True Strength Yang: Explosive Body Toughening by Stephan Berwick

Product Description

Make Your Body Combat-Ready Using the Most Powerful Secrets of the Ancient Chinese Warriors Stephan Berwick s True Strengthtm regimen draws on ancient Chinese warrior secrets to present a sophisticated and highly effective program for developing formidable internal power without the help of any devices, medicines, or forced breathing. DVD 1: True Strength Yang presents essential body-hitting exercises, in a unique training approach that stimulates and toughens the skin, muscles, and joints using only relaxed, flexible limb movement. Discover how to first toughen your upper body, moving to the mid-section, then the lower, followed by total body, structural toughening executed with a partner. Body toughening is a key part of building True Strength. The ability to withstand and recover from blows and other related contact-injuries is crucial for any combat style. While many martial disciplines use a variety of sometimes debilitating exercises to toughen the body, True Strength Yang is inspired by the fluid, relaxed body conditioning and power striking concepts of Tong Bei (Back Striking) and Fanzi (Catch & Hold) boxing to produce extremely quick results for any body type. After mastering the instructional component, take advantage of three follow-along True Strength Yang Workouts to rapidly weaponize your body in just minutes a day. DVD 2: True Strength Base: Primers for Natural Strength provides an easy to learn series of mainly lower body exercises to quickly develop overall body control. The goal in True Strength Base is to strengthen the legs, increasing the trainee s ability to shift the body weight efficiently all towards the ability to relax while the body exerts. You ll first strengthen your base, learn to better support your weight, gain control of your waist, and then enhance the control of your limbs.

Review

Stephan Berwick s True Strength Yang regimen is inspired by basic training process of traditional Chinese martial art and is a remarkable result of author s decades of systemic study and practice of Chinese marital arts. Different from many other training approaches, the body toughening regimen presented here does not only strengthen muscles, skin and joints, but also effectively builds body flexibility and abilities to stand contact-injuries. Having been a Chinese martial art master and professional Kungfu team head coach for over forty years in China, I truly appreciate this body conditioning method, which is well structured and instructed to be followed easily by the audience. –Bai Wenxiang, China Senior National Wushu Coach, Deputy Chairman of China Wushu Federation of Shaanxi Chapter and former Head Coach of Shaanxi Provincial Wushu Team.

It is part of the human psyche to experience something won¬derful and want to imitate it. People hear a professional classical musician, and want to play the whole concerto themselves; see a beautiful painting, and want to create their own masterpiece. The martial arts are no different. In the quest to quickly master a fighting system, it is natural to want to learn the most dif¬ficult movements as soon as possible. In the end, all the arts build off of fundamentals and this, it seems, is what Stephan Berwick s True Strength Yang DVDs offer to all martial art practitioners: essential body-hitting exer¬cises, in a unique training approach that stimulates and toughens the skin, muscles, and joints using only relaxed, flexible limb movement (jacket quote). There are many forms of body conditioning, so we need to ask what makes Berwick s method unique. First, his method isn t totally unique, since aspects of what is pre¬sented can be found in many combative training systems. A statement on the DVD jacket states that much here comes from Tong Bei (Back Striking) and Fanzi (Catch & Hold) boxing systems. Many martial artists are familiar with warm-up exercises where one s arms move in repeated patterns, slapping parts of the body in the process. Berwick has assembled a variety of exercises that first work on the upper-body, then on the mid-section, then on the lower-body, and then on the total body. The first DVD is 87 min¬utes long and includes ten sec¬tions: (1) Introduction (2) Vertical Hitting (3) Twist Hitting (4) Swing Hitting (5) In and Out Hitting (6) Limb Hitting (7) Stepping Limb Hitting (8) Toughen the Bones (9) Toughen the Structure (10) Follow Along Workouts. Section 1 through 9 average 5 minutes of instruction each, and the final section presents three work¬outs utilizing material from all the previous lessons: Five Minutes (Intense), Twelve Minutes (Condition), and Twenty Minutes (Endure). What makes the practices unique is that each involves hitting ; usually with the hands hitting some part of the body, such as the thigh or forearm. To Toughen the Bones, foot stomping is employed which, like other weight bearing exercises, –Journal of Asian Martial Arts Volume 18 Number 4 – 2009