Hi All
For any of the Taiji players, do you guys get taught iron palm skills? Was Iron Palm part of Taiji training originally or was it added from Shaolin or the like?
What do you think about Iron Palm as well healing energy does it destroy your nerves and energy in the hands for healing abilities?
thanks in advance
Garry
In Yang Family, “Opening of tai Chi” is training for iron palm-as far as the body mechanics and breathing/hei-gung are concerned.
I have never heard of any internal school focusing much on Iron Palm. When I asked my teacher Tim Cartmell about it, he simply said, “I can hit you really hard with my palm without Iron Palm practice.” Hu Xi Lin said the same thing.
I believe certain schools practiced Iron Palm for various reasons, but overall I think the focus on Iron Palm has been minimal and the approach by some have created a bit of a mysterious aura about it.
Jake 
Practicing iron Palm in tai Chi
Many of the moves and applications of tai chi require palm strikes. I have done a lot of investigation into the ‘real’ fighting side of tai chi.
From what I have learnt, striking with the fists causes damage to the knuckles. From personal experience, conversations and video documentation, fighting with the knuckles easily causes damage.
I used to kickbox and practicing on the heavy bag with handwraps and gloves I could put quite a hard punch out. But without gloves or handwraps my power was severly reduced because my wrists felt like they were going to break on impact. Add that to the knuckles striking bone and the hands are going to sustain damage. If a boxer punched you barehanded he would knock you out but he would also damage his hands.
Iron palm trains the wrists to withstand impact and tempers the knuckles making it possible to bare knuckle fight. Tempering the knuckles is a dangerous thing to do because it is a joint and can get nerve damage and arthritis. I have heard of people left with no feeling in their hands or constant pain. I would not reccommend this form of training.
Training the palms and the backs of the hand are much safer as there are no joints. Develop gradually by striking semi hard substances like large rice bags. Use a form of Dit da Jow (massage ointment like deepheat). This stops bruising (blood clotting) and helps with healing. Also, use those wrist strengthening grips you can buy from MA shops. it will help you with striking and applying qin na techniques.
In my opinion tai chi emphasis more palm striking because you can exert more force and there is less damage. A hard palm strike is equall to or possibly more effective than a fist.
Check out youtube for real fights and you will see that fist fighting is the most common form but then there are also clips of russian and U.K. special forces. The U.K. special forces use many open palm strikes because a broken trigger finger is bad news for them.
I personally train wrist strengthening exercises for qin na and palm and back of the hand conditioning. It does make a difference a it feels like they have alot more power to exert force i.e. deliver a more effective strike.
Be careful in your training, start slowly.
Leigh
Greetings..
Although i have trained Iron Palm, it is, by my experience, overkill.. i do work the heavy bag at full force with no gloves or wraps.. Ultimately, we train for survival in the streets.. you won’t get the chance to wrap your hands or put on gloves out there, so it’s best to be prepared.. we can’t afford to pull punches due to poor training habits.. i do use Jow to condition and maintain the tissue before and after a bag session, it just makes sense..
The mechanics of a palm strike, more specifically heel of palm, is more powerful than a fist strike, but.. it has range of motion limitations, like hooks and upper-cuts.. sure, you can find apps for hooks and upper-cuts with the palm, but it is so much easier to punch..
Good Iron Palm training is essentially an internal art, but not widely used as such..
Be well..
I have tried some physical conditioning for iron palm, but I have a preference to the energy development side of it. My personal preference is that, while many do advocate physical conditioning, you’re taking a big chance because of the risk of nerve/muscle/bone damage. They say that there was bone breaking done in olden times to strengthen the hands for iron palm and the other bones for iron shirt/etc. and that’s just insane to me. I’m also biased to energetic development because of how fast I developed.
What I’ve found is that if you’re naturally strong enough energetically, physical conditioning for iron palm/shirt becomes more and more meaningless.
Also, I had a nervo-musclular injury a few years ago and I got into reiki, so I had put in a lot of effort/energy into making my hands/wrists well. For anyone interested in iron palm/shirt, becoming attuned in reiki is a big help given how strong the energy is.
I’ve seen some people giving pointers on punches, where they say your arm should be relaxed, which is fine, but then, they say that when you’re about to make contact, to add some more tension in your muscles, such as the fist. And they don’t make the distinction that it’s just for learning the movements and then, you use less and less tension, as you go on.
