The SECRETS of IRON PALM Kung Fu EXPLAINED

There are many interesting techniques in Chinese Kung Fu, from light body skill, to eagle claw, to the five finger exploding heart technique. Okay, I don't know if that's a real thing, but the specific skill I want to talk about today comes from a special method of conditioning the hands to be very hard and tough. And that is, of course, iron palm. It's called or iron sand palm in Chinese, sometimes shortened to just or in Cantonese. And it's a technique that's had whole movies made about it. Today, I'm lucky enough to have Ron Wheeler on the show, who I met at the NTD Traditional Chinese Martial Arts Competition this summer. He trains in Jiao Gar Kung Fu, a southern style created by five brothers known as the Five Tigers of Jiao Gar. Yeah, I know, sounds like a movie, doesn't it? Ten Tigers of Kwantung. The style includes elements of several southern and northern styles. It's made up of Hung Ga, Choy Ga, and Bok Si Lung, or Northern Shaolin. As well as some other interesting techniques. We do have Tie Chong Iron Palm training, and we also have Iron Jacket training. So we're going to find out a little bit about Jiao Gar before delving into the techniques I was really interested in hearing about. This is The Secrets of Iron Palm Explained. Ron is a native of Washington, D.C., And he had the good fortune to train with Shifu Dean Chin. Chin was born in Toisan in 1943, and he learned Hung Ga, white crane kung fu, and paimei-style kung fu from an early age. Yes, paimei is the villain from Kill Bill, but he's also a real historical figure with a kung fu style named after him. Chin then moved to Hong Kong in 1960, where he started learning Jiao Gar, or in Mandarin it's called Zhou Jia, basically the Jiao or Zhou family style. At this time, he also learned Eagle Claw as well. Chin came to the U.S. in 1966 and opened the first school teaching Jiao Gar Kung Fu in America. Ron started training with him at his school in Washington, D.C.'s Chinatown in 1981. I'd heard Jiao Gar contains elements of both Northern and Southern Kung Fu systems, and this was confirmed to me in my interview with Ron. Like, what are, like, the main moves and tactics that Zhao Ga uses? You can tell the Zhao Gao form, we have a technique called Jin Sao, which translates as circling hand. So it starts off with a crane wing block or hop kick, and then you circle in towards your waist, circle around again, you grab, and then you pull your opponent in and punch. That's a key signature move. Also, the northern kind of jumps out at you. so in the north you'd always see a maneuver to block a punch where they'd block up and shoot out a punch and so that maneuver is designed to separate the rib cage and separate the muscles of the rib cage exposing the rib and making it more susceptible to actually break the rib on the punch. If your arm is down your ribs are going to be together but when you raise your arm up you can actually use your fingers and feel your ribcage start to separate. Oh yeah, I feel it, yeah. Once that's lifted up, then we punch. So the opponent's arm, you're blocking it, it's above your arm, isn't it? And you're raising their arm up. So the punch is coming here, I'm going to raise that, I'm going to catch the punch, I'm going to raise the arm up. Okay, yeah. Separate and open up the ribcage even more, and I'm going to deliver my punch. That's a very common technique that you would see in Zhao Gao, but that's something you would see in the north. The south, they don't normally do that. But it's when I ask about how power is generated in Zhao Ga that he gets into some really interesting stuff. How is power generated in your style? Because I know in, you know, Hung Ga, they have like the iron wire form and the San Chin for like conditioning the body. Do you have anything like that? Any sort of like qigong or forms that condition? We have formal qigong. we have um we do have uh iron palm training and uh we also have iron jacket training uh i have not learned that i've not learned iron jacket i learned some iron palm what's the iron palm training like can you tell us about that or is that like secret no it starts off basically like everybody i mean um the only the only different style i've ever seen that does iron palm is um it's called four lower tigers Hung Ga in Cantonese you say i'll say four Hong Kong and they have an additional strike with their or additional movement but basically if you if you start on on a bag and you go five strikes you sit in your horse stance and we do everything in a horse stance okay you strike your palm back of your hand blade of your hand the heel of your hand and then tiger claw and the only other difference in uh four lower tigers Hung Ga their table is on an angle it's not flat it starts on an edge and