I want to practice Kungfu/Shaolin to increase my stamina. I'm a software engineer and spent much time in front of a computer. I feel I'm very weak. I'm easily tired, easily depressed.
I found this tutorial on Youtube and am planning to follow it.
Please advice me if the quality of the tutorial is good? And if it is good, how much time should I spend per week to practice effectively?
If the tutorial isn't good, which tutorial is good for me in order to increase my stamina?
If you want to start a martial art for fitness and mental benefits, I can highly recommend Taekwondo. There are other styles you can try too, e.g. Muay Thai, but Taekwondo is probably the most fun you'll ever have in a dojang/dojo.
My problem with kung fu schools OUTSIDE of China is that they're usually not that great. The transfer of knowledge outside of China isn't nearly as good as from Japan or Korea.
As for how many times to practice, well start off with 3 days per week, for about an hour per day. If you join a school, they will have their own hours anyway. If you feel good the next day, nothing is stopping you from practicing what you've learned in class. I usually demonstrated how a new technique works, made sure my students could do it, then told them to go practice at home. That way we could spend more time actually sparring (fighting), which was the main point for me.
There's two things that increase stamina: cardio (fast, regular movement) and muscle endurance.
Pretty much any regular movement can do that - Shaolin training or anything else. You can do a few minutes every day up to the recommended at least 30 minutes of cardio that doctors recommend, and of course, more once you get the endurance going. Understand that of the kind of stuff you'll get, half will be movement based (punches, kicks, ec.) the other half will be stuff like stance work (Horse, cat, etc.) and that will improve the muscle endurance for your legs.
That short video you linked doesn't give me much to go on as to how well the guy teaches on the video, but there's a couple of things that are important for your training, even if you're just looking for endurance.
1) Correct stance - bad low stance work will do bad things to your knee cartilage over the long run.
2) Correct use of planting feet, especially with stomping or after a high kick. People can get nasty tendon issues from slamming their feet incorrectly or too much.
Both of these issues I've seen friends who have done Shaolin style training deal with, and it would be something to make sure you check in on.
If you are interested in things like correct form for form competition, or combative use of martial arts, you'll have a lot higher requirements to meet. At that point, I'd really recommend checking for an actual teacher, even if you only get a little bit of training with them so you have some kind of basis to use for any video or book references you take from there.
Understand that if you want more than cardio work, face to face instruction will take you far.
