Practicing boxing emphasizes specialization; through specialization comes mastery, and with mastery comes profound insights and endless discoveries. Consistent practice is crucial; seize every moment to practice. Practicing boxing requires concentration; with concentration comes calmness, and from calmness comes vitality. Not only should one remain calm in stillness, but also maintain calmness in motion. Achieving a calm mind is essential; a calm mind leads to a clear spirit, and a clear spirit leads to harmonious energy. The initial focus should be on relaxation and calmness; relaxation brings agility, which allows for smooth circulation of blood and qi; calmness leads to focus, which is essential for delivering powerful strikes. Therefore, relaxation and calmness are key to practicing boxing. The essence of martial arts is nothing but concentrated effort. When learning boxing, one must not be clever or hasty, as this leads to carelessness and superficial understanding, missing the essence. Constant reflection and examination are necessary; where the mind goes, energy follows, and with energy comes strength. Boxing techniques, ultimately, depend on mental agility.
Practicing martial arts is not just about practicing the moves; it’s about applying strength without relying on brute force. Strength is like a net that can lift and throw the body, generating power beyond one’s weight. Only by not using brute force can one harness true strength, as it involves the whole body. When energy flows seamlessly from the crown to the perineum, one’s movements can become limitless.
The essence of practicing boxing techniques lies not in the form but in the fulfillment and completeness of spirit. When the spirit is full, the form, though rigid, can move fluidly. If the spirit is lacking, even a complete form will not be agile. The focus should be on cultivating the spirit. Firmly anchor your spirit without dispersing it. During practice, avoid a wandering gaze; focus on a single point or your hand to stabilize your spirit, achieving internal and external unity.
When practicing, apply gentle intention to your palms, coordinating with your breath without showing any external force. With time, this practice leads to both softness and strength, embodying the essence of flexibility and firmness. Relying solely on brute force will only result in stiffness and lack the dexterity of seamlessly integrating softness and strength, missing the true meaning of internal boxing. Use the concept of “defending without defending” to let energy flow throughout the body, with a presence that is both there and not there. This way, your whole body responds fluidly, adapting freely to changes.
When practicing alone, focus on mastering a few techniques rather than attempting too many. Choose one or two stances to perfect, known as practicing form, or combine a few movements for a more dynamic practice, focusing on energy or the underlying principles. Without practicing form, your stance will be unstable. Without practicing energy, your flow will be disjointed. Without practicing adaptability, your reactions will not be sharp. Without understanding the principles, your practice will lack depth. Each aspect has its order; practicing form without understanding will result in a lack of authenticity.
Practicing sets and freestyle boxing differ. In set practice, not every move needs to be applicable, so there’s no need to imagine an opponent. However, freestyle practice requires the imagination of an adversary. The purpose of practicing sets is to regulate energy distribution, mobilize limbs, build endurance, and relax muscles. Effective application comes from breaking down and practicing freestyle movements. Even though freestyle techniques are derived from set movements, without specific practice, one might only master a few tricks without grasping the full range of variations within the form. Always begin practice with a calm and focused mind, pondering the intention and application of each movement and anticipating the opponent’s attacks as if facing a formidable enemy.
During personal practice, your gaze should follow your hands, adjusting speed and height accordingly. A lack of coordination between hands and eyes is a major flaw. Practitioners who do not understand the difference between using strength and applying force often practice aimlessly, resulting in quick exhaustion and the belief that they’ve exerted all their energy, despite making little impact. This indicates a lack of understanding of how to properly extend strength from the shoulders and back. Initially, practice with less force, focusing on using breath and intention with each movement. Over time, strength will naturally flow from the shoulders and back, leading to stability.
Each movement in boxing should be distinct, with quick inhalation and exhalation. Continuity can be slightly slower, but it shouldn’t be as disjointed as cursive writing. Struggling with breath and changing color indicates a lack of understanding of tension and relaxation. From beginning to end, maintaining a tight grip without relaxing even slightly, focusing all energy on a single strike, and then immediately relaxing after the strike ensures that practicing numerous times will not cause fatigue.
Boxing’s effectiveness lies in striking the air, seeking the natural generation of internal strength and maintaining a calm and unaggressive exterior. Training in attack and defense techniques
should feel as if facing an opponent, using mental focus to explore the application of various skills. The simplest basic techniques are the best way to practice overall strength and coordination, also serving as practical defense methods. Slow down your movements to feel the strength in your boxing, which comes from innate power, not brute force. Innate power is present from birth and can be nurtured to grow stronger.
Start practicing slowly to achieve coordination and identify any discordances in your body. By combining slow and fast movements, the generated force can be swift or slow as desired, continuous and overwhelming like a machine gun, breaking down the opponent. Practice without seeking immediate results; genuine skill comes from diligent practice. Focusing solely on defeating others will never lead to true mastery because it distracts from the essence of practice.
