How to Start Training Chow Gar: A Beginner’s Guide
A practical beginner’s guide to starting Chow Gar Southern Praying Mantis: what to expect, what you need, training frequency, solo vs partner work, and online options.
Interested in Chow Gar Southern Praying Mantis but not sure where to begin? This beginner’s guide explains what you need, how often to train, whether you need a partner, and what to expect from your first months.
You have discovered Chow Gar Southern Praying Mantis.
Perhaps you saw a demonstration.
Perhaps you became interested in its unusual short power, bridge methods or internal training.
Perhaps you have experience in another martial art and realised that Chow Gar approaches the body in a very different way.
And now comes the practical question:
How do you actually start?
Do you need previous martial arts experience?
Do you need to be fit?
Flexible?
Strong?
Do you need a training partner?
How much space do you need?
How often should you practise?
And if there is no Chow Gar school anywhere near you, is it still possible to begin?
The answer to most of these questions is simpler than people expect.
You do not need to arrive prepared.
The beginning of the system is what prepares you.
You do not need previous martial arts experience
Chow Gar can be started as a complete beginner.
In some ways, this can even be an advantage.
You do not have to translate the system through years of habits developed somewhere else.
You can begin learning its stance, stepping, hand positions, body relationships and training logic directly.
Previous experience can certainly help.
Someone who has trained another martial art may already understand practice discipline, coordination, distance, basic body control or the simple fact that physical skills take time.
But experience can also create assumptions.
A practitioner may instinctively generate power in the way their previous system taught them.
They may use the shoulder differently.
Stand differently.
Move the waist differently.
Understand tension differently.
Interpret the bridge through another framework.
None of this makes previous training a problem.
It simply means that experienced martial artists sometimes have to do something beginners already know how to do:
start from the beginning.
You do not need to be in exceptional physical condition
There is no entrance examination for your body.
You do not need to be extremely strong.
You do not need high kicks.
You do not need acrobatic flexibility.
You do not need the cardiovascular fitness of a competitive athlete.
But Chow Gar is physical training.
The stance can be demanding.
The strengthening exercises can be uncomfortable.
Qigong work places sustained demands on the body.
Repetitions accumulate.
As your training develops, conditioning and partner work create additional challenges.
The correct approach is not to become “ready” before beginning.
It is to begin at a level appropriate for you and allow training to develop your capacity progressively.
Strength is built.
Coordination is built.
Structural endurance is built.
Body awareness is built.
You are not expected to possess the result before you start the process.
Age matters less than how you train
People often ask whether they are too old to begin.
There is no single useful age limit.
A twenty-year-old and a sixty-year-old should not necessarily train with the same intensity, recovery schedule or expectations.
But that does not mean the older practitioner cannot develop meaningful skill.
One of the advantages of traditional internal training is that progress is not based entirely on speed, explosiveness or athleticism.
Structure matters.
Coordination matters.
Connection matters.
Efficiency matters.
Understanding matters.
These qualities can continue developing long after purely athletic performance has peaked.
The important principle is simple:
train according to your current body, not according to the body you think a martial artist is supposed to have.
Consistency is far more valuable than injuring yourself in an enthusiastic first month.
What do you need to begin?
Very little.
For the first stage of solo training, you mainly need enough space to stand, step and extend your arms comfortably.
You do not need a fully equipped martial arts school.
You do not need a heavy bag on day one.
You do not need weapons.
You do not need expensive equipment.
And you certainly do not need to renovate your home into a Qing dynasty training hall.
A small clear training area is enough for a surprising amount of early Chow Gar work.
Later, as your training develops, additional equipment, conditioning tools and partner work become useful.
But none of those things should delay the beginning.
The most important requirement is something considerably less exciting:
a place where you can practise regularly.
How often should a beginner train?
Regularity matters more than heroic sessions.
For most beginners, shorter sessions repeated consistently are more useful than one enormous training session every weekend.
Twenty or thirty focused minutes can be valuable.
So can an hour.
The exact duration matters less than whether the training becomes part of your week.
