I've been learning shaolin-do kung fu for the past 3 years, and I'm getting ready for my black belt test in a few months. In that time I've made what I consider huge improvements in my strength and overall fitness. I've gone from being able to barely do a few push ups to knocking out 100 in a set. When I was 30 I had given up on being able to touch my toes ever again, and still walked with a noticeable bounce from my overly tight hamstrings. In spite of that, I've never felt like I've been able to do a great job on any of my katas.
When I'm practicing I'll see the owner of the school looking at me with a confused look on his face like he can't figure out exactly what I'm doing. A few times he's even mentioned that he's sure I'm doing something wrong, he just can't figure out what it is. On my last test, which I thought was my strongest yet, the comment was that bird forms probably don't work well for someone with my build. I even passed up my last black belt test because I felt that while I knew the material, I just couldn't do it the justice it deserved. When I test for black belt I want to perform at what I consider a black belt level.
I had been getting increasingly frustrated with the forms and the system I was learning. More and more practice of the same forms wasn't really improving things, and my practice started to drop off. It's hard to find time for it with Luke right now too. Now that he's running he wants to play with me when I do the katas which doesn't make for the best practice. Anyway even when I did practice, I was stalled out with more of the same. Something clicked when I stumbled across the Neanderthal no More series of articles on T-Nation.
I'd always thought of posture as a passive reflection of how much you practiced it, and something that was only important for appearances, and all you really had to do for it was stand up straight anyway. The view of the article is that posture is essentially a reflection of the dynamic balances between the different support muscle groups in your body. It immediately sunk in that I've been off balance and compensating for it my whole life. My tight hamstrings and glutes, the lower back pain, some of my breathing problems and my poor kata forms all fit into a pattern.
I've added some time to work on balancing my muscle groups, and it's really starting to pay off. I can flow through the katas much better, I'm not having to correct my balance all the time, I can drop down into lower stances without leaning way over. Last night when I went through my forms, they needed so much less effort especially the jumps and landings. I even managed to pull back into a respectable low monkey stance once or twice. I probably would have gotten most of the benefit from my new workout routine (more on that in a later post), but I think things are working faster since I'm really focusing on the balance aspect of things.
I'm using some of the exercises from the article and others from other sources, plus I'm doing low stance static holds with as much weight as I can handle, while holding my torso as vertical as I can. The funny thing is that the natural posture from the article is the basic tai chi stance. Full lunges with the back leg behind the body are basically one of the kung fu stances, and many of the static hold exercises that form the core of the earliest shaolin system are very similar to the exercises in the article. While I'm learning from a few parts of the system, I wonder how much of this I would have gotten if I had been doing something similar to the full monks training rather then just the martial aspects of the system.