Saturday, October 10, 2009

aquiring gong li.

When considering internal martial arts it is extremely important to understand gong li (trained force). Gong li should be the very foundation of one's martial art training. In this article I will talk briefly about what gong li is and how to get it, as well about my perception of some major problems in internal martial arts training.

What is gong li?: gong li literally means trained strength, or the skill of strength.
gong li is something that is developed over years of hard training and constant work towards achieving the maximum amount of force possible every time you train. However, gong li is also slightly deeper than that. When I started training internal martial arts I first didn't know about gong li. I read a lot of books by people like Cheng Manching about the idea that internal martial arts were entirely about softness and physical relaxation. When I first encountered the term li as it applied to internal practice I was schocked. Li literally means strength or power. I read that li was a vital part of internal arts practice and almost had a heart attack because it went against the idea of softness overcoming hardness and the weak defeating the strong. It seemed to be against the basic principles I had read about before.
However, after I met some very talented and extremely patient teachers, I came to know that it is impossible to achieve fully relaxed power without first training strength. Without basic gong li training you will not have the foundation to later practice with soft force.

How do I work on gong li in my training: Gong li training has many stages and is the work of a lifetime. Basically my experience of the training progression goes thusly: 1) learn a basic movement slowly and softly, focus on getting the movement correct and understand the small movements contained within it. 2) start to gradually put muscular force into the movement and try to understand the body mechanics. At this point you will have stiff and unrefined force, it won't be connected and it won't be pretty, but just keep on working at it. 3) once you have hard muscular force you can start to work toward relaxing while emitting force. However this does not mean that you make the movement soft. Actually this means that you put in even more force, but it doesn't come from your arm muscles like it did before. Now the force is integrated with the structure and you will start to develop real power with less physical effort. at this stage it is also important to train your structure, because relaxed force comes from a good structure and good coordination. One way to do this is to practice standing posts like holding the tree or san ti.
4) after this you may naturally start to add elements of mental training into your practice. One valuable thing to do is to focus your mind on your attacking fist, foot, elbow, shoulder or whatever part of your body is emitting the force.
Gradually you will be able to focus on your whole body and the area outside your body that you are attacking. This will give you even greater force and you will have solid gong li.

Once my teacher told me the following about the importance of developing gong li: "when masters give public demonstrations they will always show how relaxed and effortless their movements are, however when they practice behind closed doors they always use force".
I believe this sums up the need for gong li training well.
A falacy in internal martial arts is the idea that you can train without use of force and still be able to use force when you need it. This is simply not the case.
Without going through the stages of developing gong li, you will never be able to convincingly beat people since your force will not be big enough to actually hurt them. This is extremely important when considering self defense because in a self defense situation you can not expect that softly neutralizing and redirecting an opponent will be enough to keep them from attacking you again.
In my opinion having gong li is one of the most important parts of internal martial arts training.