Take a lesson from the drunk driver survivors of the world. When they are drunk enough, their muscles don’t get tense when they crash their cars. Like flowing water, they will surround their steering wheel and bounce back. When they get out, they have only a minor injury a lot of the time.
The more self-control you can exert on your body, especially on the wrist/hand areas, the more you can relax the soft tissue. This will make your bones and soft tissue" wrap around itself".
For a finger strike with all four fingers together, it takes very little energy and they shouldn’t be tight together…just lightly touching, but pretty much no space in-between the digits. The thumb can hang loosely by the side and out a little. For a 2 finger strike, the pads of the ring and pinkie finger don’t have to touch the palm. It’s enough to just have the fingers bent at the middle knuckle, so the tips of those 2 fingers are pointing back at you. Again, the fingers are only lightly touching.
For the thumb in the 4 and 2 finger strikes and the ring and pinkie in the 2 finger strike, keeping the thumb and the ring and pinkie fingers loose will let them “wrap around” anything that happens to run into it. The compression of the soft tissue of the ligaments and muscles and skin will happen and then, rebound.
For palm strikes, it’s the same thing. The wrist is bent back, but there is little tension in the muscles…just enough to keep the wrist bent. Most of the muscles of the hand can be kept very loose. The fingers are slightly bent with only enough tension to bend the digits, so the ifngers and the other parts of your hand can wrap around anything they run into to the limit damage.
Now, when I had my nervo-muscular injury, I found no diminishing of any of my reiki abilities. The constant practice helped me increase my skill. The hand itself has a large number of energy points, which is one of the reasons why hands can be more naturally sensitive to energy than the forearm. The hands are one of the areas that are used in skin-to-skin contact sensuality. Most of the body parts are good, but hands are often favored by many. Body massages, especially back rubs, are so good, not just because of decreasing muscle tension and increasing ‘good feeling’ chemicals in the body, but also because the back is filled with tons of energy points. Because the hands often do a lot of work in someone’s life, energy exchange is done quite a lot in the hands. When the hands are used on the back, there is energy transfer to the energy points in the back. The signals and energy are sent to the brain, which is able to use more energy on the material and nonmaterial levels because the body knows what it wants. It knows what’s wrong and knows how to fix it. The body senses the energy nearby and absorbs it from the hands, though it can take from any part of the other person’s body. It’s just that the hands are closest and are already in contact with the energy points.
But, even if you were you screw up the hand on a material level, it won’t stop you from implanting energy from yourself into someone else for healing or anything else, good or bad. Instead of visualizing the energy coming out of your hands, you can think it is coming out of your nostrils or your knee cap.
The same ability to direct energy out of yourself can let you direct it out of someone else from a distance. I’m not talking about any empty force work. That’s pushing. I’m speaking about sending someone’s energy out of them to make them winded or even unconscious or dead. It can happen, but it depends on your skill level (how much you can move at one time in any given second – similar the empty force, but the technique is different and requires less skill to perform on a regular basis). Another part of the energy development track is increasing your skill in removing the energy of solid objects, making them more brittle and easier to destroy. This will cause less damage to your material body parts and make you look like a destruction God. How far you go is limited to you. The same energy in you is what’s in inorganic materials. Humans are biochemical machines, which use both organic and inorganic pieces for survival. Giving healing energy strengthens the overall energy field of the creature. The reverse is just sapping it away, though I have never heard of any dim mak lessons that even touch on this, while talking mainly about using chi on the meridians. The same chi that helps keep the atoms of your body together, helps to keep the atoms of a piece of stone together. The more you take, the more brittle it becomes, though I’d advise against drawing it into yourself. The Earth is a good place, unless it’s a life or death situation and you need a “recharge”. A good cleansing is recommended with that. Bathing in epsom salts, showering, etc. As a naturally empathic person, taking in someone else’s vibrations isn’t pleasant. It’s often down right disturbing.
Edit: Just for completeness sake, if you’re gonna recharge, recharge the dan tien. Don’t just have it floating around your body. Visualize it going into your subnaval dan tien, like you would with energy raising exercises. There’s such a huge focus on the subnaval dan tien for charging in Tai Chi that you should just use the familiarity you’ve developed in your practicing. This familiarity will let you do more reflexive energy work than thinking ‘all right, it’s floating in my arm, now I gotta move it to my right leg to block this kick to my knee’ and you can get back to working on saving your life.
