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What you have heard is at least partly wrong. Heavy weight lifting can be about increasing size, but it is more often about directly increasing strength (it's part of the distinction between a bodybuilder and a powerlifter). The expression is that "no one gets bulky by accident." I also have never seen any reliable evidence that it makes you slower at ...

Kicking has four parts to it: flexibility, technique, focus and ab's. For the flexibility, I have found PNF stretching to be quite beneficial. This is a form of stretching that uses periodic resistence/contraction followed by relaxation to achieve a deeper strectch and excellent long term results (here is a reasonable Youtube example). Of course flexibility ...

Honestly, the best thing you can probably start with is not going to be a martial art at all. Instead, try the following: Strength Training One of the biggest culprits in back pain, knee pain, etc can actually be corrected by increasing the strength of the surrounding muscles. I had hip issues and years and years of martial arts did not fix my hip issues, ...

One of my favorite exercises in that area is holding a side kick against the wall. You execute a side kick with your foot against the wall, and then you shift your weight forward until your foot no longer slides down. This will only work if you hold your leg at least in a horizontal line. Once you have some balance you can work on height. If you get your ...

Classifying tai-chi-for-health What are we talking about when we talk about forms-based tai chi? Evaluating the practice as an ignorant outsider, it's essentially a slow dance. There are a number of one-footed balancing postures, deep lunges or otherwise low stances, and opportunity to stretch the limbs as well as flex and extend. In addition to the ...

Because the motions are performed slowly, tai chi ends up being its own conditioning exercise. Holding stances increases overall stamina as well as helping find root. That said, at one point I'd taken to doing stressed forms, where I'd wear a weight belt, arm and/or wrist weights, used leg bands, etc. depending on what I was trying to work on. Other than ...

"Not tai chi" Many tai chi teachers espouse physical development through means other than tai chi, and reserve tai chi for the refinement of skill. Similar to pre-war Aikido (wherein students were required to have significant expertise in other arts such as karate, judo or jiujitsu), tai chi strength and conditioning is often mixed with other styles of ...

Slugster's great post forgot to mention relaxation. Conditioning to build strength and improve flexibility is very important. However, fast, fluid motion also requires you to be relaxed and it's harder to achieve relaxation of the large leg muscles than it is of the arms. One drill I give people is to get a pile of cushions at a height they can ...

A good way to get gi / kimono specific grip training is sling your gi / kimono top around a pull up bar or a tree branch and use that to do any number of exercises, such as Pull ups, grip the lapels and hoist yourself up Grab lapels and pull yourself up Grab lapels and bring your lower body up and wrap your legs around the gi in triangle position Just hang ...

We did an exercise at my first Judo club that seemed to help with grip. We would hold our arms out directly in front of us and then alternate between making a grip and having our hands as open as possible. Basically, like gripping thin air, but repeatedly. A very simple exercise, but it seemed to help. How many times we repeated was a measure of how many ...

I have vague memories of simply trying various kicks in slow-motion, trying to keep my balance, until I could do most of them without losing my balance. Alternatively, try to just lift one foot off the ground from a "feet together" standing position. The foot only needs to be lifted until it's no longer touching the ground. Try to keep your balance. After a ...

This seems like a tough question to answer to me because "health" is a vague term and it begs to be compared to other things. I would think one advantage forms based tai chi would have over the other things you mentioned (running, strength training) is an additional mental discipline / meditative aspect that would contribute to mental health and well-being ...

First off I wouldn't worry about accidentally turning in to Arnold. Body builder forums are littered with people struggling to gain mass. It's much tougher than you think and you'd have to be REALLY focused on gaining mass and not just strength to even have much of a chance of that happening. While strength is not always paramount in many martial arts, it ...

My teacher Scott M Rodell advocates weapons training in addition to zhangzhuang for general conditioning. When using real-weight weapons like wooden (or steel) jian or long spear, they provide the additional weight for a simple yet focused workout as well as great resistance to "push against" when applying fajing. Additionally, it is not unheard of to ...

Tai chi is about integration of the whole body and developing structure - ideally using every muscle in every move. Any strengthening "gym" type work will basically be about isolation of muscle groups, which kind of defeats the point unless you are addressing a specific weakness. In tai chi you should "throw away your hard strength". Doing specific ...

