Kunyu Mountain Kung Fu Academy - Week 1

Well the good news is we survived our first week and we are still in one piece! We arrived on Monday morning and after introducing ourselves to everyone at the afternoon line up!!!! we were straight into training. The academy is situated about an hour away from Yantai which is a seaside town in the North East below Beijing – on the part of China that juts out towards Korea. It is a very rural setting in the mountains, which makes a nice change from all the cities we have been staying in recently. It is very beautiful here and there are nearby temples and lakes to visit. The bad news is it has been absolutely freezing this week! A big change from the last few months for us and there is no heating in the rooms.  It was hard to even take your coat off when in your bedroom! The accommodation is on site and is a bit like halls of residence although we share a room – still shared bathrooms though! There is a dining hall and we all eat together 3 times per day (also with coat and hat on!).

The living quarters

There are a few different styles of Kung Fu you can train in here. John is continuing with his Wing Chun and I am learning Shaolin and Sanda (Chinese kickboxing).You are assigned to a group which has a dedicated master in charge and he is then responsible for you. If you want to leave the academy to go anywhere you must request his permission. There are also translators present in each class and everything must get translated which can be quite confusing at times trying to understand the meaning of things.

 It’s quite full on during the week and this is a typical day:

5.50am                 Wake up

6-7am                   Tai Chi and Qi gong (meditation)

7.10am                 Breakfast

8.30-10am            Kung Fu Session 1

10.30-11.30am     Kung Fu Session 2

12pm                     Lunch

2.30-4pm              Kung Fu Session 3

5.30pm                 Dinner

Outdoor training areas and punch bags for Sanda training

Each session involves an extensive warm up starting with a 1 mile run twice a day (John power walks). The sessions are quite varied throughout the week and can be practicing forms. In Shaolin I also have a morning of acrobatics (hilarious – expected to do jumping spin kicks, cartwheels, handstands, forward rolls, flicks, etc!). My poor attempts actually make myself laugh and take me back to gym club, age 10, except I‘m much older and much less flexible. Three of my afternoons are Sanda training, one morning is Qi gong (meditating for 40 mins – even this is painful as I lose feeling in my crossed legs after about 15 mins) and another afternoon is power training (frog jumps, wheelbarrows, handstands, hopping, sit ups – anything to ruin your legs and upper body basically!). John just immerses himself in Wing Chun because he wants to learn as much as he can in the short time that we have.

We both have the delightful power stretching which is our least favourite and by far the most painful session. This is a variety of stretches that you do in pairs as one person pushes you past your point of comfort. When the master comes round he takes you well beyond this point and people swear, shout, scream and even grown men have been known to cry. I’m not ashamed to admit I was begging him to stop. Then just to top of the week Friday afternoon is Mountain hell!!! This starts with a 20 minute steep walk up to a nearby temple, by which time you are out of breath and your calves are screaming in pain. The next hour is then spent walking (I won’t even bother to say running as very little running occurs) up approximately 300 steps repeatedly. The goal is to repeat this 6 times which I’m pleased to say I managed on my first week. The run back down is the only pleasant part before you start all over again! John stuck with it, completed it 5 times and was last man of the mountain.

Mountain hell - the only good bit is on the way down!!

There are a few extra classes you can also attend if you choose to, so we are learning Chinese acupuncture and massage too. I might even try Chinese calligraphy next week. John also has cleaning duties (no one has said anything to me so I’m keeping quiet) which involves sweeping outside areas and sweeping and mopping the training room. This is supposed to be done in a team but John was the only one that turned up (good practice I say!).

It sounds awful but we’re both really enjoying it. It was lovely to have a rest day yesterday but today we both wanted to do some training as we were missing it already so I went for a long run, John a long walk and we both spent time practicing our forms.

We’ve made some good friends as there are at least 40 people here from all over the world of varying experience. Some are here for just a month like us while others are here for 1 or even 2 years. I went out for dinner with my group on Friday as some are leaving and we took our master and one of the translators too. The master is only 24 years old but keen to know what we thought of China and its people. He tries to be very serious in training but makes us laugh as he enjoys singing popular songs and is constantly checking out his hair and his abs in the mirror! John calls his master the smiling assassin because he’s always got a smile on his face especially as he’s torturing them, which is most of the time!