Alright, so maybe I”Ēm about to ramble a bit here, but so what. It”Ēs what the forums are for right? So I read this article from the magazine section and I really liked it. It got me to thinking about the progression of my own training, and what my ultimate goals are for my MA practice, for the personal Kungfu I”Ēve been working to develop during this lifetime. I really agreed with the author that kungfu is really about personal development, and exploring yourself as a whole and total person.

The actual methods used for training the individual can vary pretty widely, but MA practice as a whole is generally accepted to be about something larger than the actual skills developed. In other words, no matter what aspect of training the student chooses to specialize in, be it forms, conditioning, sparring, meditation, self-defense, or what have you, each of these skills can be used to bring the practitioner to a level of self-awareness that exceeds what he could have achieved without training.

So I guess I”Ēm just curious about what sort of specializations the various practitioner”Ēs of the arts have chosen as training specializations for their MA practice. For example, I”Ēve been working on iron fist skills (learned during my kungfu days) and body conditioning as a focus for the past few years. I also work very hard at the technical aspects of my art through practicing two-person kata and sparring (randori) while in class. I look at conditioning as being sort of a physical meditation. The harder I work at the various exercises, the greater my level of concentration. What do you guys do?