Welcome to the second stage of training

After the first phase of adaptation of body and mind, it is necessary to establish training sessions that are:

• Balanced from the point of view of effort (so as to, potentially, keep the practitioner ready to fight at any time, read Self-Defense: is it possible to always be ready to fight?)
• Calibrated to a gradual improvement (to ensure the acquisition and constant increase of the 6 Dragons Kung Fu’s basic skills, read All the skills of 6 Dragons Kung Fu)

Note – This article has been asked by one of our Core Course practitioners on Patreon (see how to attend our home study classes here Learn Kung Fu online: a beginner-to-expert course).

Physical and technical training

In the second stage of learning, our training has these fundamental objectives:

• Build the discipline of daily training
• Build the basic resistance to the effort
• Build the basic mental / muscular automations

Discipline of training

If you have never seriously trained, at this step, the best way to build your self-discipline foundation is to:

• Be satisfied, of you and your training, you always have to include the athletic / martial exercises you like and the ones you are good at
• Focus the practice on giving an outburst to all the failing / annoyances / injustices / frustrations you have suffered in your daily life
• Exclude real problematic people / situations during training (eg. you do not have to focus on the specific people who hurt you but only on the behaviors you disapprove)
• Find powerful good emotions (you can choose all those movies, music, etc. that makes you strong / enthusiast / energetic)
• Avoid artificial bad feelings (you have to eliminate movies, music,etc. that makes you weak / sad / negative)
• Cure your alimentation and especially drink plenty of water (read Qi and proper nutrition)
• Stop using drugs, alcohol, smoking (etc.), all of these things make your mind and your body weak

A note by Master Kongling – With the time a some of these suggestions will become obvious and /or superfluous but for now, follow them, give them a chance and find the most effective for you.

Resistance to effort

If you follow the indications just mentioned, the resistance to the effort, very simply, will come by itself. The only thing you have to pay attention to is to keep the daily workload balanced on:

• Upper and lower limbs (horizontal symmetry)
•  Right and left part of the body (vertical symmetry, in 6 Dragons Kung Fu do not have a preferred side)

You have to maintain the right equilibrium in terms of:

• Development
• Wearying

In any case, as we said, forget the idea of effort (read Intensity of training: depends on what?):

• Train more if you have more energies (but without exaggerating)
• Train slowly if you feel tired but always try to fill the time you have dedicated (30 minutes, 1 hour, etc.)

Mental / muscular automation

6 Dragons Kung Fu has a lot of muscle automation (read The muscle memory) but the very first we want to acquire includes 2 fundamental aspects:

•  Basic body mobility
•  Basic defensive activity

While the attack may be more tactical / rational, the last barrier that separates us from defeat, the defense, must have a good deal of instinct.

To make it more simple, we must rapidly learn to:

• Move into the space with balance and ease
• Keep the vulnerable parts of our body protected

To accomplish this first goal, we must do nothing but practice the fundamental exercises of 6 Dragons Kung Fu at exhaustion (the ones that we will start to describe in the next lesson).

In-depth articles

• Tips on how to stretch our training times – Some tricks on how to stretch the daily training time
• Sparring type 3: body defensive automation – A sparring type to develop body defensive automation (not for beginners, give it a look)

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