“10 years, 20 If You Hurry” is an old Saying about mastering Kung Fu, Tai Chi, and Qigong.
Some things take time. Transforming your body into the body of a Kung Fu, Tai Chi, or Qigong master does not happen overnight.
In Kung Fu and Tai Chi developing skill in how you stand, in your stances, and how you step and shift your weight is the foundation of your skill.
Without a firm and steady stance and step you’ll be easily defeated or toppled. With a good stance, step, or weight shift you can generate abundant power, speed, and stability. Stance practice helps you learn how to move with a balanced, lowered center of gravity actively engaging the ground with your feet. Stance training gives you whole body explosiveness by using the strength of your legs to drive powerful attacks.
The challenge with developing master level stances and especially the deep and long stances of Northern Shaolin, Lan Shou Quan, or the Tai Chi Long Form is you simply cannot safely rush the process. Deep stances take both real strength and lots of flexibility in the tendons, ligaments, and joints of the legs. Developing this flexibility can be quite an ordeal for some practitioners who are naturally stiff or inflexible. Developing the strength required to perform the deeper stances can also be a legendary ordeal. Few people are both very flexible and very strong when they begin learning. Most people need to develop both strength and flexibility as they master stances, weight shifts, and steps.
Enduring the pain of stretching or strengthening exercises is called “eating bitter”. Like cold, day-old rice that tastes bitter and is hard.
Once your legs have developed adequate flexibility and strength everything is easy. Perhaps, a little tiring if you practice intensely. But the initial period of painful strengthening and stretching phase is gone. In its place is magnificent, functional strength and flexibility. Once you have the strength and flexibility, all the hard stuff, the most difficult or strenuous parts of your forms become places to play and express yourself fully.
Rushing this process of building the required flexibility and strength runs the risk of injuring your tendons, ligaments, and joints. Ligaments and joints do not respond as swiftly to exercise as muscles and tendons. This means that your muscles can become stronger and more flexible than your joints or ligaments and then overpower them. It is also easy for enthusiastic practitioners to fail to recognize the difference between beneficial stress on muscles causing pain and harmful stress on a joint or ligament causing injury.
If you do injure your joints, tendons, or ligaments they can take a long time to heal when you cannot practice, or your practice will be heavily compromised. This slows down your overall learning and explains why “20 years if you rush it” is true.
Being careful to not over strain your joints, tendons, and ligaments seems like a slower way to progress than charging into deeper stances with lots of motivation and determination. In the end though slower and more careful training results in swifter progress and a better result. By going slowly and carefully you can achieve a master level body and skills in ten years, possibly much less! But if you rush it and must heal lots of injuries and retrain multiple bad habits along the way it could easily take 20 years, and the result will not be as good.
The good news is if you eat bitter carefully every day, lasting healthy progress will swiftly be yours!
Have a great workout today!