Recent comments about conditioning on another thread got me to thinking. Where should our emphasis be in our training? As a typical westerner your well-being is far more threatened by lifestyle issues that can lead to heart disease, stroke and diabetes than you are at threat from physical attack on the streets. Therefore training for health improvement should take priority over training to fight. That is, of course, unless you plan on entering competitions. But even then, conditioning is very important.
Most of us do WCK as a hobby. Its something we do in our spare time because we enjoy it. But if we aren't training with health-improvement in mind, we are doing ourselves a disservice.
I can remember seeing a photo of the sign outside of Jim Fung's WCK school in Australia. It said..."fitness with a purpose." It think that is a good way of looking at it. You can use your WCK in two ways to improve your health. You can use it as motivation to do conditioning exercises because you know they will improve your performance. Or you can make your WCK itself your conditioning routine. But this will take some work. If WCK is going to be your primary conditioning, then you may have to really "ramp" up what you are doing. You need to make sure you are including all aspects of "fitness" in your training.....strength, flexibility, and aerobic conditioning. If you find you don't have time for this in your training, then maybe you need to eliminate some of the more "traditional" things you are doing.
Another aspect of putting "health first" is to avoid things that are going to cause chronic injury and produce problems for you down the road. This includes improper hand conditioning that can lead to arthritic changes, as well as movements and exercises that put stress on already painful joints. Of prime importance here is using good biomechanics. If you include sparring (and you should), you should do it with the proper protective gear and with an partner that isn't going to do permanent damage to you.
Since few of us are ever going to have to be in "real" fights, but all of us are threatened by the typical "western lifestyle", our martial arts training should be a by-product of our fitness training.....not the other way around.
I'm as guilty as anybody as neglecting conditioning and a "health first" approach. But I'm working on changing that. I encourage others to do the same.