Cultivate Resistance to Injury
with Internal Kung Fu
Introduction
In this article I am going to tell you about how I trained myself to use martial arts techniques to resist injury from blunt impact as well as from hot surfaces that would ordinarily cause painful burns.
Table of Contents
A Seed Is Planted
In 1971 I was in the fifth grade, and I had a teacher who sometimes read reports about unusual events to the class. One day he told us about the fight or flight response and read two reports of heroic deeds. In the first, a child was pinned underneath a car. The mother single-handedly lifted the car off her child without injuring herself. In the second, there was an explosion and a fire on a Navy ship. Deep inside the ship, one serviceman picked up two of his injured companions, draped one of them over each of his shoulders—for a combined weight of over three hundred pounds—and carried them to safety. On the way to the deck the group encountered a closed door with a handle that was glowing red-hot. The serviceman took hold of the handle and opened the door without suffering any burns.
It was easy for me to understand the feats of strength, but I was dismayed by the resistance to injury. I asked my teacher for an explanation, and he said the resistance to injury was due to adrenaline. I wasn’t satisfied with his answer because I couldn’t see adrenaline preventing the edge of a car’s bumper from cutting into flesh or providing resistance to burns. I eventually found an answer to the resistance to injury question, but it was almost two years before it came to me.
A Question Is Answered
When I was in the seventh grade, I went to a two day Aikido seminar. Aikido is often described as an internal martial art. To understand what this means, you must first understand a concept called Chi or Qi. Chi is a type of dynamic universal energy. The energy of electrons moving about within atoms is a concrete example of Chi, but in martial arts Chi refers to energy that flows through your body. You can make yourself exceedingly difficult to move by focusing the flow of Chi downward through your body, into the earth; conversely, you can make yourself more buoyant by focusing the flow of Chi upward through your body, toward the sky.
Aikido teaches you how to focus your Chi at your center of gravity, about midway between your navel and your pubic bone. If you’re attacked, the goal of Aikido is to blend your movements with those of your assailant by sensing the focus of their Chi, and to redirect their Chi in such a manner as to make them fall down. This isn’t as passive as it sounds; you can make them fly through the air and fall down very hard if you so desire.
Upon discovering Aikido, I realized that Chi was the explanation for resistance to injury that I had been looking for during the past two years. I set about theorizing as to how I would have to manipulate my Chi in order to achieve the resistance to injury that my fifth grade teacher had read to us about.
I supposed that when flesh rends, that the separation occurs between cells rather than through cells, because the weakest link is most likely to break first. I reasoned that in the case of the mother lifting the car off her child, it must have been an energy matrix composed of Chi that held the cells of her flesh together and prevented the sharp edge of the car’s bumper from splitting them apart. I still wasn’t sure how the sailor had avoided being seriously burned, but I was sure that it had something to do with Chi as well.
Hit by A Car
In 1981 I was twenty one years old, and I had an experience that led me to believe that my supposition about Chi providing resistance to injury was correct. I was hit by a fast-moving car while crossing the street. The impact sent me flying through the air and tumbling across the pavement. I came out of the accident with a severely broken arm that required surgical repair, but aside from that, not a scratch or a bruise on my body.
Considering where the front of the car had struck my thigh, it was very unusual that the neck of my femur hadn’t been broken. Had it been broken, I would have been in need of a total hip replacement, which in addition to being a horrendous procedure to go through, also leaves one debilitated for life, as the artificial hip is vastly inferior to a real one. The absence of a serious head injury—as often occurs in unhelmeted motorcycle accidents—was remarkable as well. I don’t believe that adrenaline could have played a role in this fortunate state of affairs, because I remained calm throughout the incident. Of course after my arm was broken I was soon in a state of physical shock.
As I saw it, this lack of being seriously bruised, scraped up, and permanently mangled could only be attributed to internal martial arts skills. I figured that if I had been better trained, I would have walked away from the accident without any injury at all, so I decided to study martial arts again. I kept at this for two months, and the increase in the precision of my coordination was phenomenal, but there was a downside; I noticed that all my instructors had knee trouble. Since I’m an avid hiker and backpacker, knee trouble wasn’t an occupational hazard that I was prepared to live with, so I quit taking classes. I’m not sure why the presumably well disciplined Chi of these Kung Fu instructors didn’t better protect their knees. Perhaps their approach to martial arts was more external than internal. I know for a fact that they were less interested in the medical applications of Kung Fu than I was.
Traditional Chinese Medicine
My understanding of the body’s Chi through Aikido and other internal martial arts was that it was a unified body of energy. However, in 1986 I began reading about traditional Chinese medicine in a book by Ted Kaptchuck called The Web That Has No Weaver (New York: Contemporary Books, 2000). I then discovered that there are many varieties of Chi in the body, most types flowing through specific channels called meridians. Each type of Chi has its own atmospheric characteristics, such as hot, warm, cool, or cold; dry, moist, or damp; and rising, floating, or sinking. Diseases are defined as specific imbalances in the atmospheric characteristics of the patient’s Chi, that is, the wrong kind of Chi in the wrong meridian.
Each meridian is associated with a specific internal organ, and most organs have two meridians. An exception to this rule is the heart, which only has one. The other single meridian organ is called the triple heater, it helps regulate and integrate the functions of the other organs. The triple heater doesn’t have a counterpart in Western medicine. Acupuncture points are nodes that occur along the meridians. Acupuncture is a medical procedure that consists of inserting needles into these nodes so as to alter the flow of Chi.
In traditional Chinese medicine the physician assesses the balance of the Chi in the patient’s meridians by taking the patient’s pulses. This is done at both wrists—one after the other—with three fingertips and at three different intensities of pressure. This yields eighteen different textures of pulse to the physician’s fingertips, and from this information the state of the patient’s Chi is diagnosed.
Some diseases are considered to be caused by destructive Chi from outside the body penetrating the flesh and causing an energy imbalance. Thermal burns fall into this category. During the summer of 1986 I had a minor accident in which I burned my hand, and I decided to try using my internal martial arts skills to push out the invasive Chi that was damaging my flesh. This temporarily increased the intensity of the pain, but the experiment was a success, as five minutes later the injury was gone.
Conclusion
It was a great relief, as well as extremely utilitarian, to have my questions regarding resistance to injury answered at last. I developed my internal martial arts abilities with a minimum of formal schooling—no more than eighty five hours of supervised training total. Of course there was plenty of practice time without an instructor present, as well. I encourage you to do as I have done: experiment with internal martial arts and study the theory of traditional Chinese medicine. Cultivating the ability to constructively manipulate your Chi will substantially increase your level of health and well-being. Who knows? You may wind up still youthful at the age of seventy.