Northern Shaolin Kung Fu is an amazing workout! It feels, looks, and is amazing, to practice. Northern Shaolin uses the human bodies full capacity. Few other sports develop and use the bodies capacity in such a complete fashion. Northern Shaolin develops the strength, flexibility, balance, and coordination of your entire body. Most sports use one part or area or side of the body far more than the opposing side, or areas. A few committed individuals will do very systematic exercise sets to balance all these attributes. However, doing these “pure” exercises that lack martial arts skills, power, and Northern Shaolin’s vast inspiring choreography seems soulless and empty. Building a great physique, practicing your Northern Shaolin Kung Fu, and building real self-defense skills by sparring with your fellow students and practicing applications, builds real confidence based on experience.
Northern Shaolin contains great leg training. People who practice Northern Shaolin build extremely strong and flexible legs. If a goal of yours is to strengthen your legs, develop more athletic and muscular legs, including stronger feet, calves, thighs, and hips or develop your leg flexibility Northern Shaolin is a great choice.
In fact, the leg skills of Northern Shaolin are its specialty and strong point. Few other styles of classical Kung Fu contain as many leg skills including low, medium, high, and many flying kicks, low broom sweeps, leaping, landing, rolling, tumbling and incredibly deep and long stances and bold steps. This combination of low, long stances and diverse high, even extremely high kicks is not common. Often martial arts specialize in one or the other. They are good at either high kicks or at low stances, rarely both at the same time.
This works extremely well for Northern Shaolin because the stances stretch and strengthen your legs, hips, and feet to an incredible degree. When you have extremely strong and extremely flexible legs kicking is easy and incredibly powerful. If you do not have great flexibility, then you should probably not think about kicking during sparring unless you aim low the knees or groin only. To weaponize your kicks at a high level you need to properly condition your legs so neither hurt yourself nor fall when you kick.
In addition, Northern Shaolin also contains an incredibly diverse and complete set of hand techniques including a vast variety of strikes, standing grappling, throws, and ground fighting. Because there is such a variety of skills and techniques contained in every Northern Shaolin Form it is incredibly fun to learn and practice.
Whether you are a newer student who is not accustomed to the workout or an extremely fit high-level athlete or martial arts veteran. Northern Shaolin provides you a workout that is complete in the sense of using your entire body with a wide variety of movements. And complete in the sense that whatever level you are at, you can challenge yourself in training until every single part of your body is completely worked out, wrung out, and exhausted.
Even though practicing Northern Shaolin is a huge workout, afterwards your whole body is tired in an even and general way without any one part being overstrained. When you finish practicing Northern Shaolin your whole body feels full of energy, flushed with blood and you experience your strength, flexibility, looseness, and capability. Training relaxes your mind by focusing it on the experience doing dynamic, heroic movements and feeling powerful and capable.
When we practice, we include training in conditioning, kicking, stances, and stepping. We also do lots of fundamental sparring drills centered on dodging, footwork, defensive skills, and accurate controlled striking. Yet the heart of Northern Shaolin is learning the 10 Forms and learning how to use those techniques in sparring. In addition, are all the amazing weapons forms all linked by an evolved and refined style of moving and generating power.
More about the magnificent leg skills in Northern Shaolin 10 hand forms next week!