What is Yi Jin Jing Training Like?
(NOTE: If you have not read the previous article, What is the Shaolin Muscle Tendon Change – and How Does it Work?, please do. This article and the terminology will make more sense.)
This is a long conversation.
There is a lot to learn in a year, and only so much you can do on any given day.
Just like any skill, the connective tissue transformation and tensegrity process (Yi Jin Jing) begins with learning the fundamental techniques, methods, connections, practices, and principles.
In general, a Yi Jin Jing practice session has the same flow. Consistent repetition, strategic challenges, and a balanced rhythm is the best way for the human brain and nervous system to learn and ‘hard-wire’ a skill into your nerves muscles and bones.
Sometimes, in this training, there are ‘side-missions’ into dynamic flexibility training, resistance training, or sit-down conversations about lifestyle and diet, but most sessions or classes will focus on:
- Principles of Awareness
- The anatomy of moving from your center (skill specific exercises)
- Fascial Tensegrity (Qi Gong for integration of tone, pliability, structure, and alignment)
- Isometric Collagen and Precursor Activation (Jin and Jing building Qi Gong)
- Resistance and Momentum Training (Kettlebells and body-weight-based strength training focused on tensegrity and agility).
- Breathwork skills for circulation and Qi cultivation.
- Releasing Into Stillness Practice (Dao Yin and Advanced Yi Jin Jing principles)
- Stillness Into State Shift Practice (Yi Nian and Zi Ran)
Principles of Awareness
The first principle of Awareness to learn is knowing your body on the inside – or developing an Internal Landscape (Nei Jing 內經).
Knowing the names of every muscle and bone can be helpful, but the ability to differentiate, contract, and release all of your individual muscles and myofascial systems, and articulate every joint individually will give you a tangible map of your Landscape. Becoming aware of your physical body will also bring your awareness to any imbalances, incompletely healed injuries, or patterns of embodied emotional distress. These will be like the mountains, swamps, deserts, and cliffs on your inner map.
Try this…
Pick a joint, limb, or vertebrae right now, if you are curious, and move it around. Stretch, rotate, push, pull, contract, release, become still, and relax into and through any habitual stiffness. If you could turn that experience into a cartoon map of your tension, or a hologram, or a statue – that is your Inner Landscape.
If you were just moving an ankle, knee, shoulder, elbow, wrist, or waist, you are probably more tangibly in touch with the bones, the angles that can be created by your muscles, and where you feel strong or not.
Exploring your range of motion is a great way to learn more about your Inner Landscape.
The next Awareness Principle is often the most challenging to put into practice. It is about feeling more than doing. Learning about your Inner Landscape takes some sensitivity and patience, which brings up the Qi Gong skill called Ting Jin 聽勁 – the power of ‘Listening with your whole Body and Being’.
If you are new to this part of Qi Gong practice, you can read an article about Ting Jin HERE.
It is important to keep in mind that all of your muscles rely primarily on motor nerves and load-sensing nerves. The way your brain moves your muscles like they are the pullies, and your bones are the levers, does not provide a lot of sensual feedback. Your load-sensing nerves can tell you that you are about to drop something, or cause damage, which is kind of like yelling “Oh No!” Otherwise, your muscles and structure do not have a lot to say – by themselves.
Your multilayered and highly integrated fascial networks and your interstitial membranes and filaments register about 80% of the actual sensations you experience somatically.
It turns out, your Jin Jing 筋經 (the contractile aspect of your meridians), or your network of micro-elastic tissues is what actually makes up most of the felt sense of your body, your posture (gravity), your energy level, your emotional and existential state of being, your overall fitness, and of course, where you have the most limitations, injuries, and/or pain.
The more that can you playfully pull, pull, lean, and twist in very specific ways, the more you can explore your Inner Landscape and create a ‘felt-sense map’ of your whole body. For the next few years, this is the place the rest of your Shaolin journey happens. Muscle and bone tensegrity are a good beginning, but whole-body Fascial Tensegrity (Yi Jin Jing) is where the functional and longevity benefits begin to multiply.
