Originally Posted by Aeris
Well since it appears Firegoat has abandoned the thread I’ll ask the question again to other Qi Gong experts. Is Sexual Kung Fu considered an Advanced form of Qi Gong?
I haven’t abandoned this thread, I’ve just been short of time lately, so have had to prioritise; being a mod on a PE forum means the PE questions get answered first as they are of more use to the largest number of people here.
Back to your question: “Is Sexual Kung Fu considered an Advanced form of Qi Gong”?
If you go to the gym and have not been before, it is good to do full body workouts before choosing to concentrate specific muscles, and even while concentrating on a specific muscle, you would still train the rest of your body.
If you start running, you need to ‘build and aerobic base’ before you embark on sprinting or marathon training or hills, but even after starting a specific training, you would still do other types, eg. a marathoner will still do speed-work.
(For the guys) If you start PE, you need to do the Newbie Routine, not jump straight into clamping. And whatever level of PE you reach, you cannot ditch the heat and jelqing.
It’s not that Sexual Kung Fu is an advanced form of Qi Gong, it is just a very specific form. Before doing it, you need to build a ‘base’, in this case the strength of the lower dantian, before you get much out of sexual Qi Gong. Otherwise it is like starting to do hill sprints without building up your heart and lungs and legs muscles first; you increase the chances of straining something, and get very little out of the exercise.
To briefly address other’s points. ys is right that the term ‘blockage’ is not actually correct; we are talking about a restriction of flow. The term ‘blockage’ is the usual term used in Qi Gong and in acupuncture and I am so used to using it when dealing with acupuncturists and other Qi Gong practitioners that I forget that others will not intrinsically understand my meaning. Keep picking me up on things like this!
wantsmore: I wish I could link you to articles I have written on neijia, but it would blow my confidentiality here! As the article you linked says, traditional teachers of TaiJi Quan, XingYi Quan and BaGua Zhang (which I am) include a lot of physical training in their teaching; it is far divorced from the ‘hippy’ Tai Ji that most people think of. XingYi luckily has never suffered from becoming ‘hippified’; most who teach it teach it as a fully functional martial art which just happens to have all the health etc. benefits of TaiJi. BaGua I teach less; usually I just take things from it as ‘corrective medicine’ for what is missing in someones TaiJi or XingYi. It is fairly complex to learn, and without a good base in other martial arts, very few people ‘get it’.
I would class Iron Shirt as a Nei Gong method. In fact I would class everything I have referred to as Qi Gong, as Nei Gong. I would however class Sexual Qi Gong as a Qi Gong, because it does not work on the whole body, rather only one aspect. Here it all gets a bit complex; the delineation between Nei Gong and Qi Gong is a modern phenomena. Until only a hundred years ago or so, there was only Nei Gong and it encompassed everything regarded as Qi Gong now. Equally, the separation of martial arts into ‘internal’ and ‘external’ is fairly new; the article you linked suggests it began with Sun Lutang, but he was only the one who popularised it. It goes back further, but not a great deal.
Although I teach the so called ‘internal’ arts, I draw no great distinction between them and the ‘external’ arts. There are hundreds of definitions of what makes an art internal or external, but mine is rather simple: “If you can continue to become more martially effective with the art past the age of 45, it’s internal; if you become less effective, it’s external”.
I’ve done MA’s for nearly 30 years now, and it was because I wanted to do them for the rest of my life that I switched to the ‘internal’ arts; in the ‘external’ arts I was doing, I was getting older and starting to pick up injuries I would not have got in my 20’s. But the fact is I have seen old practitioners of many ‘external’ styles who have stuck with them and eventually they have themselves become ‘internal’. All martial arts ultimately end up at the same point. As the Chinese say; “Internal arts work from the inside to the outside; external arts work from the outside to the inside”.
If you do Karate for example, and you decide to do 10,000 punches, you will start to get tired after the first thousand or so. When all your muscular strength has gone, the only way you can continue to punch is to put your body in perfect alignment (uses least effort) and just turn from your centre while sinking your weight etc.. You can continue to punch, and you are using your whole body to do it. Your punch no longer has the quality of an ‘iron bar’, it has the feeling of a ‘whip’. We live in a strength orientated, upper body culture, so we intrinsically understand the use of external strength to punch, but it is inefficient. This is the sort of training I do with people to get the ‘internal’ feeling. It’s not the sort of training people expect when they come for a TaiJi class. It’s boring and hard work, and it takes discipline. But it’s the only way to get it. That’s why so few people can use TaiJi to fight - they have been taught hippy TaiJi.
In light of all this talk of Qi, I will point out that you would never hear me mention Qi in a martial arts class! Even when teaching Nei Gong, I teach it as a supplementary exercise, but intrinsic to the style, just as a boxer would do sit-ups and press-ups. I mention Qi, but I don’t dwell on it or explain it; the exercises work if you do them, whether you know anything about Qi or not. That is the way it has always been done. The early martial artists of China were uneducated farmers for the most part, they were concerned with results, not theory. Nei Gong is to build up ‘internal skill’ and strength (that is it’s direct translation). The fact that it makes you internally healthy, is secondary to the fact that it improves your martial arts and allows you to take blows easily. I work with a lot of complementary health care providers, so Qi is a common discussion topic for me, but I like my students to get real results, not get bogged down in theory.
Chinese medicine is primarily concerned with balancing energy flows in the body, and has been around for a very long time, because it works. More of the world’s population still use it than use Western medicine. Each have their strengths and weaknesses. Western medicine has grown in a culture where efficacy has to be proven and side effects known, whereas Chinese medicine developed long before the means to test it were available; if it worked, you used the same modality again; if it didn’t you tried something else (just like PE!).
Qi is a concept used to explain how and why Chinese medicine worked, and indeed by the Chinese to explain how the entire universe works. To try to explain Sexual Qi Gong (or martial nei gong) in terms of Qi is the natural Western way, but the fact is that the exercises, properly done, will work whether you have any understanding of Qi, ‘blockages’ etc. or not. You just need to do them, and if you feel any discomfort from the exercises, go back and build on the foundation exercises some more.
