Martial Arts Coalition

Stone River Kung Fu

stnrvr2000@yahoo.com
Akron, New York
United States

Body conditioning - This is important for everybody. Many a school can have a total revision of what they consider tactics through the addition of some body conditioning. I personally have had people kick my leg and cry. This of course changed my whole opinion on how much training they had. In Snake the body conditioning is very specific. Of course you don't want to be hurt but you want to react as if you were. A kick to the leg should collapse it. A strike to the ribs should cause you to spin or fold over. The snake person will, after learning to react as if/without pain will learn to carry/transfer the power to the strike. At the kung level this gives them the ability to transfer any power from any part of their body to any part of yours. They may also allow multiple strike to them so they can build up one big strike to you. Very few styles combine their iron body and iron palm in the way snake does. At the healing level their touch is very subtle since they try to use your own energy to heal you rather than trying to force a change with their energy.
Iron palm - more than just hitting really hard, iron palm involves containing power (chi/ki/whatever) in the hand and efficiently putting it into an object, like the skull. Many people can hit hard but it is the efficient that gets them. It is the difference between a shotgun, which can blow big holes in walls/people/doors, and a sniper rifle, which can blow small holes through doors/walls/people, and the current rail gun technology, which can blow remarkable impressive holes through doors/walls/people/tanks/battleships/buildings/some hills/stuff in the way and possibly hit the moon. Aim for the moon, people.
Iron body - aside from being hit and not feeling pain or taking damage, which body conditioning does, iron body is to stop iron palm. It creates an energy barrier which stops/controls energy transfers. Iron body strengthens the body until you have control over many developmental processes, like healing. Iron body allows you to train harder/longer/more efficiently. Any school that has iron palm will usually have iron body. If their students have iron palm then iron body will be a requirement. They may build it the slow hard way(being hit alot) but it will be there.
Snake strike - This advancement on iron palm involves the power being focused like a spike. All the power the hand is capable of is trained to be focused through the finger tips. This is not easy. Many alternate training methods are trained to build the finger strength, sand training - box training - some weapons - Dim Mak - really difficult pushups. Just so you know, finger tip pushups build up the tendons of the palm. This is a good idea for iron palm but does not build up the finger tip strike. just because you can do twenty pushups on two fingers one handed does not mean you can hit hard with the finger tips. You can try it but I have already made that mistake, avoid it if you can.
Intent or eye training - this is different from tiger in that you do not actually try and hit people with the intent. It is to connect the eye/hand cordination into a thought/action coordination so that to see an open target and hit it as hard (not more/not less) as you want to.
solidity - this is a variation/advancement on the body conditioning and it results in the snake being imovable. this is in the sence that when a snake person goes into a posture they can not be moved from it. Their legs can not be collapsed, their arms can not be twisted, and eventually their bones can't be broken. They can still be picked up and thrown, but they will be in the posture and it will look funny.

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