DMP #47 - Weight Lifting & Internal Arts

[Music] So it's not my favorite topic to talk about, I'll be honest, but it's a very common question that comes up constantly within arts like Tai Chi and Chi Ga and Ba Gua. And that is, can you lift weights at the same time as doing the internal arts? So this question, the reason I'm doing this podcast is because it comes up over and over. It's a very common question and it costs a lot of people are very concerned about it because obviously they usually had an exercise regime, maybe they're going to the gym regularly, lifting weights or whatever they were doing, maybe some body weight exercise, who knows. But they had a fitness routine regime and then they started internal arts and maybe they read some of the books or saw some of the writings that said you shouldn't lift weights because it destroys the internal force. So obviously this causes lots of concern because if you, you know, for a lot of people, if you stop doing resistance training then your fitness will go down and it will drop. So I've seen this sort of, you know, it's almost like there's many divides in the internal arts, isn't there? Does Chi exist? Does it not? Is internal arts a spiritual art or a fighting art? You know, these kind of divides exist. People will polarize towards one and the other. And of course one of the other things people will polarize around is should you lift weights or should you do physical exercise or resistance training we should say, alongside the internal arts. And some people will objectively say no. Some people will say of course you should and it is a complicated issue. It's a complicated matter. I can see why it causes concern because it's not just like it's what we say, like amateur teachers saying don't lift weights. Actually it's some luminaries, you know, you'll find past masters who have said such things so the internal arts are not about that. And then of course you'll see past masters who said the opposite. So I want to answer it now from my perspective and that's all I can do is answer it from my understanding. I should start by saying obviously looking at my god, I'm not a huge guy, but I do do resistance training. I do lift weights. And apart from one small period of time, I have always done physical resistance work either with weights or with my body weight alongside the internal martial arts. So I have done it. But I'm also in the middle between the two because I do understand the limitations of weight lifting or resistance training or physical training of that sort alongside these arts. So as with all these things, the answer is not quite so simple as people make out. There's a lot of people within this scene who would just say no, no, it's very simple. Everything is simple. You can't explain it simply, then you don't understand it. It's not true. Sometimes things have nuances to them and they're a little bit more complex so they need discussing. So I would say right from the beginning, whether you lift weights or not really depends what you want from the arts. It depends on your outcome. Depends on your outcome. So I'm going to preface this. I'm going to before I go into whether you should lift weights or do resistance training, go to the gym or do cardio, even alongside arts like Bhagwara or Chigam. I want to first point out that actually what people don't realize is martial arts on their own often are not a form of exercise. And that confuses people when I say that. Let me explain why. Say your martial art is based on forms. So I'm mostly talking about traditional martial arts rather than MMA or boxing or something like this. I'm talking about traditional Eastern martial arts. Now for a lot of people, the way they do martial arts is not really exercise and I'll tell you why. It's because your system is often based on forms. And if your system is based on forms, whether you have five forms, ten forms, 86 forms, who knows, some systems have ridiculous amounts of forms. Arts like karate, fit into this category, Shaolin, Tai Chi, even if you start learning all the weapon forms or these kind of things. If you have that kind of side to your training, and this is the mainstay of what you do, you'll find that there's a process everybody goes through, which is at first when you do the movements in a form, especially a very fast form like karate or long fist Shaolin or something like that, they will be exercise because your body is not used to making the shape. So when you do your punch and you're like a Yuki like this, if you're in Japanese art, and you're making the shape, your body is fighting itself. You know, you've got all the resistance in your body, and there's all the effort of moving your body in the shape, pulling that sort of Yuki and like that is building that power. And of course, for beginners, it's very hard work. And you start to sweat and people can lose a lot of weight, and they start if they're overweight, and it can be an amazing form of exercise. But then what happens is after a while is the movements become natural to you. So if I use karate as an example, of course, it doesn't matter. It could be any external art or whatever. For a while, but my body just gets used to these shapes. It gets used to these patterns that it's running. All the muscles start to line up and they don't fight themselves. So now everything is very, very smooth. And of course, if you watch somebody's performing a martial art, at the beginning, we're kind of clumsy and tight. And then by the time you get to the sort of intermediate stages, people are smooth, and everything is moving bang in the right direction. Everything is cracks in one go, in order to hold put shape as form. Japanese art is Chinese art, it doesn't matter. But of course, then what happens is now your body is doing the form or the catter or the movement, whatever it is efficiently. It's not really any exercise anymore. Your body has become so comfortable doing that movement. It's no longer being exercised. It's learning efficiency, of course, but it's not, you're not resisting yourself. You know what I mean? So there's no working bulk. So this is why you'll see if people do martial arts that are only based on forms, such as karate, shalin, tai chi, whatever. Any of these, easy and arts. They often will do the same. Begin it will come in, then they will start to get fitter. Then they will train