Iron shirt
form of hard style martial art exercise
Iron Shirt (simplified Chinese: 铁衫; traditional Chinese: 鐵衫; pinyin: tiě shān; Cantonese: tit1 saam3) is a form of hard style martial art exercise believed to help protect the human body from impacts in a fight. This is one of the 72 arts of the Shaolin Temple. Some martial arts are based on the belief that a correctly trained body can withstand more damage than one that is untrained. Iron Shirt is said to be a series of exercises using many post stances, herbs, qigong and body movements to cause the body's natural energy (qi) to reinforce its structural strength. Practitioners believe that directing energy to parts of the body can reinforce these parts of the body to take blows against them. In the Shaolin version of Iron Shirt, the practitioner would do things such as lying on a stump or supporting tablets of granite on the chest with the goal of toughening the body.
Famous practitioners
According to 13th generation lineage Tai He ("Great Harmony") Wudangquan Master Fan Ke Ping (Chinese: 范克平), a collector of rare Kung fu manuals, Zhou Tong, the archery teacher of General Yue Fei, practiced Shènzi bādà Qígōng (Chinese: 肾子八大奇功 - "Testicle Eight Outstanding Techniques"). A book of this style supposedly appeared during the Ming Dynasty and was taught on Wudang Mountain. It became a "hereditary style", taught only to close family members. Other styles include the Hǔ Xiào Jīn Zhōng Zhào (Chinese: 虎啸金钟罩 – “Tiger Shouting Golden Bell Exercise"), Tie Bu Shan ("Five Phoenix Iron Shirt Work") and the Wu Feng Qi Ming Gui Xi Su ("Five Phoenix Combined Shouting Tortoise Resting Method").
“Iron shirt” enters the record as form of hard style martial art exercise. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Iron, shirt and form can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Iron shirt” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.