Begin practice by focusing on stable and solid stances. Once the foundation is established, gradually increase speed. Practicing solely slow movements without incorporating speed overlooks the balance of yin and yang. Slow practice aims for the soft and ethereal strength, while fast practice seeks the release of strong and forceful energy. Loosen the shoulders and slightly retract them to naturally open up and harmonize internal and external energies. Start moving and turning slowly, ensuring coordination between hands, feet, shoulders, waist, hips, and elbows, maintaining unity without any dispersion. If there’s any disconnection, it should be addressed in the waist, hips, shoulders, elbows, and extremities, which include bones, muscles, tendons, and blood. Teeth, tongue, fingertips, and pores represent the extremities of bones, muscles, tendons, and blood, respectively. Without biting the teeth, one cannot exert force properly. Unstable steps can be corrected by focusing on the three points: if the head tilts, leans, or droops, the strength is compromised. Aligning the eyes, feet, and hands ensures the unity of six harmonies force.
After a period of training, one naturally becomes aware of the body’s expansion and contraction. Initially, one feels the movement of the body, and later, the movement of breath, leading to the sensation of qi. When this sensation encounters the physical body, we perceive it before the opponent does, unless the speed or sharpness prevents timely reaction due to human limitations. If one’s own breath is uneven and unstable, it’s impossible to sense external changes in qi.
After practicing Xingyi Quan for a while, one can feel the rising qi within the body. It’s important not to sit down immediately after practice but to walk around slowly. This walking aids in the natural circulation and refreshing of qi, enhancing mental clarity over time. Thus, practicing martial arts involves both physical practice and internal cultivation, with the finishing and starting positions being equally important, sometimes spending more time walking after practice than the actual practice itself.
Practicing involves relaxing all joints and avoiding holding breath in the chest or abdomen. Limbs, waist, and legs should not exert excessive force. Any movement, turn, kick, or waist movement that causes breathlessness or body shaking is due to holding breath or exerting too much force. When initially practicing strength, each movement should be accompanied by full inhalation, using the intention of pressing to naturally induce an internal and external vibratory effect.
Continuous focus is essential in practicing qi; a break in concentration causes each movement’s energy to disperse, requiring re-concentration, creating gaps. Practicing qi aims to eliminate these gaps, ensuring continuous flow like unending waves in the sea. If each movement results in lost focus and needs reconcentration, even ten years of practice will be futile. Striking with force seems energetic, but after each punch, the energy disperses, requiring a restart, leading to discontinuity between movements.
There’s a distinction between practicing and applying boxing techniques. Practice should be expansive to facilitate the development of qi, strength, tendons, bones, and muscles. Application should be precise, conserving energy and spirit, ready to advance or retreat as necessary. Boxing employs both direct and lateral forces in all directions. Direct force focuses on precision, like a bullet with a spiraling motion, while lateral force emphasizes elasticity, like a fan’s motion, embodying a grinding spirit. Practicing with this mindset enables one to overcome opponents unconsciously, a depth of understanding not easily grasped.
The effectiveness of striking relies heavily on focus. Daily activities, when performed with unified spirit and full effort in each action, starting from the lower abdomen through the sides to the arms, refine strength over time. Focusing solely on the action, guiding qi with intention, and practicing natural deep breathing strengthen the body, eliminating the need for external pursuits.
Practicing martial arts brings an indescribable joy when one masters the flow of strength. Initially, during movement, each action should involve fully inhaling and using the intention to press, naturally generating an internal and external responsive vibrational effect. Thus, understanding the flow of strength is the primary essence for practitioners, leading to a moment of sudden clarity and enhanced sensitivity in various techniques, making the body respond like water forms channels. The human skeleton acts like a clothes hanger, moving one bone moves them all.
Before making a move, calm your mind, eliminate distractions, relax your body and mind to regain the natural calm and innate intuition unencumbered by external factors. Then move, maintaining this tranquility even in motion. Relax the mind first, then the body, allowing the qi to naturally sink to the dantian rather than forcing it. Begin by relaxing the entire body, especially the arms, as if they were ropes tied to the shoulders, free from any restraint. Once calm, initiate movement, gently lifting the arms with a slight mental intention, using the waist and spine to guide the arms, executing movements smoothly, not merely through limb motion. Pay close attention to the essence of each movement during practice, and after consistent practice, one will feel a sense of heaviness and slight soreness in the arms, eventually extending the intention to the hands. This is achieved through relaxed and soft foundation training, as opposed to lax and unfocused methods.
The sense of heaviness in the feet is developed through lightness, akin to walking on a tightrope where exerting force causes one to fall, yet striving for lightness requires even more effort. It’s not about adding force to one strength but integrating multiple strengths. Tightrope walking requires adjusting the entire body’s strength for balance, not pressing too hard or too lightly on the wire. Mastery of this balance leads to developed skill. In changing postures, maintaining integrated strength throughout and using moments of pause for cultivation is key. Should one fail to seize the opportunity or gain momentum, seek improvement from the waist and legs, as agility in all movements relies on the body, rooted in the stance, with all transformations led by the hands, but the foundation lies in the stance. To make skills effective, one must train the lower body’s stance as if treading on a hanging rope.