a bit longer, then they will become unfit again. And then there's that old joke, isn't it, that the higher you go up through the black belts, like the bigger your belly becomes. And sometimes people say, "Oh, it's because you've got lazy as they get older." But often it's because they've done the arts so long that it's no longer exercise. It's such a natural thing for their body to do, that it's not working them anymore. And definitely, I remember that with something like, well, actually most arts that I studied, you can always find a way to make it be effort on your body. But after a while, the movements will come very smooth and very comfortable for your body. And when your body is not fighting itself, not going through resistance, there's no fitness training. So you should be aware of that, that if your art is based on those kind of things, making your body efficiently perform forms on movements, that at some stage it will stop being exercised. So therefore, if you take out all strength training, resistance training, whether it be going to the gym and lifting weights, or whatever you use in the floor, press up sit-ups, maybe it's in the hand balancing, or whatever it is people do. Or if you take out all of that side of your life or their exercise, after a while there's a chance you can become quite, quite unfit. And it is something that happens in the Eastern Arts. You will see people with very efficient but weak movement. So therefore most arts should have, I mean a lot do, a lot will have their exercise as well. But all arts should have some kind of training, sometimes they call it gongli in the Chinese art. Sometimes gongli verse repose very specifically to just physical stuff. But sometimes gongli actually, some systems will talk about it more in an internal way as well. They'll use the term gongli to talk about sort of dragging and stressing of the facial lines as well. It really varies how people discuss that term. But they should have some kind of strength training, power training, resistance training as in. So when we get down to it, if we want to make our arts work in the most efficient fashion possible, or the best fashion for us, not only do we want to make our movements more efficient, our ability to move our bodies smoother, faster, we need to learn the choreography of the forms and everything the form is teaching us, we also need to maintain our health. A large part of our health is our strength. And our strength is built largely through resistance, it's built under pressure. Sometimes people think internal force is different, you know, like you just build enough chi, and then through your gong and then your martial arts will have enough power. But that's not the case actually. Even if your model of your arts uses chi, then essentially the chi still has to move into the cavities of the body of your leg. So we can push open the connective tissue, which I'm sure many of you will understand to be training this way. So therefore when the chi mobilizes the connective tissue, the connective tissue will have to be strong. So therefore the connective tissue will have to be stressed. So there's even specific ways within the internal arts, especially of training the two different layers of the body. So when you get a bit further down the line, there's a difference between, you know, sort of cranking dumbbells to build the biceps, sort of standard sort of external stuff. Or there's other ways to use weights, other ways to use resistance. So that whilst it still does the outside muscles, the biceps, we might say, to a certain degree, it will to a larger degree move the connective tissues on the inside and start to make them thicker. So it's not an exact model. And of course, people with understand, this is a human physiology, you might argue with the way I'm defining this, but just as a model, you can think of it like this. If you have your muscle on the outside, you might have your connective tissue inside that muscle underneath that muscle, you know, filling the spaces, going around the sort of striations of the muscle. And in classical medicine, or classical Chinese thoughts, or you know, as in classical Chinese thought, they tend to think of the connective tissue that we're working on being between the muscle and the bone. It's kind of in the space between the two. So obviously that's not so literal but if you think of it like that, that it's easy to understand how this works. Because if it's between the bone and the muscle, so maybe this is the bicep on the outside. And then I got the connective tissue underneath the bicep, then I got the bone. If I learn how to exercise the connective tissue, then the connective tissue will grow and get bigger and expand and it will push the muscle on the outside. And this is what often causes people's bodies to look a bit full or packed. Not the same as fat, you know, like you've eaten too much pie or something like that, it's not the same. There is a quality where the internal artist body looks inflated. And it looks strong but not ripped, I should say. I mean ripped, I don't mean ripped injured. I mean ripped in the case of, you know, winning a bodybuilding competition or something like this. And this pushing out and filling up the body is because the internal artist has learned how to stress the connective tissue, if you like, the stuff that in the model they use for Chinese artisers between the muscle and the bone. And this is going thick. So you have a phrase within the internal arts, mostly associated with Tai Chi, but I think it's safe to say you could probably accredit it to most of the internal arts. It's your body should be like steel wrapped in cotton. Most Tai Chi people have heard this. And there's different ways to define it. As with all of these kind of phrases from the classics, it can be understood on different levels. But on the level of the physical body, the cotton on the outside is the surface muscles. They want to be relaxed. And the steel or the iron, the steel wrapped in cotton is on the inside underneath the muscle. So basically that the connective tissue between your bone and your muscle is pulled, tore, and built. So conventional weightlifting, if you like, would make you cotton wrapped in steel. Shall we say, you would become cotton wrapped in steel, solid on the outside, squishy on the inside. This would be what conventional