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The dragon style has roots in Hakka Chuen, a style of kung fu practiced by the Hakka people living in the inland eastern part of Guangdong (Cantonese: Canton). The dragon movements were combined with those taught by the kung fu monk Zhi Shan, one of the Five Elders of Shaolin. Like tiger-claw kung fu, dragon kung fu stylists use clawed hands as part of their repertoire of movements. The dragon claw differs from the tiger claw because the dragon claw hand has fingers arched back at the knuckles. Along with using one’s chi (internal energy or life force), dragon kung fu also uses many body spins and whips, with swinging arm movements to generate power. The Dragon develops alertness and concentration. Physical techniques were executed without strength, with emphasis placed on breathing. Movements appeared long, flowing, and continuous.

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The Back Story

I don’t know if I mentioned this before, but while traveling in China with my teacher, I met a kung fu master at a local park. He was 80 at the time. I watched him practice kung fu and Tai Chi.

At one point, he walked over to a tree and placed his foot above his head. Then he grabbed the tree with both arms and pulled himself forward into a standing split. Later, I trained with him.

About 5 years later, I saw him in a Kung Fu magazine, where he had won first in the Kung Fu forms division. What was especially surprising was that age did not matter, so he beat younger competitors.

In the same park, I saw another teacher in his 70s teaching the Mantis style of Kung Fu, moving as if he were twenty.
These masters do not run, do treadmills, or lift weights. What is their secret? The secret has three components: muscle strength, joint flexibility, and breathing.

The Secret of Strong Muscles and Strength

Muscle strength is not based on how big your muscles are, but on what you can do. The Chinese believe in balancing muscle toning and strength through Yin/Yang principles.

You’ve probably heard of this concept. Basically, for muscle strength and health, you want to balance flexibility and firmness. You’ve seen weightlifters with massive forces. Weightlifters have strength but move slowly and have little flexibility.
Another example is using a rubber band. You get to stretch it out, and it snaps back with force. However, the more you fold it, the weaker it becomes (i.e., its snapback power). Kung Fu and Tai Chi teach this muscle harmony between Yin/Yang.

Joint Flexibility

Joint flexibility keeps your joints healthy and loose. Inflexible joints can lead to arthritis, nerve damage, and stiffness. Healthy joints require rotation, flexibility, and strength.

The full-range circular movements of Kung Fu and Tai Chi rotate your joints as you build strength and improve flexibility. This keeps your joints healthy and increases blood flow.

Since everything in your body is circular, circular movements are the best way to keep it healthy. Plus, this is how your body naturally moves. Therefore, straight and linear actions are less beneficial for your body.

As I mentioned, Yin/Yang has two components: light and dark, strong and flexible. Therefore, a healthy body requires keeping these two opposites in harmony.

How to Breathe

Breathing is the third step to staying healthy. Most people think of aerobics as a way to stay healthy because it forces you to breathe heavily, raises your heart rate, and pumps blood through your veins. Kung Fu does that, albeit a little differently. Tai Chi is the opposite, but it also has a profound effect.

What’s the secret that Western exercise programs miss? It’s how you breathe. Kung Fu and Tai Chi teach you to breathe from the lower abdomen, as you did when you were born. However, we breathe incorrectly, using our chest and reacting to the environment. Incorrect breathing causes tension in the body, especially the neck and shoulders.

Here’s an example: When you get angry, you use your upper body by tensing your shoulders and chest. As a result, your entire upper body tightens, your mind becomes stressed, and you don't think through the situation to find alternatives.

What do most people recommend doing when you’re angry? That’s right: do slow, deep breathing to calm your nerves and body. Stress is unhealthy and can cause many diseases.

So, it helps to relearn how to breathe using your lower abdomen. Low abdominal breathing, when combined with Kung Fu and Tai Chi movements, relieves stress and exercises the internal organs.

Wow! How does that happen? Breathing in the lower abdomen, where most of your vital organs are, combined with Kung Fu and Tai Chi postures, vibrates these organs.

This gentle movement improves blood and nerve flow and prevents stagnation in vital organs, which can cause many problems.
Kung Fu and Tai Chi also have unique breathing patterns called Chi Kung for this specific purpose. I once saw a gentleman in his 90s who was built. All he did was do one of these breathing patterns a few times daily. A picture of him, shirtless, showed him picking up a 50-pound urn with his fingertips. Plus, he had a six-pack that would make anyone envious.

Conclusion

So, whether you like the faster action of Kung Fu or the slow, relaxed pace of Tai Chi, they both keep you healthy, which is essential in life. So, give them a try if you haven’t tried either Kung Fu or Tai Chi. You’ll be amazed at the results and how good you will feel.

In September 1620, a small ship called the 'Mayflower' left Plymouth, England, carrying 102 passengers. After a treacherous 66-day crossing, they dropped anchor near the tip of Cape Cod, far north of their intended destination at the mouth of the Hudson River. One month later, the Mayflower crossed Massachusetts Bay, where the Pilgrims, as they are now commonly known, began to establish a village at Plymouth.

The first winter was brutal, and most colonists remained on board the ship, where they suffered from exposure, scurvy, and outbreaks of contagious disease. As a result, only half of the Mayflower's original passengers and crew lived to see their first spring in New England. Then, in March, the remaining settlers moved ashore, where they received a great visit from an Abenaki Indian who greeted them in English. Several days later, he returned with another Native American, Squanto, a member of the Pawtuxet tribe who had been kidnapped by an English sea captain and sold into slavery before escaping to London and returning to his homeland on an exploratory expedition. Squanto taught the Pilgrims, weakened by malnutrition and illness, how to cultivate corn, extract maple sap, catch fish in the rivers, and avoid poisonous plants.

Governor William Bradford organized a celebratory feast and invited a group of the fledgling colony's Native American allies, including the Wampanoag chief Massasoit. Now remembered as America's "first Thanksgiving," although the Pilgrims themselves may not have used the term at the time, the festival lasted for three days. While no record exists of the historic banquet's exact menu, Pilgrim chronicler Edward Winslow wrote in his journal that Governor Bradford sent four men on a "fowling" mission to prepare for the event; the Wampanoag guests arrived bearing five deer. Historians have suggested that many dishes were likely prepared using traditional Native American spices and cooking methods. However, because the Pilgrims had no oven and the Mayflower's sugar supply had dwindled by the fall of 1621, the meal did not feature pies, cakes, or other desserts, which have become a hallmark of today's celebrations. Additionally, surprisingly, turkey cannot be confirmed as the fowl served at the first Thanksgiving dinner.

In 1608, a congregation of disgruntled English Protestants from the village of Scrooby, Nottinghamshire, left England for Leyden, a town in Holland. These "Separatists" did not want to pledge allegiance to the Church of England, which they believed was nearly as corrupt and idolatrous as the Catholic Church it had replaced. (They were not the same as the Puritans, who had many of the same objections to the English Church but wanted to reform it from within). Separatists hoped that in Holland, they would be free to worship as
They liked.

The Separatists (who called themselves "Saints") found religious freedom in Holland, but they also found a secular life that was more difficult to navigate than they'd anticipated. For one thing, Dutch craft guilds excluded migrants, relegating them to menial, low-paying jobs. Even worse, Holland's easygoing, cosmopolitan atmosphere proved alarmingly seductive to some of the Saints' children. (These young people were "drawn away," Separatist leader William Bradford wrote, "by evil example into extravagance and dangerous courses. ) For the strict, devout Separatists, this was the last straw. They decided to move again to a place free of government interference and worldly distractions: the "New World" across the Atlantic Ocean.

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