It takes some time, and a lot of contextualized repetition to relearn how to listen to your membranes. Listening to, and hearing all of the cobwebs and contours of your inner topography – your Landscape – your Somatic Embodiment, is the soil you are cultivating with.
Where does your garden need better irrigation and drainage?
Where does your soil (embodied experience) need to transform some compost into nutrients?
Where does any part of your body need restoration – of any kind?
We all start at the beginning. We all have to learn to listen on the inside – again and again.
It is a journey after all.
Move that shoulder or knee again, feel your membranes carefully and play with your elasticity. Find any tissue ‘cobwebs’ and put it on your Inner Landscape restoration list.
Restoring and realigning your many muscles and membranes requires that you elongate, rotate, reach, and release, in as many different directions as possible, across all of your joints – at the same time. There are many Qi Gong forms to choose from that can facilitate this process, as long as you are training for both coordination and rehabilitation.
Keep in mind that rehabilitation implies returning all of your elastic tissue meridians (Jin Jing 筋經 ) to their original tissue matrix. That often takes many months.
The Anatomy of Moving from Your Center
(Skill specific exercises)
Relearning how to interact with your body through tension, tone, relaxation, pliability, torsion, and stillness is a potent journey.
Along with your ‘felt-sense map’ (Nei Jing ) ,this journey will be supported by learning the locations, names, functions, and rages of motion of about 50 of your muscles. And what better way than through some isometric and specific resistance training without weights.
Gymitations
I invented the term Gymitations as a fun reminder that any time and anywhere, you can imitate a basic dumbbell, barbel, or cable-based exercise that you would do in profession or home gym. Isometric exercises, which focus on tensing one muscle or entire muscle groups while moving through large or small gestures, have been used around the entire world throughout history to build strength speed and endurance.
The Gymitation exercises are designed to help you interact with every important muscle and bone teaching you about anatomy, function, and range of motion.
Moving in a Centered Way
Qi Gong, especially the Qi Gong systems that are connected monastic training and martial arts training have skill specific exercises to restore many aspects of movement, coordination, agility, speed, power, and efficiency. All of these benefits arise from an approach to training that is very precise. This kind of precision is greatly enhanced by knowing your anatomy, and the ability to locate and contract or release individual muscles in a specific order.
This kind of efficiency, moving with release more than contraction, balanced like a bird on a branch, and fluid like kelp in the ocean, returns us all to our birthright of vitality and embodied peace.
Every practice session has a focus of some kind.
Each new technique or principle is introduced and explored through a series of skill specific exercises that have worked for over 1,000 years. Each principle becomes a part of your Inner Landscape, creating the foundation for the next layer of refinement.
Fascial Tensegrity
(Integration of tone, pliability, structure, and alignment)
The best way to investigate and master most Qi Gong principles is through traditional Qi Gong forms.
Repetition, precision, efficiency, repetition, visceral power, repetition, and complete release are all necessary – in different ways, at different times.
How many thousands of times have you sat with a bad posture?
How many skillful core toning sessions will it take to restore your Inner Landscape and all of your anatomy back to its innate potential?
It doesn’t take very long, but that is determined by the techniques, principles, and practices you use.
The first form that I teach in this Yi Jin Jing system, is called the Twelve Gestures of Wei Tuo. Many refer to this form as the Yi Jin Jing form. This form is usually taught first because it challenges and restores several aspects of your coordination, range or motion, core tone, complete pandiculation, and tensegrity.
Try this…
For context, imagine that you are driving, and for some reason, you suddenly have to turn around and turn off the overhead light that is behind you. If you can imagine that experience, feel into your body. Ting Jin 聽勁…,
Listen and feel into every fibre and the elasticity of your whole body (Jin 筋and Jing經) as you imitate that experience.