weightlifting does, according to Chinese martial arts thought. So if I do a conventional weightlifting, like this, I lift this golden bulldog up, oh, it's really light, oh, you can be heavier. And I lift it up like this, and the bicep builds, because I'm lifting a weight. What I'm doing is I'm building the outside, the outside, meaning it will become solid and built. But the inside, the space between the muscle and the bone, actually doesn't really build. The layer where the internal forces doesn't build. So we would say you are still-- you are cotton on the inside, wrapped in steel, steel on the outside. And that's conventional exercise or a system work. So Chinese martial arts, not just internal arts, I think that many of the Shaolin systems do it as well. And even the definition of internal external is a little burry sometimes, isn't it? As I'm sure you know. But other more external arts, should we say, for simplicity, say, even they would do this, that they learn to then transfer the power off of the large muscle groups on the outside to the inside, so that you stretch open all the connective tissue and stress it and build it. So what you get is steel on the inside and cotton on the outside. And obviously Tai Chi, before this was so important, to put it within its classical text. So then if you look at how you do that, there's two components, one of which is chi to mobilize the insides. So this is back to that sort of bone and contention, is chi real or not? Yes, it depends how you define it. There is something that is produced as a byproduct of internal training if it's done correctly, which is quite rare these days. A lot of people don't know how to find it. But if you know how to find the chi within the body, what it does is it mobilizes and wakes up for what we call the insides of your body. Essentially, it causes the connective tissues to kind of animate and come to life. This is why internal martial artists, when they move, you can see it looks like things move around under the surface of the skin. It, that life within their body, it's the connective tissue waking up and it wakes up because the chi goes into it. Then the next stage is to stress those connective tissues after they are awake and then they will start to build. They will start to build. And now you can find the steel. So if you can understand that, you can see that, and this is why some internal arts teachers, masters, even in the past, it's not like it's nobody, you know, it's quite high up guys of dead, they said this, they said don't lift weights, okay, don't go to the gym. Now the reason they're saying that is because they're trying to stop people, build the outside of the body, building the biceps, the triceps, the big muscles on the outside because they know that if those become too contractive, too much mass, too tight, then the inside can't wake up. So the connective tissues can't wake up. So if I were to look at the advice of don't lift weights, depends what you want. Realistically, if you want internal movement and you want the internal arts, I would say if you have the correct method, if you understand how to build the chi and mobilize the connective tissues inside, your system contains that kind of instruction, then you kind of leave resistance training and lifting weights until you've got to the stage where the connective tissues mobilize. I would say that's probably more accurate way of doing it. Then when the connective tissues are mobilizing fine, you may as well go back to resistance work because it will make you a lot stronger and a lot healthier. So you can think of it like set of scales, yeah. On one side, I've got conventional muscle, shall we say outside muscle, and on the other side of the scales, I've got the connective tissues and the insides mobilized my chi. Now this is my normal muscles, outside inside. When my outside is very, very strong, being contracted, stressed, grown, the inside is switched off, okay? So I need to relax the outside muscles, let them switch off by set of dry sets, the outside, all the stuff the teachers tell you to do, hang the muscles off the bone, you will hear, relax the muscle bodies, switch off your tension, okay? Release all the clumsy power. It will go down and as it goes down, if you build chi alongside it, you can access the inside. Now the connective tissues mobilize. The inside of your body comes to life. Some people have called this the elastic wet suit or the organic wet suit or the venom symbiot, if you like, that appears within your body of your comic book nerd. So as the external strength goes down and the internal strength goes up like this, now my body functions differently. You have an entirely new way to mobilize or use your body. Now your body is not gonna function on leverage and contraction, it's going to function on the release and expansion of the connective tissues inside. Once you've switched that set of scales, there is enough cheat and mobilize it issues, now you resistance train again. And what happens is now the internal muscles or the internal tissues get stronger and stronger and stronger and you start to build, stress and strengthen your body in the correct fashion. So generally if you want that kind of stuff, if you want the internal force, for most people there is a period where the external weightlifting probably has to go. You have to drop it and I did. And I used to do a lot more physical exercise and then there was a period where I had to let that external exercise disappear 'cause I had to find the inside of my body. And I became weaker. I became physically weaker. I became less able to lift stuff. My body was a little strong. Just while I found the inside and then once I found the inside and the cheat and the tissues are mobilizing, I went back to lifting weights because now I knew that my body was going to lift weights according to this internal mechanism instead of the external mechanism. And then I got stronger again. So the stopping of the lifting of weights was a temporary phase while I found it. So I would say with that, if you've got two different ways of lifting the weights, you can't really choose. You can't really, it's not like an intellectual thing. It's not like I go to lift the weight, whatever back to my, it's not actually very heavy. It's like a tin of beans. So say I've gone to this and I got my weight here or pretend