Strength, Speed, Flexibility and Endurance in Body Conditioning

Strength
Cinderblock flipping and catching is a great exercise to increase the strength of the wrist and its surrounding areas. Wrist conditioning can also be achieved with a staff. While holding one end of the staff with one hand, swing, stab, and make circular movements, simulating different combat applications. Holding the staff closer to one end of the staff increases the weight, strain, and conditioning on the wrist, allowing you can adjust the weight to your own level. This exercise will also stretch out the wrist and in addition strengthen muscles, tendons, and ligaments.

You can also train correct wrist alignment and strength by doing fist/knuckle push-ups. This will cause stress to the many small bones of the wrist. In order to stabilize these bones, the ligaments and tendons are worked hard and ultimately conditioned. By training the tendons and ligaments, we also train the muscles surrounding them, and the bones which benefit from their piezoelectric properties. Click to learn how Chinese medicine treats Premenstrual Syndrome.

Speed
When training for speed, one drill you can practice is closing your hand into a fist and then opening all of your fingers again over and over as fast as you can in one simultaneous flow of movement. This should be initially practiced for about 30 seconds each hand. It is also important that you keep track of how many times you can grab in this fixed amount of time, so that you may compare and study your progress. Another speed exercise you can train is stick swinging. Swing a light stick or rod back and forth with full extensions, as fast as you can. The stick can be swung in four directions, each to be practiced for about 15 seconds. The four angles are vertical, horizontal, and the two diagonals.

Flexibility
Flexibility is very important, especially for Chin Na training. You can enhance the flexibility of your wrists by stretching your wrists in several different angles. A similar effect can be achieved by extending your arm out when practicing staff swinging. Flexible wrists enable you to have less pain when Chin Na is applied to you, due to the increased range-of-motion in your joints.

Endurance
Endurance is always being trained, no matter what exercise you do. However, you can adjust each exercise to produce different results in your endurance training. For example, by doing more staff swinging reps with less weight, you will essentially focus more on endurance than on strength.