Connect with as many different directions, rotations, pressures, and specific aspects of coordination that you can. Imitate of imagine all of the subtle contractions and releases that you would need to do, and maintain in that moment
What would that feel Iike on the inside? Driving safely, or at least staying in your lane, and at the same time turning, looking quickly, reaching, finding, and turning off the overhead light?
Notice your core as you’re driving along, holding the wheel, keeping your feet on the appropriate pedals, turning away from what you’re doing, using the steering wheel as a leverage point…
What is your core doing when you turn off that light?
Restoring natural coordination through Qi Gong forms is an enjoyable and safe way to explore your elasticity and tone (Jin 筋). As your awareness and listening skills help you map out your Inner Landscape (Nei Jing 內經), you can guide the gradual process of Yi Jin Jing – the transformation of both the contractile tissues and the underlying fascial networks, collagen matrix, and stem cell bank account that maintains and builds your entire body.
As your practice becomes consistent and your body begins to elongate from within, it will be time to focus on your awareness of contraction and release through a range of qualities and interactions. Traditionally, there is a very sequential nine-step process of resistance, progressive relaxation, pandiculation, as well as a whole-body opening practice called Pore Breathing, and some subtle state shift practices.
You will need to learn this process from a qualified teacher from a Shaolin lineage. Learning this process properly is beyond worth the effort of finding a traditional teacher! It does not take very long for the changes in your muscle tone and pliability to become noticeable – to you and to everyone around you.
Before moving on to the next step, I want to bring your attention to an unexpected and important truth. You may need the Yi Jin Jing for the same reason the original Shaolin monks did. Too much sitting. Today we sit and watch screens, in the monastery 1500 years ago, they were sitting and observing – sitting and forgetting…, for many hours of every day!
Fortunately, even if you only learn the Twelve Gestures of Wei Tuo form, you will have a way to connect to and restore all of the meridians and membranes of your body from extended sitting. In TCM, extended sitting (Zuo Lao) is understood to be one of the five worst taxations (Wu Lao 五勞) to your health and longevity.
Each of the 12 exercises, not only helps you with coordination and rehabilitating old injuries and other tissue imbalances, but they also help you develop whole-body sensitivity and agility. Remember that most of your embodied awareness is experienced through your multi-joint, multi-layered system of fascia. Also remember, your body may have to restore some strength and structure before it can release into efficiency and flow.
If you already know a complete Qi Gong system, you have felt the symphony of coordination, sensitivity, and agility. If you want to learn more, and have an abundance of healthy curiosity and playfulness, this practice will help you develop more fluid and powerful movements.
This quality of movement often looks like a person that is not limited by their bones. It is often called ‘the Swimming Dragon Body.’
Bring your attention back to turning off that light behind you while driving.
Now imagine that your arms and legs are becoming a bit like boneless tentacles. How would your feet, the hand on the wheel, and the hand reaching back feel as they interact with each other across your very pliable spine?
As you invest some time developing your body’s tone and pliability by reaching, pulling, twisting, releasing, and allowing your limbs to feel boneless, you will naturally begin to feel your fascial membranes connecting all across your body. This process is called Fascial Tensegrity.
Imagine the layers upon layers of fascia, connected by countless filaments of micro-fascia, surrounded by interstitial fluids and stem cells everywhere in your body. Depending on your age, your posture, your embodiment of distress and trauma, and any previous injuries, your fascia may look more like Velcro stuck together, or crumpled tinfoil, than like smooth and resilient membranes. The initial benefit of this practice is to balance and restore any constraint or collapse, while also equalizing the tension, tone, and pliability, everywhere in your body.
Now that your entire fascial system is on its way back to the original ‘factory settings’ of strength and tissue integrity/tensegrity, you will have also restored a ‘bank account’ that helps repair your whole body.
This is essential if you train every day, and a potential lifesaver if you ever need to heal a wounded, chronically ill, and/or worn-down body.