Absolutely it does! When I was training judo seriously, I was in the gym lifting weights 3x a week. In most martial arts, you don't want to get huge and bulky like THelper mentioned. But it's easy to train explosive power and balance and endurance, all of which will help your martial arts training.

A fun way to work on balance (and endurance) is to stand in your kick stance, and draw out the alphabet with your kicking leg. This doesn't really work your actual kicking technique much, but it will work your balance and your endurance and strengthen all the muscels needed for kicking, and therefor your balance and technique will improve.

When talking to people about this specific problem in class, I usually surprise them with my comment: "stop standing on your heel." If you are light on your heel but strong on the ball of your foot you have several advantages: You are using your calf muscles. They're very strong and confidence inspiring. You have less rotational friction than a planted ...

Although, both answers so far have made good points I happen to agree with, I would like to weigh in with an alternative albeit perhaps not so very popular answer. I would argue that by selecting just a small subset of the whole system, you are already forfeiting some of the benefits that the whole system can offer. Or to quote the words of Yang Cheng Fu ...

Tai Chi. Any kind. Possibly even any teacher should do. TaiChi is neat, because of the general focus on smoothness. The movements must be carefully orchestrated and done not only with the minimum effort possible, but also with efforts to relax. The only way to relax fully, over time, is going to include fixing the posture, going as far down as the bones ...

Your goal to increase your grip strength should focus on exercising your forearm muscles. There are several strength exercises and tools you can use to work out the different muscles in your your forearms. Tennis Ball or Hand Grip As @stslavik stated in his comment, you can grab a tennis ball and squeeze it to your heart's content. When squeezing the ...

There are a few things you can do to improve grip strength. Like everything else, sport specific drills are best, training the closest to the actual activity your trying to improve. on that note: Like others have mentioned, throw a gi over a bar and do pull ups with it. My favourite, because it works all sorts of different parts of your upper body, and ...

There are a couple of things that you can do to help. Go hang from something Basically either go outside and find something overhead or get a pullup bar and hang from it. You can make a progression out of this, going from a pullup bar to one-hand on a pullup bar to hanging from a rope. The basic idea is that if you want to improve your grip strength, ...

Doing Luta Livre helped my back and posture problems a lot. A lot of different muscles are used in both static and explosive manner. Luta Livre is -just like Brazilian Jiu Jitsu- a submission wrestling sport, although in Luta Livre no gi is worn. The athletes usually wear tight-fitting clothes like fight-shorts and rash-guards. Apart from that the two ...

Reducing stress, eliminating back pain, and improving fitness have little to do with martial arts styles. Instead, they have a lot to do with the physical culture that a given school adheres to. In terms of strength, if a tai chi school has newcomers master one-leg squats, stone lifting, barbells, or gymnastics alongside forms practice, that could help. If ...

Good and well thought out responses. Like the key on relaxation comments. My own training includes quite a bit of slow staff movement (twirling, thrusts, defensive blocks, strikes, slashes, etc), which is great for focusing the mind and body. Combining non-weapon kicks, punches, strikes and blocks with staff movement is a great change of pace and requires ...

We got this exact question over at fitness.SE. Essentially you just get back into it a little slower, with a little less intensity (less weight on the bar, running shorter distances, sprinting a little slower). Not much special to it, except crossing your Ts and dotting your Is. Make sure the sickness is really gone and start training carefully.

David Gaffney (co-author of the excellent Chen Style Taijiquan) has an article on chen tai chi strength training (PDF) that mentions methods such as stone lifting, pole shaking, the taiji bang (short stick), taiji ball (akin to a medicine ball), and training with intentionally heavy weapons. While it may come as a surprise to many, strength training is ...

I highly recommend BJJ or Brazilian Jiu-jitsu. I sit on an office chair all day and use to have lower back pain. I even have an inverted table. I train BJJ and muay thai. But, BJJ movements feel similar to Yoga. There is a lot of stretching, and isometric contractions of the muscles. Plus being in the gaurd, and being in someones gaurd you are ...

Relief from Work Stress? I would suggest you to learn free style. Keep learning moves that enhance your flexibility. Start with front kicks,side kicks, round house kicks and other good kicks that will get u ready for some art that suits you. Then you can decide which art you would want to learn. You could try aerobics or yoga for starters and then a few ...