Iron Shirt (traditional Chinese: 鐵衫; simplified Chinese: 铁衫; pinyin: tiě shān; Cantonese: tit1 saam3) is a form of hard style martial art exercise for protecting 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 idea 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.
Read more about Iron Shirt: Famous Practitioners
Famous quotes containing the words iron and/or shirt:
“Manhattan. Sometimes from beyond the skyscrapers, across the hundreds of thousands of high walls, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia in the middle of the night, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“There’s not a shirt and a half in all my company, and the half
shirt is two napkins tacked together and thrown over the
shoulders like a herald’s coat without sleeves.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)