Is body conditioning in martial arts bad?

as others have correctly pointed out. ther is conditioning and ther is conditioning.

For stance work. - you can play as long as you want so long as you feel pain in muscles. This is due to lactic acid build up and can be ignored. but not if you have pain in tendons or joints. this shows you are pushing the stance to low and should stop immediately. Gradually increase the depth of your stances over weeks - months.

The time to think about hand conditioning is when you begin to feel that you hand is deforming when you do bag work. As your striking technique improves your power increases and greater stresses are placed on the hand. Wraps actually help with conditioning allowing the tendons in the hand to strengthen while protecting the hand under load. The more complicate regiments of iron palm conditioning work in a similar way. Herbs can both speed recovery from injury and encourage increase in bone density or tendon strength.

Most kung fu conditioning is about avoiding injury and gradually increasing the strength of bones and tendons by exposing them to a controlled slow increase in strain over months / years. In most kung fu callused skin and deformed joints is a sign of poor conditioning.

 

I like a certain amount of body conditioning in terms letting someone hit you in the body in controlled drills. Starting light, learning how to brace the core, breath out, ride the shot, absorb, etc.
Part of taking a hit is mental rather than physical and for many people they may have never even been hit before. It can be shocking (out of proportion to how hard it is) if it is new or unfamiliar.
Obviously a good shot will put you down but think there is something to be said for low level conditioning type drills to get people over feeling uncomfortable in the pocket or with proximity and even being touched.
People are often tougher than they realise but need to guided gently into that realisation IMHO and controlled conditioning drills can help with that.

 

Yes! It is Choy Li Fut. Thank you, yes please let me know if kids and teens use less force when doing impact conditioning drills. If doing heavy stance training and body conditioning is done with both teens and adults then I should be ok doing it then right? I know some karate schools probably do stuff like this too cause I once tried a beginners class and I was doing a basic arm blocks drill with a student a little older than me and the side of my arm felt swollen so I had to stop. Kung fu may be different. Maybe I should start with lighter contact and build my way up, maybe against a bag too.

 

totally agree with Smitfire. The kind of practical real world conditioning he describes above is practised in pretty much all fighting arts. Its about learning to stand up to the rigours of the activity. Nothing magic or superhuman about it. just learning how best to cope with the impact of a strike or a fall.

 

Having previously done it loads in Shidokan/knockdown karate I did some with the Taekwondo people I train with and you'd think I asked them to paint their faces blue or something.

 

It is also possible to miss -read the intent of training drills. Take 3 star striking for example. a staple of many types of kung fu.

Yes. it is possible to build bone density by practising this drill. particularly when accompanied by the correct herbal medicines. But to me the conditioning imparted by this drill is purely incidental to the befit of exploring the connections between the core and the extremities.

 

That video is exactly what I have in mind when I think of body conditioning. You can do the same with round kicks and knees too. Or go tit-for-tat.
Maybe "desensitization" would be a better word?
It's the middle ground that happens so much in fights/sparring where a shot doesn't outright miss but doesn't land fully either. I think you can desensitize people to some degree so those sorts of shots can get harder and they can still be taken/overcome.
It also gives you a good chance to practice your poker face and how to "no sell" a technique that actually hurt.
It builds trust in training partners. Knowing they will listen and go lighter when you tell them. Give you a chance to explore your comfort zones.
And finally it teaches the puncher about control, fist alignment on targets (very important for bare knuckle sparring), angles, which bits are soft/hard (no offense Si!).

 

So if I feel pain in my legs for doing long minutes of stance training at my age is ok as long as I don't feel pain in like my knees? I could get hand wraps for hand conditioning, but I don't think they use them there. Did you start conditioning with increasing strength and doing iron palm at an older age or did you start in your teens?

 

Stance holding is not going to hurt you, your feeling discomfort not pain.

 

Most of the time it won't, but when I was doing wushu I trained with the wushu taolu world champions for 2 days and (stupidly) tried to keep up with their stance training, then I couldn't walk for 2 days, it was agony

But I doubt the OP will be doing that level at a new club.

 

But that would be doms, not an actual injury!

 

I see what you mean it felt like buakaw had gone a few rounds on my legs. There was a third 8 hour session planned but I opted out.

@Light25
In terms of stance training, the pain is on par with doing resistance training.

When you're starting out training it takes some time to guage what actual pain is, so initially you probably just getting used to the stance work. Like @Dead_pool said, it's just discomfort.

 

The practical benefits of body conditioning are strong tendons, flexible joints and strong muscles. This is what allows people to cope with impact. It much less to do with practising hitting hard surfices and more to do with building over all strengths and flexibility. below is an example of what good body conditioning can allow someone to cope with.

exert from 2017 tor de france. a crash that would have killed many people outright. both riders made a full recovery. one (the rider struck second) finished the entire tor de france and then discover that he had sustained a neck fracture. They are human. Just not as we know it.

Porte's terrible crash with Martin ends his campaign

 

Ok good, thanks. I guess it depends how much you can tolerate it. I heard there are guys that could hold their stance training for 15 min maybe even 20 or 30 min. Would that be too much for me to start doing now or wait a few years to build up to? I know if I push myself I could handle resistance training and keep up with the older guys, I just wanna make sure I'm not over working it.

Thank you for your help. It sounds like it's ok if I push myself to work hard at my age if I can handle it, like I just said to @axelb they do training where you hold your stances for minutes at a time. I don't know the name of the drill forms and lineage as I just started learning it but I'll find out more. If I push through the pain and can hold the different stances and practice at home holding it for let's say 20 min that would be ok for me right? One of the Instructors said that's fine if I can, if I can do 30, even better he said. So I am safe holding it for 20-30 min at my age then?

The other conditioning drills involve the leg and forearm drills where there's impact hitting them against eachother to build strength, which I forgot the name of. I can go as hard as I want to and even practice against the older students which they'll let me do. They'll even have the older guys hit me very hard as long as I can tolerate the impact against forearms, outer thighs and inner arms then rub the dit da jow on the targeted areas or bruises, and we'll do things like hitting nuckles against wooden boards till it starts to hurt, same thing with the bags, they'll let me hit the bags as hard as I want, even harder than some of the older students.

My question is if even I can tolerate these conditioning drills, besides the discomfort, will it all have a negative impact on me in the future when I'm older due to my body probably still developing? I may feel fine now with some pain amd discomfort here and there but im guessing most kids my age probably wouldn't be doing as much as I am just starting yo do and I just wanted to make sure you guys would know if this is ok, if not then maybe I should go little easier and wait to do more when I'm older, thank you so much.

 

Personally I would recommend against "hitting your knuckles against boards until it starts to hurt". You will gain more practical conditioning from doing heavy bag work. I would recommend against doing press ups on your bear knuckles on a hard floor. but I would recommend press ups on your knuckles wearing very light bag mitts. The benefit is in strengthening the wrist not in strengthening the skin of the knuckles. . In general. you can work hard at any exercise that causes discomfort in the muscles without doing yourself any long term harm. I would recommend against any exercise that causes pain in a joint.

 

Thank you so much. I'll go easier on the knuckles. I'll continue to push myself and do harder conditioning training as much as I can handle any discomfort. I'm 14 so this is why I wanted to make sure and so I know the instructors are not over training me. I had also thought about trying wing chun and hung gar since I heard their conditioning is good.