Anyone do any specific exercises to train the legs for strength, distance, timing, balance, position?
One legged squats … because I CAN.
On a summer’s eve I like to drink beer.
I’ll try it on one leg.
specific exercises to train the legs for:
strength - one-legged SLT
- squat, then stand up & kick
- kneeling horse (kwai ma)
distance - you need a partner. Face each other & hold each other’s foream. Take turns kicking each other in the abdomen. WC practitioners should be able to kick at such short distance. Of course, you don’t kick your partner for real. The kick should just barely make contact.
timing - jumping rope
balance - one-legged SLT, chi gerk
position - what do you mean by “position”? Maybe you could use a dummy. There are kicking/leg techniques in the dummy form.
One legged squats… eyes closed
For balance training, start off with something simple like standing on one leg, eyes closed, see how long you can go for. This is also great for strengthening ligaments and stabilising muscles around your ankles.
One legged squats are absolutely excellent. Not just for strength gains, but for good wing chun too. Stretch out your other leg in front of you and touch your toes during the squat, go SLOW, and concentrate on form.
There’s tons of stuff you can do… wobble boards, balance beams, standing post, skateboarding…
Oh, and dont forget YJKYM!
Prithee, forasmuch as thou dost covet the mightiest legs 'pon life run thee hither and yon as though against the prevailing winds; pounce thee like the nimble leopard in search of pray, and rise and fall thee with but one leg on the most precarious of wobbled surfaces.
And then, as cruel summer sun doth slide once more beneath the gentle blanket of night, rest thee merry and content in the knowledge that all of faery doth wonder what the puck thou hast been doing.
RR
Are you quoting A Midsummer Night’s Gerk?
Amid somes Dim, perhaps, but I am a bit of a Gerk.
snt on one leg is grand. you can work the balance in two ways
-
put your free leg behind your plant leg and rest the ankle behind the knee/calf. your free knee should be pointing to the side and down.
-
put your free leg out in a chambered kick/yap gerk position.
This question is really gay, but how many one-legged squats are y’all doing? I ask because I recently began training them after several months of concentrating on regular Hindu squats. The comparison is simply for motivation purposes.
Currently I’m doing 5 sets of 5 each leg, with 5 minutes rest between each set. Last time I busted out a 6th rep on the last set.
I’ve tried it holding a 15 pound dumbell, and was still able to do five reps.
Training in this manner is like a power-lifting regime - shouldn’t add too much mass to your leg because the emphasis is on the concentric rather than the eccentric part of the motion. That’s also why I take 5-minutes rests between sets.
one legged squats
I’m doing sets of about 5 reps.
If anyone wants to work up to these I found this reference really good:
I find the one-legged squats to be a great exercise, and on the last rep I really concentrate on the hanging leg, trying to extend it outwards as much as possible while raising up. This does tire the top of the quads, so I have to wait about 20 seconds before I do the other leg. It seems that it would translate very well to the Wing Chun kicking motions, especially the front kick obviously. Good for balance, too. The only thing is, I have to be carefull with my left knee because my kneecaps (patella) don’t track correctly, so I maintain the tension in the standing leg even at the bottom of the motion, and don’t go down the last one or two inches, which is working so far. BTW - sets of 5 with a 55 pound kettlebell like Mr. Mahler does is very impressive - I figure that a one-legged squat doubles the weight compared to a bodyweight squat, in other words if you weigh 180 pounds, it’s like doing a full squat with two legs and 180 pounds on your shoulders, only you are also working your abs some, and your hip flexors and the top of your other leg, and without the strain across your shoulders of supporting extra weight. Furthermore if you increase your bodyweight by holding onto a 15 pound dumbell, again it doubles and is the same as holding 30 pounds and doing a full-range two-legged squat. Mr. Mahler, who weighs 195 is thus doing the equivalent of a two-legged squat with 195 + 2 x 55 = 305 pounds, pretty darn good.
Re: one legged squats
Originally posted by anerlich
[B]I’m doing sets of about 5 reps.
If anyone wants to work up to these I found this reference really good:
http://www.intensitymagazine.com/02-26-02/mike_mahler.html [/B]
Thanks for the great link!!!
Never done these before… I can squat about 225 lbs pretty comfortably. Doing the math (I weigh 170 lbs) I thought I should be able to handle these. I quickly had a try in the bathroom at work.
Quite hard I must say. I felt a lot of strain in my knee joint and I didnt even try to go all the way down, I just went until the thigh was parallel. Hmmm may give these a try but I’m worried they could damage my knee.
Re: SLT on one leg. A hybrid I took from physio when I had to rehab major ankle damage a couple years ago is to write out the alpabet with the hanging leg. Makes it a wee bit more challenging.
just wondering:
any one knows why in YM SNT (not sure about YKS’s), we open the stance by lining up the feet in a straight line; so heels are against each other, toes pointing outwards. After this we put weight and pivot on the toes and turn into a pigon toe stance?
Is there any significance to this opening?
sounds like RR has a heat stroke, from the summer sun shine? or from the Montreal girls? 
as far as i know, it’s just meant to open the stance up to proper width and positioning. but i also find it handy for a quick opening/closing of the hips before i get set in my stance – just for the sake of looseness.
For beginners it gives a simple way to measure horse width. For later students, it gives the basic toe-out and toe-in steps.
And the girls haven’t been out in their usual numbers lately. Must be hiding from Burnsy…
Hi RR, rubthebuddha
I believe it has more to do with stretching some key muscles on the legs or loosening the pelvic-leg joints rather than measurement. I don’t think we need to go all the way till feet in one line for width measurement.
Any qigong significance you think?
Again, toe-in, toe-out steps are very important later for application. Hei Gung doesn’t seem to have been a focus for WCK, other than as part of the collective martial tradition (like philosophy, TCM, etc.) that pervaded the culture. I think you and Hendrik were discussing Hei Gung and that context on another thread.
The best anology I can give is this: You can have a Porche or a Hummer. Both are excellent but have different, sometimes mutually exclusive requirements. If you try to build something inbetween you will lose what makes both great.
Likewise, certain body alignments and mechanics suit the demands of fighting while others give benefit to Hei/Noi cultivation, and some of those alignments/mechanics are mutually exclusive.
So, while you can own both a Porche and a Hummer, and you can train both WCK and HG, you can’t always easily do both at the same time.