Edit 2: Forgot. If you want to ignore ‘energy sapping’ go with energy changing. Imagine that someone/something’s energy level is not regular, but just very very weak. So weak that you can easily and effortlessly break through it. You could call this the opposite of a ‘dragonball power flare up’, if you wanted to use a visual from manga. But, bare in mind, I haven’t used this technique in a fight. It’s only theory at this point. I came up with the idea based on the fact that one day I was feeling sluggish when I woke up. Then, I imagined my ‘aura’ was super powerful and I instantly perked up and was back to my full of energy self all day long and had a very keen focus. If you were to practice this, just imagine that the energy of the aura has gone down, like when you turn down the strength of a fire and you shouldn’t worry about ‘well, where is the energy going’. The important thing to think about is that the energy is so very low. Think of it as a variation of using 4 ounces to move a thousand pounds.
[QUOTE=fiercest tiger;696956]Hi All
For any of the Taiji players, do you guys get taught iron palm skills? Was Iron Palm part of Taiji training originally or was it added from Shaolin or the like?
What do you think about Iron Palm as well healing energy does it destroy your nerves and energy in the hands for healing abilities?
thanks in advance
Garry[/QUOTE]
http://www.itcca.it/peterlim/combat.htm
Combat Principles
A Word About Anatomical Weapons
The anatomical weapons in Taijiquan are not rigorously hardened like in external styles of martial arts. This is because it is not hardness of the weapon but the energy within it that is the effecting component. If the correct structure of the anatomical weapon is maintained, then structurally it will be substantial and able to deliver telling blows with much power without recourse to hardening. The appropriate efficient use of strength usually does not entail vast quantities of it to obtain the desired effect. The principles behind the adage of deflecting a thousand pounds with four ounces hold true in Taijiquan.
http://www.itcca.it/peterlim/index.htm
PS-I really like this guy’s ‘Discourse on Jing’ as well, though I’ve never met anyone who can actually do what he describes in it.
He’s definately got a lot of good information, though I’ve never heard of cold jing before nor how he’s describing it. When he speaks of “cold”, he seems to be speaking figuratively, but I can’t be sure. Given the level of detail he’s given on all the rest, this seems like he just blew over this part.
If we are gonna go with this type of classification, the “empty without jing” level seems like it might be contradictory. It might be “leading someone to emptiness”/“creating a situation of emptiness for an opponent” without exerting any jing at all. It might be in reference to more an energy attack without physical movement and with only a tiny bit of thought, but the impression he leaves with the reader does need classification.
The descriptions for the rest of the classifications have to be figured out by the reader by using the whole thing from above, like “cold jing”. It could be in reference to the difference between the temperature descriptors “hot” and “cold”, where cold has less energy, which is how you get to level 5, but I don’t know.
However, with the impressions I get for each level, if anyone is to reach the last 2, you need to move beyond just the reactive/reflexive way to fight. Reacting/reflexive fighting seems to be more for level 3, ching ling jing. If you want to have and be able to use effective “light and agile jing”, there is a lot more coordination and conscious thought that needs to be put into fighting (at least to have the same light and agile jing that I’m getting, as an impression from his article). To be a reflexive/reactive Tai Chi fighter, there has to be some amount of hardness to it, whether it’s for maintaining balance, generating centrifugal force after sticking for a throw, etc. Level 4 makes me think of movies, like Crouching tiger, Hidden dragon, where you see the martial artist do impossible feats effortlessly for balance, defying gravity much longer than you could for most people, etc. These people are almost like the Spider-men of fighting. They can apply siffucient force over such a small area that, they look like they have ungodly strength, speed and coordination and you’d think they were bitten by a radioactive spider.
If my impression of the levels is right, I’m at three and a tiny bit of four. If I’m right about the impression, the way to achieve level four is to take more conscious control of your reflexive acts with a merger of the conscious with the subcosncious and refining your signal interpretation for sensitivity. Better precision, along with the merger, gives better effectiveness to less jing, creating a greater effect.
Iron palm!!! hmm… I think it’s alittle umfamiliar to link it with internal style.
I know some Mantis people train heavily with Iron palm, alot of Shaolin people train Iron palm. It’s really a external combat asset.