Isometric Collagen and Precursor Activation
(Qi Gong and Martial Arts Strength training)
The next step is to increase your strength, tone, and elasticity (Jin 筋), while refining your Jing 經 (innate fiber network, meridians, veins, and arteries), while also increasing your ability to store Jing 精(Essence).
Said another way, active all of the tissue building hormones and cells (like Elastin and Fibroblasts), increase your mitochondria, build more collagen fiber into every connective tissue matrix, restore the availability of collagen precursor gel (stem cells and hyaluronic acid – see previous article)
The second form that I teach in this system is called Tan Fu’s External Vigor Routine. This practice involves 24 dynamic postures/gestures that create a balance of Isotonic (static) and Isometric (small movement) muscle contractions, while dedicating a lot of awareness to structure, balance, torsion, and your breath. This form has twelve passes, or levels of practice.
This aspect of Yi Jin Jing practice assumes that you have gone through the first phase of coordination and restoration training (from the outside in). Now you are ready to increase the overall demand on every tissue, and more specifically, balancing the capacity for tension and torsion across all sides of your body. This asks you to train, under tension, every joint’s range of motion, the defining gestures of every limb, the bow-like and snake-like nature of your spine, as well as the complete system of muscles referred to as your ‘core.’ (Transforming and Restoring all of your connective tissues – From the inside out).
This practice can be used to build larger, faster, and much more powerful muscles and membranes. It can also be used to tone all of your tissues while correcting years of poor posture and embodied holding patterns.
You do not need to build muscle mass if that is not your goal.
There are over a dozen distinct ways to use this ‘External Vigor Routine’ to prepare, enhance, restore, and rejuvenate (Yì 易) your connective tissues (Jin 筋) as it restores and returns to Jing 經 (essence) to your birthright capacity. Each stage or Pass is designed to challenge your coordination, body awareness, and physical dexterity – specifically, sequentially, and progressively. This process requires some disciple, but the benefits are undeniable.
After all, this practice is the result of 1500 years of refinement by warrior monks.
Strengthening and equalizing all of your connective tissues and fascia is both simple and involved. The simple part is exploring internally generated resistance through Isotonic (static isolated tension) and Isometric (isolated tension through a movement) gestures. Over and over again – for months and maybe even years.
Imagine you are holding a pose while imitating a bodybuilder.
Tensing one wrist, or an elbow, one or both arms – or even your whole body. An Isotonic pose is as simple as activating the muscles on both sides of each and every joint involved. Then making minor contraction and release adjustments to get the structure and poise just right.
Now imagine reaching up to scratch the side of your head. Let’s say your fingers are a few inches away from the top of your ear – either side – or both. Isometric gestures are mostly simple movements that imitate a range of interactions with the physical world. Under very precise and progressive versions of whole body balanced contraction and release.
Over and over again – for months and maybe even years.
Carefully increase the muscular effort to get your fingertips to touch and scratch your temple – while at the same time, with the same amount of effort, try and touch the wall or tree beside you with the back of your wrist.
Things get more involved after you discover your optimal amount of resistance (depending on your age, health, and goals).
What if your body likes spirals much more than angles?
Your practice will need to cover every dimension (front, back, left, right, up, down, twist, hard, soft, release, receive, restore), while gently rotating all of your bones, demanding torsion of all of your skeletal muscles and membranes – at the same time.
With very precise resistance and release.
To be complete, your whole-body practice also needs you to breathe skillfully and powerfully. Just like lifting weights, your metabolism, your muscle size and definition, your energy levels, and your mood will all improve with regular breathwork sessions (see below).
Like any other form of fitness, you can choose your outcomes with the Yi Jin Jing.
Your Collagen Bank Account
Strengthening all of your connective tissues, even your bones, draws on and then gradually expands what you might call your collagen bank account.