Salivation during practice indicates a state of complete relaxation. If one does not salivate, it suggests not reaching this state of tranquility. Only through extreme relaxation can one achieve lightness, as both heaviness and lightness result from natural relaxation without forced effort. Minimal movement interacts with the air like movements in water.
For beginners, there are three key stages to overcome. First, channeling strength from the feet to the dantian and directing blood and qi flow from the Governing Vessel down to the dantian, achieved by tucking in the pelvis, contracting the buttocks, and lifting the anus, akin to sitting on a toilet. This foundation leads to rootedness and integrated strength. Second, overcoming blockages between the chest and the Governing Vessel at the back requires the simultaneous actions of tucking in the chest and straightening the back, softening and releasing force from the middle dantian. Third, the area between the shoulder blades, the spiritual mansion, is where essence and qi transform. Overcoming this involves leading with the head and tucking in the chin, allowing intent to guide qi and supplement strength. Connecting the three dantians, from the crown to the perineum, through the central axis, embodies the integration of the three dantians, the foundation of martial arts practice. Understanding this integration allows one to sense the connection from the crown to the perineum.
Beginners, after a period of practice, may feel disoriented or euphoric, often a sign of deviating from proper form and strength flow. This self-perception of rapid improvement needs timely correction to avoid ingraining mistakes. The speed and unity of mind and body in internal martial arts cannot be achieved through physical speed training alone but through simplifying and optimizing movements for attack and counterattack. Basic skills and application are key; some may win with application without focusing on basics, but this is unsustainable with age. Training involves more than just muscles and bones; it’s about cultivating a complete, uninterrupted flow of qi. This integration of hands, feet, waist, and body, along with internal organs, achieves a harmonized qi. Practicing aims to restore a state of effortless being, illuminating one’s innate moral sense and mastering one’s spirit and qi. Tranquility fosters natural yang qi, embodying the principle that stillness begets movement.
The progression in martial arts training involves several stages, from initial uncoordinated efforts to stages where coordination, relaxation, and speed increase, culminating in a state of swift, responsive movement that is both quick and precise, reflecting a clear mind and adaptability. The transition from visible to subtle strength, from external to internal mastery,
Practicing low stances aims to cultivate a mode of exerting force, transforming habitual clumsiness into a unified and rounded form. Only after mastering this form can one practice real combat techniques. Otherwise, having thousands of moves without a single one being truly applicable. Masters naturally do not use large movements to accumulate internal strength; every part of the body moves subtly, and high-level practitioners never resort to low stances in real combat. A shake, and the opponent is defeated. In Tai Chi, squatting is avoided as it disperses force; instead, tucking the buttocks is emphasized, naturally preventing squatting too low.
Practicing routines or individual movements without reaching a certain quantity hardly leads to qualitative leaps. Initially, focus on expanding the form to stretch the muscles and bones fully, vital for learning various forces, though at this stage, it’s still rough. As practice deepens and understanding of boxing details evolves, movements become more refined and compact, efficiently executing force and transitions without overt effort, reducing the form’s size for better defense and anticipation in counterattacks. Movements become minimal, simplicity masking complexity, making advanced skills challenging to master.
Start with stretching and opening up, allowing internal energy to flow freely and joints to relax, leading to enjoyable practice. Significant progress requires at least an hour of practice, focusing on extensive stretching initially. As strength develops systematically, start with relaxation, then progress to deliberate force application, expanding before refining force types.
First, relax the body, adapting movements to a specific form until proficient. Then, increase the speed of these practiced movements, focusing on clear and precise exertion, followed by slowing down while maintaining tension for fuller and thicker strength. Finally, relax again to refine energy, achieving a state of agility and strength. Mastery involves returning to relaxation, signifying expertise.
Training intensity in internal martial arts lies in ensuring accuracy in each movement, focusing more on attention than duration. Practicing correctly for even half an hour can be intensely demanding both mentally and physically.
Feeling strong qi after practicing indicates successful energy management, whereas feeling less qi upon immediate repetition suggests inadequate post-practice energy consolidation. Properly concluding practice by centering qi in the dantian enhances energy sensation with each session. Oversimplified post-practice routines can lead to energy depletion and physical weaknesses.
Practicing boxing should not be overly forceful; adjust with mindfulness to avoid undue strain. Progress is marked by increasing ease and interest; lack of interest hinders progress. Correct practice energizes and excites, contrasting with improper practices leading to exhaustion or breathlessness. Mastery involves maintaining enthusiasm and achieving a balance, nurturing the spirit while maintaining interest.
Some may exhibit crude energy, indicating ungrounded energy. With time, practice becomes irresistible, and discomfort during practice signals strength development. Experiencing illness-like symptoms after advancement indicates a period of adjustment; overcoming this phase signifies significant progress. Regular practice helps prevent cerebrovascular issues, with walking backward as a recommended routine for maintaining agility and defense.
Practice aims for full-body engagement, ensuring balanced effort without overexertion. Paying attention to posture and avoiding protruding the buttocks, which compromises structural integrity, is crucial. Adjusting the abdomen and engaging the back muscles creates a tension that enhances overall coordination and force. This process varies in duration among individuals, requiring dedicated practice for proficiency.