you're a tiny solid gold and I'm gonna lift. And if I haven't trained to the internal mechanism in my body, I can't choose to use it. You know, like I see some, I've even seen on YouTube some teachers trying to say, you know, just access the inside and then lift the weight with the inside. You can't. If you haven't built enough to eat and mobilize the tissues, you won't find the inside. It's not an intellectual choice. So when I choose in between my left arm and my right arm, that's not how it works. It's not a decision I can make in the moment. In the same way as, if I've woken up the internal body, should we say, and all the connective tissue is moving according to the internal arts, I can't then choose to lift with the outside muscles. Maybe I'm more likely to be able to, because I previously used my external muscles when I was still developing and new, but it's still very difficult. You can't make a decision in that moment. So the weight lifting will depend on, you will lift the weights according to how your body is built and what you have developed within these arts. And that's very important to understand, because sometimes people think these things are all a technique. You know, like if I lift the weight in a conventional way or do my muscles, if I do it at this angle, and I breathe a certain way, it'll do it with the internal mechanism, but of course that's not the case. It doesn't make a difference on the outside shape really. It mostly matters if you have found the inside of the body. So then the question is, how long do you have to drop the external weight lifting for? And that is complicated. The question is hard, is, 'cause the first thing it depends on is, do you have the method to wake up the inside? Because if you don't, if you don't know the method to find the insides of your body, then which is not automatic, you know. It's not like you do the Tai Chi form enough times and you'll find it. Most people will not. Most people will need specific training in the causes of the mind and the causes within your body and the way you breathe and the way that we open everything up and the way we sink the Chi to find the insights. This is why there are many people, let's be honest, who practice the internal arts, who've never found the internal mechanism. Even some famous lineages, to be honest, I think died several generations ago. Even a famous lineage of Tai Chi is not even a guarantee for people to have that. But then increasingly, more and more people are having the method because the beauty of the internet is that it's more and more people are sharing and more people are comparing it to more people are finding the insights. There is hope there. It's going to be all doom and gloom. If you don't have the method, then there's no point quitting the bodybuilding. Because if you can't find internal strength, you may as well build external strength, in which case you may as well develop a really or have a regular and clever bodybuilding routine that builds these kinetic muscular chains on the outside of your system. Now, why are there many martial artists who've done that? Because they never found the internal mechanism, they just built the outside of the body externally using weights or kettlebells or resistance bands or thousands of press ups or whatever you do. It can be as all kinds of ways you can do it. They built the body externally. By doing that, they stayed strong. They built strength. Even sometimes a very intelligent external strength. External strength doesn't have to be dumb. We think of it like it's clumsy, which is a bit snobby. It's not true. I've seen people with incredibly clever external strength. They built these kinetic chains in the muscles. Incredible. But it's still external power. It's not really what the Chinese arts were after. It's a kind of hybrid. Chinese martial arts shape or Tai Chi shapes, if you like, or white cream shapes or winged chan shapes or whatever, with this external strength that they've built. It's not really the right power for the internal martial arts. But I'm not a traditionalist in that way. I don't really care. I don't mind. I mean, if someone has a nice form and they flow and at the same time they're using resistance weight training externally, they get nice and strong and staying healthier, they're more powerful to them. More power to them, go for it. Build your body in this way because it will serve you better. It's better than not knowing how to build internal force and also stopping external strength training. Because now what happens is you do your form and you've taken away all of your resistance training and you'll just get weaker and weaker and weaker and ultimately that's bad for your health. That's no good and your health has come first. Right. Even for fighting. If you don't know how to find internal force and you take away, so you've got none of that. You have an external force. I mean, even self-defense side of martial arts kind of pulls away, doesn't it? So, you know, that's why it's hard to answer because if you don't have the internal methods, you're better off building external strength. If however you do know the internal methods and you know how to get the cheek and you know how to sink it so it mobilizes and fills into the spaces and activates all the internal side of the body, then excellent. I think that if you're training daily, you know, the timescales I can give are only for people that have been with a couple of hours a day because that to me is what most of my students do as a minimum and that's just kind of what I expect. So, if someone's doing a couple of hours a day regularly for internal martial arts and they know the internal arts method, I think you probably have to stop resistance training for about nine months, about that. Nine months. While you find the insides. And to some of you, that will sound like a really long time. Nine months without any resistance training. Well, don't forget you still get an exercise, you're still getting, you're still moving your body and you're still developing strength from low stance work and the shape of the forms themselves. You're just not going to bulk up and get that external power because you've spent nine months to a year maybe dropping that external weightlifting while the internal force built. Now once the internal force is there and it's back, resistance training is fine