Internal people are more likely be into Cotton palm or hard qi gong.
but of course nothing wrong with Taiji plus Iron Palm.
[QUOTE=MASTERforge;703740]Many of the moves and applications of tai chi require palm strikes. I have done a lot of investigation into the ‘real’ fighting side of tai chi.
From what I have learnt, striking with the fists causes damage to the knuckles. From personal experience, conversations and video documentation, fighting with the knuckles easily causes damage.
I used to kickbox and practicing on the heavy bag with handwraps and gloves I could put quite a hard punch out. But without gloves or handwraps my power was severly reduced because my wrists felt like they were going to break on impact. Add that to the knuckles striking bone and the hands are going to sustain damage. If a boxer punched you barehanded he would knock you out but he would also damage his hands.
Iron palm trains the wrists to withstand impact and tempers the knuckles making it possible to bare knuckle fight. Tempering the knuckles is a dangerous thing to do because it is a joint and can get nerve damage and arthritis. I have heard of people left with no feeling in their hands or constant pain. I would not reccommend this form of training.
Training the palms and the backs of the hand are much safer as there are no joints. Develop gradually by striking semi hard substances like large rice bags. Use a form of Dit da Jow (massage ointment like deepheat). This stops bruising (blood clotting) and helps with healing. Also, use those wrist strengthening grips you can buy from MA shops. it will help you with striking and applying qin na techniques.
In my opinion tai chi emphasis more palm striking because you can exert more force and there is less damage. A hard palm strike is equall to or possibly more effective than a fist.
Check out youtube for real fights and you will see that fist fighting is the most common form but then there are also clips of russian and U.K. special forces. The U.K. special forces use many open palm strikes because a broken trigger finger is bad news for them.
I personally train wrist strengthening exercises for qin na and palm and back of the hand conditioning. It does make a difference a it feels like they have alot more power to exert force i.e. deliver a more effective strike.
Be careful in your training, start slowly.
Leigh[/QUOTE]
Do you have any links to the UK and Russian special forces using open palm strikes?
Iron Palm and Taiji
I will have to say I’ve just recently started training Bagua Zhang.
When I first started I did some practice of clapping the palms together to stimulate the internal organs as many Chinese do in the parks. It was painful very fast to do this. I didn’t do this for a long time (6 weeks) but only practiced Bagua 8 mother palms and other exercises. Just yesterday I remembered this clapping exercise and I did it again. I had no pain and a lot of power in my palms.
The point being that internal training can make your palms very powerful without Iron palm training. So I agree with Tim Cartmell on this.
I’m in Jake and Tim’s camp. No need for this type of training. Fajing will do the trick nicely.
Greetings..
Having gone through the Iron Palm training, i am in both camps.. the development of structure and alignment for power distribution is very complimentary to Taiji applications.. the transition of tissue, when properly maintained with herbs, is not counter-productive.. it is simply another tool in quiver.. more than anything else, it is our attitude and belief system that dictates the internal relationship.. i understand and accept the notion that proper Taiji and QiGong training can and will manifest very powerful palms, i simply don’t have a sense that Iron Palm training is counter-productive.. If nothing else, the Iron Palm trainingleaves the student with the confidence that the weaponry of their hands is quite capable of maximum power with no self-damage.. this confidence removes hesitation or reduced expression of power due to worries of damage.. it’s a bit liberating.. Now, having said that, if hadn’t been through it already i doubt that i would pursue it from my current perspectives.. it is not “essential”, but.. it’s nice to have accomplished it…
Be well…
Greetings..
Having gone through the Iron Palm training, i am in both camps.. the development of structure and alignment for power distribution is very complimentary to Taiji applications.. the transition of tissue, when properly maintained with herbs, is not counter-productive.. it is simply another tool in quiver.. more than anything else, it is our attitude and belief system that dictates the internal relationship.. i understand and accept the notion that proper Taiji and QiGong training can and will manifest very powerful palms, i simply don’t have a sense that Iron Palm training is counter-productive.. If nothing else, the Iron Palm training leaves the student with the confidence that the weaponry of their hands is quite capable of maximum power with no self-damage.. this confidence removes hesitation or reduced expression of power due to worries of damage.. it’s a bit liberating.. Now, having said that, if hadn’t been through it already i doubt that i would pursue it from my current perspectives.. it is not “essential”, but.. it’s nice to have accomplished it…
Be well…