Fighting Fitness
To be able to fight you must have three essential attributes
- stamina
- spirit
- technical skill
The easiest and quickest to be able to build is stamina which just takes the desire to train hard.
Spirit is a hard one to train. I am in two minds whether it can be trained at all. People who train hard and are able to push themselves beyond the pain barrier have spirit but whether this translates to being able to get up continuously and never give up after being knocked down many times remains unproven.
Snake Creeps Down Exercise | |
All the elements of the form can be broken down and made into individual exercises to work on specific areas of weakness and imbalance. This exercise is particularly good for stretching the groin area amongst other things. |
The military believe that to make a man you nust first break the man and then rebuild him. Their objective is to make a man into a killing machine, a soldier who will obey without question who will rush into certain death because they are more afraid of their own officers than they are of the enemy or just bloodthirsty berzerkers who don;t care whether they live or die.
This is not martial spirit in our sense of the word. Our actions are driven by knowledge and conscious decision. A man who know no fear is not brave, he is too stupid to understand the danger he is in. A truly brave man does feel the fear, but does not let his fear dictate his actions.
Tai Chi Exercises | |
Exercising the waist and stance in Tiger Embraces Head. Exercising the back and hips in Retrieving the Moon. |
To practise any martial art, but Taijiquan in particular, it is necessary to overcome the natural fear reactions such as the flinch response and the retreating when attacked and substitute instead an appropriate trained response.
In this respect it is similar to military training in which a drilled response will activate automatically without thought.