and you know, I'm teaching here in Bali and I'm teaching full time. And I basically, the students who are studying full time, more to the point, you know, there's other teachers who are teaching too. I'm not doing the whole thing, that would be crazy. But there's students who are studying full time and when they started, the period when we dropped to the external work was about that, you know, about nine months or something. I kind of focused on a lot of chi building and a lot of opening the body and a lot of finding the insides until the insides moved on all the students that were pretty much living here full time. Well, after that, even for one hour after that finish, I'm putting the resistance training back on top. So they're doing a lot of a lot of our choice exercises, which are not like in very much because who does, you know, I'm quite grueling sometimes in my classes. And they're putting that exercise now into the internal body. So now what's happening is, so the process when they turn up, we activated the insides to their bodies, found the chi, got it to mobilize, found the insides through the tai chi and the jingi they're doing, which is what they're learning. And then now doing a physical exercise back on top of that. So now they're bulking, but they're not bulking the external muscles, they're bulking the connective tissues to build that kind of steel wrapped in cotton, or the, which is the physical interpretation of that phrase. There's different, any classical phrases, interpretations on different level, there's a subtle version of that. But on the physical level, they're building the steel wrapped in cotton because they're stressing the internal mechanisms through their exercise. So I hope that made sense. So maybe that answers that question. Like, should you stop weight lifting? I think for a little while, while you find the insides is wise, but if you don't have the methods, you're better off doing external training constantly. And if you can't find the internal method, do remember to go back to external training. And once it's woken up, once the body knows how to move under all this expansion and release, do put the resistance training back on you. Don't spend the rest of your life thinking, I've got internal force and this will be really healthy because it won't. Your body will waste away. It's why you get lots of Tai Chi practitioners, particularly, you have quite a lot of internal movement, they have quite a lot of Chi. And they have a bit of Jin, maybe they can maybe just associate Jin Tricks and stuff like this, but they're weak. They're physically weak and the health isn't that good. The longevity of many Tai Chi masters is not great. You get the occasional one, don't you, TT Liang lived till, I don't know, long time, but you can look it up over 100, I think, or something, or I've got that right. But, you know, some of them, if for a long time, some into their 80s and 90s, but then a lot of Tai Chi people died in their 50s and 60s. And people say, "Ah, it's because of the time or something like that, and that era of people died early, maybe, but I know modern Tai Chi experts that die quite young." And, okay, life happens. You get the healthiest person in the world and you get a disease and it kills you. That can happen. Maybe the healthiest person in the world, and you have an injury and it sort of throws things out of whack and it kills you. That can happen. So, you can never fully ignore those things. Of course, life is life and there's chance in holding it to a certain degree. But at the same time, I think a lot of the Tai Chi masters that were dying quite young was because they had completely dropped external methods. So, they didn't, they didn't, they couldn't drop Tai Chi's external. They completely dropped resistance training. They completely dropped weights. Completely dropped pushing against something that was resistance. So therefore, their health dropped and their health failed and that's not great for you. Especially, good old or isn't it? Like, what's the age? Is it past 40 or something? 45? I don't know that you're, maybe it's earlier. I've got no idea on this, that your muscle mass drops by a percent every year or something and you get a bit weaker. So, it's obviously wise to have some strength. So you must, once you finally enter nobody, do some resistance training and you can see it in Tai Chi, I mean, they started to introduce all the other heavy weapons, you know, I'm not talking bazooka, sounds like that, I mean heavy weapons like very heavy poles or very heavy swords and things like that. In Bagwai, you'll see giant weaponry that's obviously not practical, wasn't used in combat. It's like a dwarf picking up a giant sword or something you've ever seen, but it's the weight and it's the sheer pressure that our object puts into your body or sometimes you see Bagwai practitioner with rings around their arms or holding weights in their hands, what they're circle walking like this. And that's all resistance training, essentially resistance training that is being put onto an internal body. You'll see people don't do those large weapon training or anything right from the start, they do it once the internal mechanisms are switched on. So hopefully that made that clear, that's my view on weightlifting. I will now branch off into a couple other topics. First thing I do is argue with myself. There's no one here to argue with me, I'll do it myself, somebody will argue in the comments I'm sure, but I will argue with myself now. And what I will say is there is an exception to that. Exception to everything I've said is sometimes I'll get people come into a martial art class and they're really weak. They're just weak, they've never done any exercise in their life. Maybe they've spent their life smoking weed and playing video games or maybe they've got an office job or maybe they've been in university, who knows. And so some people will turn up bad posture, weak, flobby, no muscle, no strength, no stamina, no cardio. Those people will turn up, I ignore everything I just told you. I ignore everything I just said. I don't think I will wake up the internal body for these guys. I think there's a stage they need to do before that, which is they need to get strong first. Because you can only let go of something you already had. So if you never had external strength and you never