That’s right. Even though we’re the guys who are always talking about how great Internal is, and it is pretty great, I’m telling you to keep doing that external stuff…
…Or something bad will happen.
I know that seems odd so let me tell you about Steve.
If you haven’t met Steve you’ve probably seen him in one of our videos. Steve is Sigung Clear’s Senior Tai Chi student and as you might expect he has a lot of internal skill and he practices constantly.
What you may not know is that Steve also plays with marble all day long. 1 Cubic foot weighs just under 170 pounds and Steve has been pulling this stuff out of the ground all day long almost every day for years.
That’s some serious external conditioning.
Last year Steve decided he wanted a break. So he quit working at the quarry for a while.
He started running a couple extra Tai Chi classes for us and was able to focus a lot more on his own training.
Then his joints started to hurt and he lost a lot of weight.
It didn’t make any sense. He was doing less hard physical labor and a lot more healthy internal stuff but he was starting to feel old fast.
So he asked Sigung Clear about it and master Clear told him about the real danger of external training.
And that’s this:
If you do external right, you have good teachers, you practice carefully and don’t injure yourself, you can get good results and you can keep doing it fairly late in life.
However,
If you EVER stop you will get old very very quickly.
If you’re under 30 you’ll be ok if you start training again. It will take some work but you can build back to where you were.
When you start getting past 40 this changes quickly. Any break in training leads to a faster and faster decline in your skill and your health. It becomes harder and harder to gain it back.
If you can’t train due to illness or injury you run a very high risk of never being able to fully recover and regain what you lost.
This is what was happening to Steve. His body had grown accustomed to work in the quarry and when that stopped his body started to deteriorate.
Internal training on the other hand is much more forgiving. It’s much easier to maintain and it doesn’t decline nearly as fast (and some things never go away.)
Internal is also much better at preventing illness and injury.
So if you plan on living past 35, I know I do, we highly recommend you focus on Internal training methods as early as possible.
If you do hard physical labor you will need to properly compensate for it with internal training when you retire.
This is one of the primary reasons we only do INTERNAL Iron Palm methods and it’s one thing that sets our training apart from the much more common external methods.
https://www.cleartaichi.com/iron-palm
And don’t worry about Steve. He’s fine now. With a little guidance from Sigung Clear he modified his internal training to compensate and he’ll be more than happy to toss you around if you’re brave enough to push with him at one of our upcoming workshops.
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