Intersting thread and article:
http://www.emptyflower.com/cgi-bin/y...num=1071193499
Makes me think about what training was like then. More specifically, the logistics of actually "training all day". Here's my thinking:
Back then, as now, you gotta make a living. Whether as a smith, a farmer, a bodyguard, a soldier, etc. But let's see how much training a person could actually do. Let's assume that people awok at dawn and went to bed some good time after dusk - trying to get ~6 hours sleep a night. So....around 5:30 or 6 am to about midnight. You get up, and assuming you're a diligent kung fu adpet, you do your morning qigong, jiben, drills, etc - for about an hour before you have to go to work. Work being in the field if you're a farmer, or the court if you're a bureaucrat, or to the marketplace if you're a merchant or fisherman or something like that. You work until mid-meal, so afterwards let's say you can get about 1/2-hour break to do a quick workout. Let's say that "work" ended around supper time, so let's say 5am. Unless you have assistants or servants, there's always personal/house work to be done (it's not like there's a WalMart or Home Depot around the corner), so let's say this consumes anywhere from 2-4 hours of your day. By the end it's anywhere from 8-10am. Now you practice fullout - about 3-4 hours. It's now past 11pm or so, so maybe take a bath, or cool down, or write/read poetry, etc for about an hour. Then sleep around midnight.
Now, this is a vastly hand-wavy generalization, but I am thinking that in all, there's about 6 hours of training in there per day. And I am assuming this is done everyday, more or less. Of course this actual schedule will differ depending on the day, and the profession, and also if you have a family or other business to take care of, but it's a good starting point to take a gander at what a tyical training schedule would be like. I guess if you were a rich man, then you could afford to train much more (especially if you're the child of a rich person). Or if you were a solider then it's your job to train more. But even monks have daily temple duties to perform that are not MA training related - just like soldiers normally have non-fighting training related things to do a lot of their days. And if you were a body guard, then you are out travelling a lot, and when on duty, you're primarily going to be concerned paying attention and not necessarily fighting. Of course whe off duty or during down times, you'd be training your ass off.
Is this 1st order approximation a decent guess at what it would have been like? Is it really different than the way some seriosuly motivated people nowadays train? I'd say the primary difference will be in teh physical conditioning and mental toughness. Most "work" will be physical labor (unless you're a scholar or merchant or the like), and by the time you get around to your kung fu training, you're not necessarily going to need time to "life weights" per se. You can focus more on your kung fu associated activities. As for mental toughness, I am under the impression that back then, the world was lot tougher - in the sense that people and the elements were a lot less fogiving, and people were much more used to discomfort and pain in general. So experiencing these things during training would not have been a serious turnoff to training. And this general mental toughness would also have crontributed to mental toughness during fights themselves.
Feel free to nit and pick this.
Reply With Quote
