internal practices are concerned. Indeed, one would try to train in length, not pausing and without getting breathless while most performance training leads to a short and out of breath training. Very similar to the difference between training for a sprint and for a marathon.

1.2 Crucial Moment

That is the harder part of the training and where success or failure reside. Indeed, if one misses this moment, all has to be started all over again.

In the old days, when trying to acquire a new skill based on body change, a number of necessary days was often linked to such training. Hence the hundred days’ training for example. In this case one had to train without any rest for this period of time and, at its end, face the challenge that lies in reaching the crucial transformation.

1.3 Long Trainings

This implied long training. In the old days, it was ceaselessly, everything from sleeping to eating, from exercising to resting was customised. Therefore, even training 3 hours a day every day cannot equate to old training and one shall understand that a lot of feats promised cannot be reached because of, comparatively, a lack of training.

Long regular hours of training would finally pay to deliver lasting changes.

II. Lasting Transformation

Basically, one is looking for a perennial body transformation and not just something that happens only when training. For this, whether external or internal, he/she would have to search for obvious changes.

1.1 Permanent

This is also one of the main differences between the professional and leisure worlds. Nowadays, one tries to reach a certain skill only when training while before it was meant to become something kept everything second of the day. Furthermore training can be compared to diet. In this way, and like for the fast ones, this can have a yo-yo effect.

Posture is a simple example. One tries, maybe successfully after a few years, to force the body into certain angles. Because it is not accustomed to them, some of its parts naturally stress (where it is sore after a long practice for instance). There comes the main issue. Old practices would make someone train until what they used to call ‘定形’, fix the form, the first step of deep changes. Basically, one would have to be relentless until the focused parts end up ’breaking’² and that the change would be almost irreversible. Therefore, this meant a twenty-four hours seven days a week training, the sleeping hours actually being also crucial (there were a lot of weird ways to sleep for a student in the old days). 

Nowadays, leisurely practice brings two issues:

- First, even when training regularly, it seems obvious that if the body is correctly angled only three hours a day, it will never become a permanent change. The best-case scenario will be to have trained enough the motor memory so that correct angles will come automatically when training. But this is the main difference, old practices were not just about muscle memory, they went further to muscle and fascia transformation.

- The second issue is the yo-yo effect. Indeed, the stressed parts of the body, as a reaction, will push it in the opposite direction as soon as one stops training. Our body is very conservative and every time it is faced with a strong change, it will try to revert to the previous state. In order to do so and to reach a certain balance, it will push back even more in the opposite direction. This is obvious with fast diets where someone will actually become even more fat after quitting, the need to store more in case of a shortage being the message sent. As the real solution for losing weight is not to diet but to change one’s diet, improving posture is not about holding a correct position for a short time but comes with deeply changing the body structure. Hence, if one tucks in the butt just while training, it will most probably end up pointing more and more upwards in everyday activities, especially when sleep comes very close after practice.

Therefore, change meant something noticeable in the old days.

1.2 Noticeable Metamorphose

From the taste of the sweat to the sound of the breath, from the suppleness of the muscles to the clarity of the eyes, not to forget the (absence of) smell, the fives senses, were often used to check transformation.

As the paradox dictates, internal practices, in the particular case of the flat stomach, were then not a question of feeling good but more of looking good and all about the V shape.

Therefore, deeply changing the body meant something visible, touchable, audible and even tastable or smellable was sought.

These three important points of the method being taken into consideration, the flat stomach issue deals with having a correct posture to connect the upper and lower parts of the body and the internal alchemy, keeping the organs at their rightful places and a better insulation to improve vitality. Furthermore, one cannot avoid dealing with the possibility or, maybe more, the impossibility to adapt such training to leisure practices.

1. Sword of Chaos Classic, Bikun, 練眼，渾元劍經，畢坤.

2. Think about locks.