had external exercise, how can you let go of it in order to find the internal? You can't. So it's a saying that my dad used to tell me actually and it's very true is you can't rise above what you can't do. And I always kept that rule in life. In mind, it was like a motto that stuck with me. A few of those things I was told in early life, stuck with me, and that one always run true. You can't rise above what you can't do. So if I wish to, if you say, rise above conventional strength, not that there's anything wrong with conventional strength, but I want to look for a new form of it, I have to have conventional strength first. It's just a weird cosmic rule. So I have to, if I get these people coming in or students who have never done anything physical, which is very common, especially these days. These days, people can't work on the internet. And there's no shame in smoking, reading, playing video games, not doing anything with your life. That didn't mean to sound so harsh, but there's no shame in that. So what happens is when those people come along is they have to build external force first. It's like there's a stage they haven't yet got to. So they just have to do lots of exercise. So I don't even worry about internal force for those people, particularly, I just build them up. And once they got that weight, that strength, which they have to do by going to the gym, doing resistance training, doing lots of push-ups, the normal things that people would do for the outside body, only once they have that. And they don't need to be jacked. They don't need to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger or something, but they just have to have some strength in their body. Then we can start to think about letting that go a little bit to find to the internal mechanism and then to put the strength back on. So you get this weird process where you need external power, let go of it so we can find internal power, and then put the resistance back on top to create a higher degree of internal power. And if you do it in this way, if you know how to do this, the combination of the chi mobilizing, sinking and mobilizing, and the resistance training onto the connected tissues, you'll get very, very strong and very, very healthy. It's crazy how strong you are. I'm very strong, like, conventionally, I'm very strong in a standard fashion. And it's not like I'm hugely muscley or anything, not at all. But it's because the internal mechanisms are there. So when I go to lift something, look at this. This way, solid got none lying to you. It doesn't weigh anything. But if I wanted to lift the weight up, or I wish to grab a person and move a person or something, it's very easy for me to do so, or I'm very strong in that way, because the internal force is very connected. So what it means is when you grab something and move it, you feel it pull across your entire body. Like, you grab something and you go to do an action, and you pull, you're even a gym, you know, and I get the handles and I pull like this to lift the weight. You feel it, it's not just the normal weights. How do I explain this? Okay, yeah. So you know when you go to a gym and you sit on a weight, there's like a drawing, isn't there? And they're shading red or something, or black, the muscles that it's working, is you always working a chest and the biceps. Okay, no problem. And if you do it in a conventional way, you kind of feel that your body will brace and then those muscles will engage what you do to work. But if you've got the internal mechanism going, what happens is when you grab it, often you don't feel it in those muscles. And instead what you'll feel is like a stretch across the entire body. So you grab the weights and you go to lift, and I feel it pull behind my ankle, and inside the calf, somewhere near the bone, something underneath the ribs, diaphragms usually involve. Sometimes it pulls up behind the ear, and then you'll feel it kind of stretch and mobilize, and then the weight will lift. So it almost makes the piece of equipment irrelevant in a way, not totally, but the accuracy, so you're using gym equipment, the accuracy of the diaphragm doesn't, a diagram, sorry, of what muscles are being used, doesn't really apply anymore, because the whole body is connectively being used to lift everything. So it doesn't matter whether I do a chest, press type movement, or pull down for the lats or something like that, or even a curl for the biceps. You might still mostly target that part of the body, but the rest of the body will support it in this elasticated way. And if you have a kind of a lot of internal force, when you start to lift that weight that way, you even feel the chi mobilise, and that pressurization of the chi pushing into the chamber of the body, the chambers of the body will come in order to switch the internal mechanism and for you to lift it. It's a very fascinating process. And if you can get the body to do this, all of a sudden, like the heavy pole in Tai Chi, and the heavy weapons that you use, the sword and that, or even holding weights or rings in baguette, all of a sudden they take on a different meaning, because you don't get that same sort of contractive localised muscular fatigue feeling. You get an all over stretch across the entire body, and you feel how the weight is loaded onto the steel of the internal mechanism that you're building, while the outside stays soft cotton. This is why you're often see Tai Chi teachers do a demonstration where they're doing the form, and they're very low in their stance, and loading all their body weight into their legs, and they'll have a student or something touch their thigh muscles, and it's still soft. They can see that the outside muscles are still relaxed and switched off, and it's because they're transferring their force, they've trained to get the force off of the external muscles onto the internal muscles. Okay, and this is what's building that. So it's kind of a long answer, isn't it, into weightlifting? Is it a good idea? I think that in that phase, if you do have the internal methods, and you know how to access the inside of the body, and you're going for that space where you switch off, or you leave the external training for a bit, it's still okay to do some exercise. So what I do is, whilst people are doing that training, I still get them to do bodywork stuff. So even on the stage where I'm saying, "Don't go to the gym, don't do resistance training," I still get them to do 20 press ups, 20 sit ups, or something like that. And maintaining a basic level of health, shall we say, a basic level of fitness, 'cause I think 20 press ups and 20 sit ups is nothing. Anyone should be able to do that. It's especially a bit of a martial artist. If you're a martial artist, you can't do 20 push ups and 20 sit ups, then maybe you need to relook at what you're doing, because that level of exercise is what I consider normal. So even on that phase where I'm saying, "Don't go resistance training," I'm still getting people to do that kind of exercise. 