the bag moves it's on like a roller so you go do the same strike but as you do the tiger claw you would push the bag forward and then pull it back and then start over that's the only difference oh yeah okay i see but we have the same strike uh you know everybody one two three four five and then you repeat and what's the bag is it like gravel in the bag or do you start off with beans and then you go to so you can use iron filings you can use steel shots some people use um some people do use gravel like you know but mostly people use iron iron you know iron balls or steel okay because yeah i've got one at home that has like pea gravel in it um yeah i've heard to be okay and do you use that medicine as well afterwards always you did that always and then you'll see food and then you go you know the various stages of mung beans and the mung beans get harder and as you get better with it oh this is actually pushing your hands into a bucket of beans right yeah tell it tell us about that so when i was in the school steeple had three buckets they were always set on an angle of about 45 degrees okay they didn't have to like bend the back so you can keep a good posture and thrust your hands in so as opposed to sitting in your horse and looking down and maybe you you know he wants you he wanted your energy to be right your energy flow has to be correct well if your posture is over like this then obviously it's off so by sitting in your horse and sitting straight but having the uh the barrel he used to use like like 10 gallon 10 gallon uh barrel that you would find like in a commercial restaurant where you get like, you know, 10 gallons of pickles and then there's large buckets. Yeah, so he would use those. But he'd have it set at 45 degrees on the angle. And so you sit in your horse and you thrust at 45 degrees and you still get the same effect, plus your breathing is going to be better because you're not bent over. And what effect does it have on your hands? Like, what can you do afterwards with the palm? Is it just like it really hurts when you hit someone? Yeah, I mean, iron palm training never, once you develop it it never goes away I mean you got to maintain it but once you develop it it never goes away Paul Atkins he was a senior instructor in the school and but Paul really was really really good with it and when you normally do a brick any type of breaking demonstration normally you'll see a brick and then a space and then a brick and a space well the bigger the space the easier the break still a good break momentum right yeah so if you have a brick and this is the brick and then I have this much space and then another brick. That's going to be a much easier break because you have what we call progressive collapse. The smaller the space, the harder the break. What Paul would do when Steve was alive, he would do arm-palm demo and they would take six cinder blocks, flat cinder blocks, one on top of the other. No space. I've got pictures of him doing it. No space. He's sitting in his horse stance. He's getting his Qi together, you're breathing, hitting this Qi together. All of a sudden, boom, one shot. Well, hearing all about this stuff, maybe we want to break out the gravel bag and the dit da jiao medicine and do some iron palm training myself. Of course, I have learned it before. If you want to learn it, do make sure you seek the guidance from a qualified instructor. If you are interested in jiao ga kung fu, you may want to check out Ron Wheeler's book too. I have a copy. It's a great read. It has step-by-step guides to some of the forms and routines from the system. I will paste a link to the book on Amazon down below. A big thank you to Ron for coming on the show. So his book is pasted down below. I'll put his YouTube channel on screen in just a moment. He's got a lot of videos of him doing demonstrations of Jiao Ga. And if you want to see the full uncut interview, which is about half an hour long and talks more about the style of Jiao Ga and also the story of the Jiao Ga team from Ron's Shifu school who went to Taiwan in the 70s and won a load of medals at an international competition there and even brought some Chinese audience members to tears at the sight of a load of African-American guys displaying the dedication and passion to practice and preserve this style of traditional martial arts. I will put that on screen now, or if I don't have it quite ready at the time of upload, it'll be in our members-only section on our channel for our channel members. It costs $4.99 a month to be a member, and we're gonna try our best to do more members-only videos. If you do join, I thank you very much for your support. Otherwise, please subscribe if you're new to see all our public videos when they come out. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye.