Training Kung fu in China

A letter from David to our wushu family;

Aloha Wushu Family,

Angela and I miss all of you very much, and we’re happy with the school we chose to train here in China. If any one of you wishes to look it up it’s the academy in Kunyu mountain.

Today marks 10 days of being in the academy in China, and our bodies are finally adjusting. Our first week we woke up sore every morning. It was hard to start training when all our muscles ached, but somehow it seemed to ease up as the day went by, until we cooled down again haha. The location is amazing, we are surrounded by beautiful huge mountains, lakes and magnificent views. Our first day here, after line up and meeting the coaches and introducing ourselves to everyone else, we unfortunately got to witness a punishment on a couple of students who broke a few rules, it was pretty intense and looked really painful. We are so spoiled with how easy we have it back home haha 

Anyway, we start the days by waking up around 5am, we warm up on our own until our Tai Chi coach arrives and starts the class. After a nice hour of working on form 24 we finish the class with some QiGong which feels great. Perfect way to start the morning :)

After breakfast, on Mondays, our couch comes up to our room and inspects it for cleanliness and order, students have many responsibilities here at the school. After this, every student goes outside for the lineup and we greet all the coaches, followed by our first run of the day. We usually warm up all together, similar to what we do back home but longer and tougher. After warming up we all split up and follow the coach we are assigned to. On our first day, they asked us to show them our WuBuQuan. They said it looked good, but showed us the Shaolin way of doing it as well, which is nice. We worked on preparations and kicks mostly during this first class.

Shaolin has been lots of fun, Angie was able to convince our coach to teach us a Duilin. We’ve accidentally hit and kicked one another several times haha, but it’s been fun, so hopefully we can finish it before we have to leave. We’ve also been doing a lot of basics and conditioning and also having the coach correct a few Shaolin forms I knew from before and forgot.

After lunch, during our first break we went hiking with a friend of ours up to the temple on the mountain. This is a taoist temple and its about a 30 min hike up the mountain. Once you get there the view is breath taking and the temple is amazing. Behind it, you can still go up a few hundred steps and it takes you to a cave where they have seven zen monk statues meditating, pretty darn cool. Overall a great first hike, and from the top we spotted another temple across the valley on the mountain. That will be our next hike :)

We started the second class the same way for the warm up, different exercises, but same system. This class was focussed on SanDa (kick boxing), it was Angie's first time doing it and she loved how cool she looked throwing those punches and kicks. I’m kinda scared of her now haha, I’ll try to get some footage of her when they put her in the ring with someone else. Y’all will enjoy watching that haha. We got a great work out from it and bloody knuckles. The only thing Angie didn’t really like is how smelly the boxing gloves were, but other than that we both enjoyed the class.

The conditioning here is hardcore. We do an hour and half of full body conditioning. By the end of it no one has the strength to carry themselves anymore. I bet this is what we’ll feel the most the next haha.

We usually finish the day with another session of QiGong, which in my opinion is the best way to finish the day. By 8 or 9pm we are ready to crash and rest before another long day of training.

Last Friday we got to experience something they call the mountain run. It consists of going up to the Taoist temple on the mountain and then running up and down the hundreds of stairs up to the cave at the summit of the mountain six times and one of those times you have to bear crawl down, super fun and a great workout. Of course I finish it by jumping in the ice cold lake afterwards haha.

During the weekend a few of us went up another huge mountain called Taibo, it took us several hours, beautiful views, awesome trails and the best thing yet was that coming down you can take this super long slide they built on the mountain haha, couldn’t believe it when I saw it, and it was super fun.

Well everyone, thats a quick description of our first week in China, we are really excited to continue training hard and hope all of you back home are training hard as well, especially since we might be training with this Chinese coach in the near future. We will try to email you at least once a week to share or experiences. Can’t wait 'til we all get to come to China together and show them how awesome the Hawaii Wushu Academy is.

David & Angela

We didn't have a chance to get much video because we were too busy training, but here's a little peek of some of our shenanigans in China!