I am interested in potentially joining Chinahand. I wanted to speak to a student about it? Mind if we email about it?

What questions do you have about chinahand? I’ll try my best to
answer them. But, the best thing you can do, is just go to the
school, watch a class, or even just take one class, and see if you
like it.

I will be at the school on monday night class if you wanted to come to
that class.

The martial arts training you had before should help you out a lot in
the class, as you will already have some of the basics down. The
forms will be a lot different from anything you saw in Shotokan, and
Tae Kwon Do. Our forms are little more complex and long.

As for our training at the school a typical class is 5-10 minutes of
warm up, 5 minutes of blocking drills, 10-15 minutes of other drills,
be it kicking, stances, other blocking drills, 20 minutes of form,
then the remaining time is spent going over applications of the moves
we just learned in the form, and working with partners on actually
doing the moves in a real life type situation. This is by no means
set in stone though. Some classes we dont do any form, and strictly
focus on drill, or applications, or even stretching and conditioning.
Other classes we focus on just the forms. It really depends on who is
in the class, who is teaching, and where the students are in
everything. Like if the class is full of students who are a little
behind on the form, we will just do form all class.

As for target training, we do break out the pads for some drills, but
a lot of what we do we do with a partner, so you are aiming for them,
and they are aiming for the block. Along the same lines we do spar in
class, but not normally at the beginner level. At that level you dont
have enough techniques or control to do more then kick boxing, and
that is not what we are trying to teach. We do other things like free
flowing, which is like sparring, only much more controlled, and slow,
and is more about technique, and reaction, rather then just fighting.

Class size varies on a lot of things, the time of year, the weather,
etc. But a typical class size is about 2-5 beginner students and 3
intermediate or advanced students in a class. Although there will be
months where everyone is back from school, and work schedules align
right, and we have classes of 10-15 people.

The curriculum for Shaolin is long, there are a lot of forms and
techniques you need to know before you can get to a black sash level,
but at the beginner level you will need to learn the 8 basic stances,
how to do all the kicking and blocking drill, 3 single man forms(Lien
Bu, Gung Le, and Tan Toi), and one two man fighting set(Chin Na 5).
It takes about a year to go through the beginner class. You can do it
in about 9 months, but typically the first form you learn, you forget,
and need to relearn it. If you practice at home, and can remember all
three forms after one run through of them, then you can do it like I
said in about 9 months. The intermediate class however takes much
longer, as that is when you start getting into our signature style
forms(The Hua Chuan forms), the weapons forms, and more complex
fighting forms(Chin Na 1, 2 and 3).

As for Qi Gong, this goes through everything we teach. We may not
focus on it, but all the forms we do have there meditative properties
to them. We also end class sometimes doing Qi Gong exercises. That
being said though, it is not something that is really focused on in
the beginner classes, that is something that starts showing up when
you are getting ready for you black sash or after you already have
one.

I Hope this helps, and I look forward to training with you at the school.