Optimal collagen levels should be over 30% of all of your body’s protein tissues. A very strong and muscular person maintains over 35% collagen and an underweight and frail person can get below 20% of their connective tissue being made of free collagen. Just enough for your fascial membranes to survive.
Which is why aging looks a lot like a grape turning into a raisin.
As your body builds and retains more collagen, it will also produce more repair hormones like Human Growth Hormone (HGH) and other signaling molecules. Consistent resistance training will also increase your DHEA, Testosterone, and other Steroid Hormones, which balances stress hormones like Cortisol, and which helps build an abundance of reproductive hormones.
And finally, as your body finds a new balance, abundant collagen retention and availability, the stem cells waiting in your interstitium will also increase in volume. The availability of collagen and stem cells is an actual physical bank account for times of illness and injury. It is also the most important bank account of physical longevity.
Traditionally, students who are learning this process are encouraged to eat a high collagen and nutrient-dense diet, while also engaging in the appropriate forms of stretching, massage, and use of topical liniments for sore muscles. Shaolin monks, many of whom are vegetarian, will drink the broth made from deer tendons when engaged in this aspect of Qi Gong practice. In some of the old animistic traditions, the Mind/Soul and the Karma of another living being resides in the flesh – the muscles. Some would say, animistically, that there is no (or less) Karma receiving the gift from the skin, tendon, and bones. There is no need to ever ingest anything you are not comfortable with.
Building Muscle Mass too Fast
An unfortunate side effect of focusing a lot on resistance training is a loss of general flexibility. There are many forms of Dian Gong (floor work/mat work) in the Qi Gong world. I encourage and teach my students to deeply explore the elasticity and pliability of all of their muscles and membranes, at least once a week if they are consciously focusing on the Yi Jin Jing process.
An optimal tissue matrix (Fascial Tensegrity) is all about balance. Too much of any aspect of this practice will create an imbalance.
Optimal tissue matrix includes a wide range of motion that is both dynamic and functional. Just like over-strengthening can get to the point you cannot scratch your own back, you can also over-stretch, which often striates the fascia of your back, core, and limbs. This has the opposite effect on your dynamic capacity – which could be dancing or fighting for your life.
An unexpected and very effective way to keep your connective tissues, especially your fascia, from becoming bound or striated is a form of percussive massage. Traditionally, using bundles of wood or bamboo to hit your limbs and body repetitively to dissipate stagnant Qi and Blood. Today, foam rollers are more popular. One teacher I had recommended using a bundle of metal welding rods to create an Iron Body.
In some classes we will learn self massage, meridian patting (Pai Da 拍打) and other practices to ensure that you are building new structural and sensing membranes that are free of congestion and ‘cobwebs’ of scar tissue, postural tension, and/or embodied distress and trauma.
If you are going to build a collagen bank account, make one that is abundant, strong, with available resources everywhere at the same time.
Resistance and Momentum Training
(Kettlebells and body-weight-based resistance training)
Every serious system of whole-body health, vitality and longevity includes some form of resistance training.
Another component of Shaolin strength training uses Stone Locks (Shi Suo 石锁) or ancient Chinese kettlebells. Again, you can choose your degree of effort and how your muscular your body becomes.
The first kettle bell series is a pre-choreographed resistance training warm up based on the 12 Gestures of Wei Tuo form.
Again, you can only learn this process from a traditional source. I have not seen the traditional process available in written form – yet.
If you start in Spring, it takes about 6 weeks to learn and begin the coordination and restoration phase. Near the end of that time, you could dedicate 12 – 24 weeks to a combination of the Wei Tuo form, floor work, massage and ligaments, a very healthy diet, potentially some traditional herbal medicine, and the External Vigor form.
As Fall arrives, and Yin begins to settle into the world, the Yi Jin Jing process goes deeper – into the matrix and mojo of your bones, marrow, and brain.
