What Really Happens To A Student After Decades Of Martial Arts Practice
Wednesday, September 1st, 2010The real benefits of Martial Arts practice are quite a bit more intense than most people understand. Most people, you see, study Shaolin or Kenpo for a couple of years, and they are just tapping into the real benefits of the martial arts. Then they lose their way because marriage or kids, their only involvement is really through seeing people like Jackie Chan or Jet Li, and their path has effectively ended.
You recognize these fellows because their uniforms are hanging in the closet, as if they would wear them tomorrow, but they don't use them. This is a sad thing, because it is like buying half a car, or wearing one sock, and they don't understand what could have been. They don't understand that a little work over time and the world would have opened up to them in unimaginable ways.
It takes 3 to 4 years to achieve first degree black belt in most martial arts styles. It used to take a less time, but a lot of junk has been added to the arts. If you separate the blending of arts, the commercial and trophy influences and that sort of thing, then you can actually get to black belt within a year.
At any rate, when a person makes it to black belt they usually realize a thing I call CBM (Coordinated Body Motion). Reaction time goes down, and this makes them quicker, and their movement becomes more liquid. Unfortunately, many systems obsess on muscles or strength, or other things that disrupt the natural movements of the body, and this pretty effectively ends the training cycle.
If the martial art system they are practicing is a good one, they still run into things like marriage and kids and bills. They don't see the value to be gained from the long path, you see, and they don't make the necessary sacrifice to travel it. Sooner or later, they stop working out.
If they do stick to it, however, after about twenty years of practice a person masters his art. This can actually be done in 3 or 4 years, but most instructors don't know enough about actual teaching to help the student make it. They may know the martial arts, but knowing teaching is an entirely different bag of feathers.
Once a person has become a martial arts master he starts to know the true extent of his abilities. He understands how he has become more aware and intuitive, and he finally realizes that he has been building abilities that other people don't know anything about. He becomes a larger human being, a giant, really, and he tends to be patient with those who are still like children to him.
The fighting practices of the far east are ancient ones, and the effects have been well laid out. In modern times, however, with the introduction of corruptive teaching methods and lack of adherence to what works, these effects are not so easily had. It is easy, however, to correct your martial arts practice, and to achieve what the ancients used to achieve quickly and easily.
If you want to learn faster, or perhaps fix your art so it becomes true again, click on over to Monster Martial Arts. This is a phenomenal site which helps people understand what has been done to arts like Kung Fu and Kenpo and others. 1

