Learn through practice

Explore simple Kung Fu ideas and practices at your own pace.

What happens in a one-to-one session?

Each session begins and ends with a warm up/down. Joint mobility exercises and movements help you feel more centered in your body. Other activities to enter and exit the practice include ‘do-in’, a self massage tapping exercise that can quickly stimulate your body for activity. As well as other tension release activities.

The session then can include specific practices for your unique wants and needs. The system has forms that can be practiced to develop stability, power, coordination, and agility. As well as practical hand and leg sets of movement with martial applications.

Other practices could include locks and holds, sticking hands, energy work – like qigong, breath practice, relaxation techniques, and many other subtle forms of movement, coordination and awareness. I’ll share practical personal insights that I have learnt over 35+ years of playing with these ideas and practices.

Principle and practice: two paths to learning

I like they idea that there are 2 paths to enter your ‘way’. One is the path of principle and reason, where ideas, concepts and insights are discovered and brought into awareness – and this informs your physical presence and emotional content.

The other is one of practice and disciplined training, where physical insights are drawn through refining and attaining more subtle and nuanced movement and physical presence.

Which ever gets you into growth and cultivation, the other can follow. Combining the mind and body into a place and space where they come together. This simple idea is a very valuable insight in developing, or cultivating practices that suit you best.

In my own journey, I find my natural curiosity and thoughtful nature means I often have my most exciting breakthroughs through Principle and Reason.

Notice tension and relaxation

Another key distinction in early training is learning how to clearly notice tension and relaxation. A bit like a spectrum from most tense to most relaxed. Using this awareness to create movements for different ‘textural awareness’ and different applications of this. This naturally lends itself to feeling more relaxed and at ease more of the time – but also how to engage tension and power with intensity. This is a good example of the path of principle and reason – an insight that changes your physical awareness. This area of training is where I get most excited. If this concept is sounds like something you are intrigued by then email me now and ask for more.

Email me now and ask for more about the Tension Relaxation spectrum: tony@gongfu.ie

Explore posture and connected movement

Posture, alignment, and a sense of connection in your body as you move and find stillness are all inevitable by products of cultivating a physical practice like Kung Fu. The movements at the basic level naturally refine these qualities in order to efficiently complete the basic movements. This can become a key focus of development, doing less things but making them more precise and considered.

This can relate well to the Bruce Lee quote: “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”

Cultivate Your Energy

Learn a foundation qigong practice. Breathing into your centre and storing up energy from this into your body’s centre. You can learn more about this here

Email me now for more, or book a session. tony@gongfu.ie