The more I work with qigong masters, the more I realize the profound effect it can have on the ego. That being said, a lot of hard qigong can be demystified into gradual conditioning, and that's only really harmful if you try to rush things. If you're into pursuing something like Iron Shirt, please do. It's a traditional art that takes an intense amount of dedication, and because the commitment is so costly, few see it through. The best course is to research the methods so at the very least, you can tell a genuine master from a charlatan. As always, do your research. The more research you do in preparation, the greater chance that you'll be able to identify a good teacher. There are a lot of fakes.

The three main resources I'd recommend from our materials would be our Iron Body and Power Meditation DVD and our 2003 March/April hard qigong special issue. I also did an e-zine article that tackles this topic - see eXtreme Kungfu Qigong: Hard Qigong and Water Lei Tai Fights in China's Amazing New Tournament. Worthy of note, since I wrote that article, they've held at least two more qigong feat competitions. I just saw some footage of the 2nd one last week. Great stuff. They didn't do another water lei tai from what I saw but there was some other fascinating sparring games like plum-flower-pole push hands and plank push hands. We're debating about doing another video on it, but we have so many video projects in the queue right now.