Breathwork
One final important muscle and fascia system to include in your practice is the muscles and membranes of breathing. Your core, your diaphragm, your perennial floor, your chest wall and intercostal muscles, and your abdominal muscles. Breathwork offers a unique mind/body interaction, staying completely present, completely engaged with the three layers of fascia that surround your thorax.
As your fascial tensegrity (Yi Jin Jing) completes the restoration of your Inner Networks across your abdomen and core, your nervous system shifts into a more relaxed and ready baseline. As well, traditional breathwork skills, which involve very precise movements of your pelvis, ribs, diaphragm, and perennial floor, can significantly reorient your Polyvagal nervous system, which primarily deals with, and remembers stress, trauma, injury, abandonment, and every kind of pain.
This also resets and regulates your Vagus Nerve.
In the first year of Yi Jin Jing training, you will learn the following Breathwork skills. <?>
Releasing Into Stillness Practice
(Dao Yin and Advance Yi Jin Jing principles)
The third and final form in this practice, which often practiced at the end of each practice session is called the Daoist Heavy Hands. This is a thirteen posture Standing Meditation (Zhan Zhuang) practice that focuses on the Bone Layer (Gu Fen) of Qi Gong and Nei Gong.
As we complete our days training, we will often explore some Progressive Relaxation, or ways to directly release distress from your meridians, muscles, and membranes.
Through guided whole body release practices, that include your instinctual, intuitive, visceral, and emotional holding patters, we release deep enough for our joints to open completely. Which changes completely how you feel in your body.
It also introduces you back to your skeleton, minus a very long argument about holding patterns.
Bone Marrow Washing is a long conversation for another article, but it begins by settling into a very patient conversation with all of your bones, all at once.
Imagine all of your bones showing you how gravity can be a source of energy and longevity. Over months and months of conscious whole body release, and an aligned and recharged skeleton, the one standing in stillness can truly arrive.
Stillness Into State Practice
(Yi Nian and Zi Ran)
At the end of most training sessions, we will become very nuanced with our awareness. There is a quality of interactive focused attention – constantly tuning into embodied states and energetic sensations (Qi), called Yi Nian. This is like a superpower.
Being present, relaxed, still, and open, while also learning from your skeleton and gravity, regenerating your whole body on a cellular level, aware of every intertwining microfilament in your body, feeling once again, your birthright of listening (Ting Jin) to your your Jing Essence, Qi Vital Energy) and Shen (Spirit Consciousness).
It is in these moments that a Sacred transformation begins.
We return to an unborn or original state of attention, accepting that all holding can be released.
Over and over again – for months and maybe even years.
This is the process of Zi Ran.
Releasing what is untrue while rediscovering your authentic self.
This is the beginning of Chan/Zen. A primary motivation in the development and application of the Yi Jin Jin.
See you in the next article…
Dr. Michael Smith
(Teacher of Shaolin Qi Gong and Daoist Inner Cultivation)
My name is Michael Smith. I am a Doctor of Traditional Chinese Medicine, as well as a Martial Arts, and Qi Gong teacher. I am also an Author, Speaker, Podcaster, and Professor; focusing on the combination of Ancient and Modern Healing methods to support patients with Autoimmune conditions, Complex Trauma, and Addiction.
I first encountered Qi Gong over 47 years ago and began studying with lineage-holding masters 39 years ago.
I have had the honor of supporting Qi Gong enthusiasts and teachers for the last 33 years.
I am and always will be fascinated with the Shaolin Yi Jin Jing (Muscle Tendon Change) process. The short term and very long term benefits are almost unbelievable. Given my medical background, I have come to teach this practice in its classical approach, while also augmenting the process in a few small ways with the advancements of modern medical physiology and physics.
Believe it or not, this practice can change your body and physiology down to to energy holding structures with the molecules that make up your pre-structural and post structural tissues.
Ger ready to see unbelievable changes in your Embodied Awareness, as well as your speed, power, and stillness!
One Year Yi Jin Jing Lineage Apprenticeship
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