20 push ups, 20 sit ups, this is nothing. It's not enough to bulk you. It's not enough to keep you locked in the external mechanisms of your body. It's not enough to cause lots of muscular contraction and tightness, but it's enough just to make sure you don't tell into a complete pudding while you're in that phase of finding the internal body. So this is my explanation of this kind of undidid idea of weight lifting. If you want to find the internal mechanism, there's a period where you drop it, but it's really not that long, especially not in the grand scheme of the entire of your life. And then once you've found the internal mechanism, you can do a lot of resistance training, like a ton. I mean, I grapple and I wrestle, that's resistance training, the other person's body, and I have a gym in my house. This is my house, this is my hangout space and where I socialize, you can see the pool table and hangout, and I have a training remover on the other side of the building that has gym equipment in it. I have a whole, what you call it, the rack with the bench press on and all that kind of stuff. So very conventional weight lifting equipment that I have in my house, it's pretty well stocked gym. So it's not like I have different equipment, particularly. It's just that because I've developed the inside of my body, it works the connective tissue and creates the steel wrapped in cotton, hopefully, rather than just working the conventional muscles like a normal body builder would or something like this. It means you never get the aesthetic build. I lose all the aesthetic benefits, I don't get all the nice shapes of the muscles and all nice and toned, definitely not, but you get the strengthening of the tissues on the inside. Because I'm also very much interested in internal arts and imbalanced that with the Qi. So I have to build, sync and develop enough Qi so you have to even believe in that or have it in your arts for this evening be relevant. And then I balance the two. So I build enough Qi that my body mobilizes more and then I stress out and weight lift with what is mobilized and that is my process. I was going to finish there, but I make it not too long. Because I think that pretty much says what I want to say, but actually I wanted to add a little sort of PS. What do you call that? Post-note, I don't know, whatever. On the end of this, to answer another question very, very briefly, that my friend, Joey Nichead, you might know him as a troublemaker, I do, but I do, do you know who he is? He asked me the other day my opinion on a conditioning, you know, to take impact from people to take blows, essentially and how that's done within the internal arts. And it was difficult for me to give him that because I'm really focused on that particular thing because I'm not sport fighting or anything, but this is my take on it. And I'm sure other people will understand it more. It's the internal way of taking impact training and why I'm mentioning it in this. Podcasts is because it also really comes from the same kind of training. So if you're building, say when I was doing karate when I was younger, I wanted to be able to take impact or some of the boxing I was doing. So therefore I had to get hit. So basically what you would do is take blows. So with the boxing, the very fact that you get hit and banged around in the ribs and whacked in the muscles means that your body kind of knits together so it learns to take the impact. So essentially your training is based on repeatedly hitting, getting hit, you know. And then in the Japanese arts, the martial arts sometimes, especially on the legs and things in the arms, there'll be a lot of impact. So sometimes with other people's arms, you'll see it in Kung Fu as well. Or sometimes with sticks or bits of wood bang in the body to knit together the kind of muscles, the muscle tissues. So they kind of knit together to give you a lot of resistance. And you can see lots of the Okinawa arts and things where they hold and go like this. engage the muscles in a very specific way and then repeatedly take impact to knit the body together. So what you get is a kind of muscular protective shield across your body. That's the external way. But it's not the internal way. Sometimes it's he tai chi practician is doing it and I always think it's a bit of an error. Or rather it's a hybrid. It's not an error. It's a hybrid. To hit your body with sticks and stuff to. or to have people. you see people, should ladies and people, slap them to basically or hitting them to build the power in an external way. I think that's a hybrid. That's the same as doing a tai chi form. Don't really know how to be an internal force who just left resistant weights and create that external internal hybrid. So same with the hitting as well, because when I hit like that, what happens is you knit together the tissues and create this sort of thick layer that makes you very resilient to being hit. But it's still on the outside. It's the outside. It's the wrong layer. And sometimes for people say, "No, no, no, we change material." So I see this in the internals. We start with like, I don't know, brush. And then we go to wood. And then we go to metal. And this penetrates deeper to the bone. It doesn't. Okay, maybe argue when it does, if you sit on that. But it still knits together the external layers. It's still not the internal layers. So internal arts are built differently. And you get something like. So external resistant, you know, to take damage sort of resilience training to build that is called iron shirt. And most of the external stuff I'm talking about, or at least how I was taught it, it was called iron shirt. And I did quite a lot of that when I was