Product Description

Stephan Berwick’s True Strengthtm regimen is based on ancient Chinese warrior secrets to create a highly effective program for developing formidable internal power without the help of any devices, medicines, or forced breathing. DVD 1: True Strength Yang presents essential body-hitting exercises, in a unique training approach that stimulates and toughens the skin, muscles, and joints using only relaxed, flexible limb movement. Structural toughening is done with a partner and begins with the upper body, moving to the mid-section, then the lower, and finally the total body. Building True Strength involves body toughening. Any combat style requires the ability to survive and recover from blows. While many martial disciplines use a variety of sometimes disabling exercises to toughen the body, True Strength Yang is inspired by the fluid, relaxed body conditioning and power striking concepts of Tong Bei and Fanzi boxing to produce extremely quick results for any body type. You can weaponize your body in just minutes a day after mastering the True Strength Yang Workouts. DVD 2: True Strength Base: Primers for Natural Strength provides an easy to learn series of mainly lower body exercises to quickly develop overall body control. The goal in True Strength Base is to strengthen the legs, increasing the ability to shift the body weight efficiently all towards the ability to relax while the body exerts. You will strengthen your base, learn to better support your weight, gain control of your waist, and then enhance the control of your limbs.

Review

The author’s decades of study and practice of Chinese martial arts resulted in Stephan Berwick’s True Strength Yang regimen, which is inspired by the basic training process of traditional Chinese martial art. The body toughening regimen presented here does not only strengthen muscles, skin and joints, but also effectively builds body flexibility and abilities to stand contact-injuries. Having been a Chinese martial art master and professional kungfu team head coach for over forty years in China, I truly appreciate this body conditioning method, which is well structured and instructed to be followed easily by the audience.

It’s part of the human mind to want to imitate something. People hear a professional classical musician and want to play the whole concerto themselves; they also want to see a beautiful painting and make their own masterpiece. The martial arts are the same. It’s natural to want to learn the most difficult movements as soon as possible in the quest to quickly master a fighting system. Stephan Berwick’s True Strength Yang DVDs offer martial arts practitioners a unique training approach that stimulates and toughens the skin, muscles, and bones. We need to ask what makes Berwick’s method unique. His method is not unique since aspects of what is presented can be found in many combative training systems. The jacket on the DVD states that a lot of it comes from the Fanzi and Back Striking boxing systems. Warm-up exercises where one’s arms move in repeated patterns are familiar to many martial artists. The upper-body, mid-section, lower-body, and total body are all worked on by Berwick. The first DVD is 87 minutes long and has ten chapters. Section 1 through 9 average 5 minutes of instruction each, and the final section presents three workouts utilizing material from all the previous lessons: Five Minutes (Intense), Twelve Minutes (Condition), and Twenty Minutes (Endure). The practices are unique because they all involve hitting with the hands, usually with the thigh or forearm. The Journal of Asian Martial Arts Volume 18 Number 4 was published in 2009.