Formosa Neijia

When using heavy weapons and other things for internal strength training, you need to be very careful with your joints. I’ve been aware of this lately since I started doing long pole and some ball exercises. Since you relax the major muscles as much as possible, most all the weight gets placed on the smaller muscles around the joints. In what I’m doing, the shoulder and elbow joints get affected the most.

This causes some worries about overtraining. I’ve done athletic and IMA training long enough to know when I’m tired and should call it a day. But since pole and ball work puts a strain on the joints, it’s sometimes hard to tell when you’ve had enough.

I’ve had to become more careful about my pole and ball workouts. It’s easy to overwork your wrist, for example, and then not be able to train the next day. I’ve heard of people doing long term damage to their joints through practices like these, and that possibility really needs to be mentioned. It’s one of those dangers that IMA people are susceptable to but that we are never told.

I hurt my elbow doing staff last year and had to stop practicing that weapon completely until my elbow healed. It took so long to heal that I forgot the set. Now I’ve lost one of my weapon sets. I took private lessons to get that, too. Rats!

One thing that I do is to not extend the weapon all the way out. Many teachers have you go to maximum extension because it’s great for fajing practice. It really gets the energy out. But it can be murder on your joints. Most of the time, I practice with a little bend in the elbows to protect them. Fajing is important, but it isn’t everything.

So if you’re doing IMA weapons training, be very, very careful with your joints. Don’t be all gung-ho like me and train too much.

BTW, gung-ho is one of the few words in English that came from Chinese. Here’s Wikipedia on it.