younger. I quite enjoyed it. It gets quite, you know, sort of say, domestic as they give building this iron shirt. But the internal arts don't really build iron shirt, or that's why I was taught. They build golden bell cover instead. They talk about. And golden bell cover is a different thing. So these, the Chinese names don't really matter, you know, but essentially golden bell, if you want, or all the resistance to be able to take an impact in the internal arts, is based on something else. It's based on exactly what I'm talking about here. It's the external that let go of becomes cotton. The internal, the connective tissues become steel. Okay, steel wrapped in cotton. So the Qi pushes into all of the spaces in the body and into the connective tissues and causes them to inflate and push out and become thick. Essentially that a different layer, the layer between the surface muscles and the bone starts to bulk up and thicken. And it looks like your body becomes more full, right? So we say the internal martial arts practitioner is full filling up, filling up with pung, filling up with Qi. The Qi is pushing into the cavities and pushing into the tissues. So now what happens is when you take an impact, instead of it hitting like a knitted together iron shirt, what it does is it disperses that power across the whole of the connective tissues. So if I've done iron shirt and everything is contracted and I hit like that, it's localized to that area, but because I've knitted together all the tissues, it's very strong and it comes listed. It sort of bounces around like a shield, but if I've done golden bell, or I don't even like that name, it's stupid isn't it? Golden bell end, because if we do the internal version of it, shall we say, the internal version of iron shirt, or the internal resistance, so you can take impact. When I hit, instead of knitting everything together, I've expanded it out and connected it up. So now the force gets distributed across the entire body, meaning it's not localized here. So I'm not a scientist, but if you add a hundred, so we say, of whatever the thing you're reading it with is, if your power is 100 when you hit here, it disperses over the body. So instead of becoming a hundred percent impact here, it's 1% 1% 1% 1% 1% 1% 1% 1% 1% 1% 1% 1. Like it's over the entire body. So it means that the force is greatly reduced and I find that that when I'm sparring or even in applications, alarm people to hit me or something like that, I don't really feel like obviously it can be too strong. It gets around house to deliver is never awesome to be totally honest, but if you're getting hit on the body and you have the chief filled into it and you've done the internal training, so you have still wrapped in cotton, the force spreads across your body. So you feel your whole body just kind of adjust, but the force is not localized to a point. So it's like you're taking a solitary point like this and you're turning it into a large spread area across your body which reduces the impact. So the reason they do this is because, well, I think it's just a byproduct of the internal training if you're doing it properly, you're filling with chi and building the resistance, the causing stress into the internal mechanism so it all connects up. And the other reason is I think because the view of everything tightening and contracting was a bit stagnating in the body and they didn't really want that. They wanted the chi and the blood to flow. Remember a lot of Chinese men's and beliefs are mixed in with martial arts, aren't they? Chinese martial arts. So they wanted everything to flow smoothly through the body. So that's how the impact training is done on the internal arts. Of course, the next stage is you can take it further and you have things like neutralizing gin, kwajin, things like this and then that is another way of receiving force. That is deeper. Okay, jongding and kwajin is another topic but I'm literally just talking about the sort of surface level impact that your body takes when you get hit and built that way in the internal arts. Having done lots of, you know, we're getting hit in the external arts and then actually sinking the chi and opening up and taking impact in the internal arts, I will say that actually I can take more impact from the internal arts than I can from the external arts. Okay, it wasn't that way at the beginning but because I spent years and years focusing on that I can take more impact from internal arts body conditioning for sure. Obviously only in some places, NDNOS is not very nice. Only in Jaws not too good but certainly on the body and the fleshier areas of your fleshier areas, your body, you can take a lot more. So hopefully I covered a bit in here. I know it's probably a controversial one again because people have their ideas around whether you should lift weights or being strong and stuff like that and do remember that I'm saying if you don't have the internal methods you're better off doing external strengthening. You really are because you'll stay a lot healthier and the other thing is if you started weak and you need to exercise do get strong first. So once you've done both of those things, say you've got the, you're already strong and you've got the internal method that's the only time I would then say we need to let go of all the resistance training. So you can song, so you can release, so you can let go of the outside and find the inside. Then when you find the inside we put the weight lifting back on. So my version of it is not that you don't lift, it's not that you don't lift weights for the internal arts, you don't lift weights in the internal arts at a particular stage in your training. And once you're past that stage of training you can carry on. You do have to make sure you're not stupid with it though. You'll never be able to like that level of strength training that you're blood vessels of birth and you'll be shitting yourself with the effort as you go and up that. You'll never be able to that level of weight lifting. That's always going to contract your body, but you can go back to the gym and you can do a sensible amount to stay strong. So hopefully that helped and I hope lots of you have access to the internal methods these days. Lots of internal systems do contain such things and if you can find it you can build the internal body. So good Good luck to you.