Hung Gar knees

[SteveLau]

Wetwonder,

If you don't mind, pls tell us your age and your physical condition when you first started training Hung Gar. Have you been an athelete before that? After having suffered from several self-inflicted muscle injuries since year 2000, I can say that I have enough sports science knowledge to comment on the topic.

First, be careful of muscle soreness. Yes, I have heard of people before said that it is normal. I have believed so causally too for quite a long time. But what does normal means here? My current view is that even muscle soreness is a sign of muscle skeleton overuse injury though it is not serious. The danger here is when a student overlooks such symptom or even believes it is alright to have muscle soreness after exercise. There is a formal medical term for it - Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS). When one exercises well, muscle soreness should rarely occur. And that is true to me even I exercise three times per week.

Getting back to Hung Gar Knees, there was a classmate in a private school in which I learnt Hung Gar many years ago. He had good physique, and seemed to have previous MA training. He have said once that Hung Gar training makes his knee muscles very sore. These are the lower end of the quad muscles just above the knee. When he got to learn the second hand set (Tiger Crane Double Style Fist), I saw him once dropped to the floor on his knee at the ten tiger moves section. His knees were shakingly weak. And the Sifu said to him, "How did you train to such a state?" I think the training was wrong somewhere, and the Sifu was mainly to blame.

At the end, if you have soreness over a week, I strongly advise you to revise your training. May be you train too hard, too frequent, too much (in workout volume per week).



Take care,

KC
Hong Kong

[wetwonder]

Thanks Steve. I'm 45. I started at the beginning of December. I'm a competitive tennis player, pllaying about 5 times a week in the Spring/Summer/Fall. Tennis is about sprinting side to side and up and back, over and over. It doesn't do much that matches the deep stances of the Hung Ga, so the muscles that do that are not accustomed for it from tennis.

[SteveLau]

Wetwonder,

So if you are a competitive tennis player, your physical condition should be good. With regards to the moves of tennis and martial art, they have very much commonality. For instance, both players need to move often in different directions quickly and strongly. One difference is that tennis player needs to sprint over much longer distance in the court than MA player does. Also, you sd you do tennis 5 times per week in certain seasons. Well, then you probably have no time and energy to do other physcial demanding activity. Staying healthy is about the whole picture of one's life style. We all need to take rest and recuperate sometimes.



Take care,

KC
Hong Kong