pain tolerance

[reeve80]

do you guys know any methods for building pain tolerance for the whole body so it's not so painful when I get hit

[David]

Conditioning or conditioning. Followed by conditioning. Or conditioning and chi kung.

The powers of Kung Fu never fail!
-- Hong Kong Phooey

[Fu-Pow]

Sit in a low horse stance for 5 min.

Fu-Pow

http://www.fongs-kungfu.de/assets/images/lionhead.gif

"Choy Lay Fut Kung Fu does not encourage its students to abuse or harm others with no reason. Nevertheless, in times when Kung Fu must be performed, Choy Lay Fut requires the student to change from a gentleman into a fierce and cold fighter."

-Lee Koon Hung,
CLF:The Dynamic Art of Fighting

[shaolinboxer]

Take a wooden bar about the length of your forearm and lightly tap your body w/ it (it should feel more like a massage than self abuse). It will stimualte your nerves, circulation, and calcium accumulation in you rib cage.

Other than that, you'll get used to getting hit after a few years

[UberShaman]

Easy ,subject yourself to pain

[IronFist]

I hear novacaine <sp> works.

Iron

[deelee]

I would also love to build up pain tolerance, but I'm worried that I'll end up with lumps all over my body like teacher Pan has.If you don't know who he is, he was in the kung fu film "Iron and Silk" and he is currently teaching in Canada.
Do any of you have any ideas on how to build up pain tolerance without actually damaging the body?
I don't want to be crippled when I'm older!

Deelee

[Primer]

It seems like you're afraid of pain :). Just think of it as the bodies mothering (nagging) way of giving you advice. Just subject yourself to small pains, say , get a red-hot pin and push it right into your arm , then just keep it there and philosophise about the pain you are feeling. After awhile you will almost certainly reach a zen-like state where you understand pain and pain understands you, that or you'll probably pass out.

-Primer

[bigjoe]

pain tolerence is also genetic, my pain tolerence is quite low, i cry like a baby if i am hit hard, though conditioning the body makes taking a hit much less painful... learning to deal with pain the horse stance is good, i recommend 15-20 minutes.

[shaolinboxer]

I give props to mater pan or all of his acheivements, but seeing his "iron fist" in person I could not help but notice that his calluses look more like warts that have been beaten into submission. Warts like this are common as infection spreads easily when bareknuckling a shared surface.

If you look at the hands of most karate masters, infamous for their long hours conditioning their knuckles, they do not look like master pan's. It seems to me he's using a slight malformity to his advantage, and I do not think you could reproduce the same results.

[Repulsive Monkey]

I feel that having to build up pain tolerance is a poor sign of a inefficient Martial Art i'm sorry to say folks!! Ideally you want to edave all attacks not take time and effort in building up unnatural resistance to something that is so ...well... lowest lommon demoninator stuff like that. Pain is essential to the human body as a Neural indicator of damage and tissue deformation, so building up tolerance to it can in the long term be quite risky to your health. Plus some of the Karate methodologies to harden the skin and degrade the epidermal tissue is plain self abuse. Any, yes I will put my neck on line here and repeat that, any person Master or neophyte who goes through these particluar routines is an idiot, as you purposefully debase the body in a unnatural manner to kill off enural receptors and de-nature the epidermis. All this can be avoided AND one can learn an effective martil art without crippling the body.

[PHILBERT]

Repulsive Monkey, you might be outnumbered in a street fight 2 to 1 or 3 to 1 or even more. And if you can't evade both, you are gonna take a beating. If you are in a street fight, and they punch you in the stomach and you got abs of steel (so to speak) like Muay Thai and just laugh at them, they are gonna get kind of worried that they won't be able to take you down if you don't feel pain. In a street fight, they like to see you in pain, and if you can deliever pain to them, and they feel it, and they deliever pain to you, and you don't feel it, but they know you should, they might try to back off.

PHILBERT

[Repulsive Monkey]

you don't need well conditioned abs to repel a fist. One can use Zhe De-jing to absorb and spit the oncoming force back from where it came. Building up unecessary muscularity in the body trully is a dead end quest because if its inapropriate it will hinder your health not help it. Bulky muscles and inordinate muscularity of the limbs in particluar can have an adverse effect (depletion) of Spleen and even Liver strength in the body. And tension in general impedes the natural flow of energy in the body hus bringing about chronic decrepitude. The Tao Te Ching likens the alive,lythe and supple body as that of a furtive sapling, and a hard tense body like that of a wooden stiff and inflexible branch.The sapling yields to everything, all it takes for the brach to break is pressure.

[Nexus]

:eek: If you needed well conditioned abs to repel a fist, that would sort of deny the purpose of the training/practices in the internal martial arts.

"Oh look, its Chen Fa Ke, and boy, he has a full 6-pack! His muscles are ripped!"

It may impress the ladies but is not the only effective way to absorb attacks.

:eek:

- Nexus

<font size="1">"Time, space, the whole universe - just an illusion! Often said, philosophically verifiable, even scientifically explainable. It's the <font color="blue">'just'</font> which makes the honest mind go crazy and the <font color="blue">ego</font> go berserk." - Hans Taeger</font>