how is your view on paintolerance-training? We do that a lot. But sometimes with new students you can see that they are not happy with this. Sometimes they even stay away because of this. But how can you study CMA without hardning the arm, upper body, legd, etc... ? Maybe because most newbies have a different view about kung fu ?
well, we do a lot of body to body drills. in baji we get close to our opponent and a bunch of techniques involve serious contact with your body. besides that we have the typical hardning like you have in most CMA where you train your arms. we don't train with full power because of injuries in the past. but we train with just as much power as the trainingpartner can stand . ( in a responsible way ! ) Sometimes we also train our hands but not so often as the other things mentioned above.
all we do is 3 star 5 star and 9 star blocking to toughen up the forarms, but i would like to do a lot more conditioning especially the shins and thighs. Oh and we have the wall bag set to condition the hands.
Depending on how large your group of people is, I'd suggest breaking it into two groups when doing conditioning drills. One group can work on conditioning and the other on forms or punching or something else. Also, you can offer a dedicated conditioning class, where you could do the body toughening exercises as well as other good exercise for increasing fighting readiness such as jumping rope, hitting the bag, pull ups, medicine ball work, etc. If you have the time and the means to do that, that's my recomendation because it will not only toughen their body but get them into top fighting shape as well. If adding another class is a problem to you because of the extra hours worked with no raise in tuition, then I'd calculate how many people you think will come, calculate how much an hour you think you should make, then increase the price of tuition for that class slightly above that number. For example I want to make $15 an hour I have 5 students coming to a conditioning class In order to make that goal I'd need $3 an hour. However, if someone doesn't show up, I'm left with $12 an hour, if it's a 2 hour class then that's $24 instead of $30. So, I predict that one person won't come and make it $3.75 per person. Just keep the prices reasonable, people are already paying a monthly fee (if that's how yours is set up) to learn gongfu, so while a conditioning class is something above and beyond what they signed up for, it can seem like you're gouging them.
We do 3 Gate, Tiger Blocking, and Gua Sou drilling. They all hurt when you first start. We simply gauge our partner's ability based on age, rank, and size, and we are all expected to talk to each other while drilling. Conditioning is expected, and we focus more and more on it as we advance in rank, but beginners are expected to let their partners know if it's too hard. At upper levels, students are expected to begin real conditioning of the body. It's part of the style. I don't believe the children do it asd much as the adults, though, we do have limits, lol. But conditioning is expected at higher levels...