A beginner training three or four times consistently will usually build more than someone training intensely for several hours and then disappearing for ten days.
This is especially true in the foundation stage.
You are teaching the body new relationships.
Stance.
Stepping.
Elbow position.
Hand paths.
Breathing.
Tension.
Release.
Coordination.
These improve through repeated exposure.
Your nervous system does not care that you watched six hours of lessons on Sunday.
It cares what you actually practise.
Do not try to train everything every day
Another common beginner mistake is trying to include the entire system in every session.
You learn several exercises and immediately create a ninety-minute programme containing all of them.
Then new material arrives.
The session becomes two hours.
Then two and a half.
Eventually your training programme becomes so magnificent that you no longer have time to perform it.
The solution is focus.
Some exercises should be repeated frequently.
Others can rotate.
Some sessions may concentrate heavily on stance and stepping.
Another may place more emphasis on Qigong.
Another may work on hands and combinations.
The curriculum should guide this process.
The goal is not to touch every exercise every day.
The goal is to give the important qualities enough repetition to develop.
What should a beginner focus on first?
At the beginning, external accuracy matters.
Where are the feet?
Where is the weight?
Where is the elbow?
What path does the hand follow?
How does the body remain organised during stepping?
These details matter because they create the framework for everything that comes later.
But the goal is not to become obsessed with creating perfect-looking positions.
The positions serve relationships.
Gradually, the student begins asking deeper questions.
Does the hand remain connected to the body?
What changes when I step?
Am I using unnecessary shoulder tension?
Does the stance disappear when I concentrate on the hands?
Can I maintain the same body organisation from one technique to another?
These questions are where the training begins moving beyond imitation.
At first, you are learning what Chow Gar looks like.
Eventually, you begin learning what Chow Gar feels like.
Do you need a training partner?
Not immediately.
A substantial amount of foundation work can be practised alone.
Stance.
Stepping.
Basic hand techniques.
Qigong.
Strengthening.
Forms.
Body coordination.
Conditioning exercises.
These give the beginner plenty to work on.
But Chow Gar is a martial art.
Eventually, another person becomes necessary.
Bridge contact cannot be completely understood without a bridge.
Pressure requires pressure.
Sensitivity requires something to sense.
Timing requires interaction.
Partner drills reveal whether the structure you developed alone survives contact with another human body.
So the correct answer is:
you can begin alone, but you should not plan to remain alone forever.
This distinction is particularly important for online students.
Solo training can create a strong foundation.
Partner work and direct contact add another level of development later.
What if there is no Chow Gar teacher near me?
This is the problem MyChowGar was originally created to solve.
Chow Gar is a relatively rare system.
For many interested practitioners, finding a qualified teacher locally is simply impossible.
The traditional answer would have been:
move,
travel regularly,
or do not train.
Technology gives us another option.
A structured online program can teach much of the foundation remotely.
You can learn the curriculum.
Follow demonstrations.
Study the explanations.
Submit training for correction.
Attend live teaching.
Ask questions.
Develop your solo practice.
This does not make geography irrelevant.
Some parts of the system eventually benefit enormously from direct contact.
But it allows that future contact to happen after months or years of meaningful preparation rather than from zero.
Online training does not need to replace physical teaching to be valuable.
It only needs to do the parts it can do properly.
Watching is not training
This sounds obvious.
It still deserves its own section.
One of the strange dangers of online martial arts is the feeling of familiarity.
You watch a lesson.
The explanation makes sense.
You understand what the teacher is doing.
You watch it again.
Now it feels very familiar.
And the brain quietly files this under:
learned.
Unfortunately, your body was not consulted.
Understanding an exercise is not the same as being able to perform it.
Performing it once is not the same as having developed it.
And performing it alone is not necessarily the same as being able to maintain it under pressure.
This is why MyChowGar is built around progression rather than simply access.
The purpose of a lesson is not to be completed.
It is to create training.
Do not rush toward advanced material
This may be the most useful advice for a new practitioner.
Advanced material is attractive.
Power exercises are attractive.
Applications are attractive.
Forms are attractive.
Weapons are extremely good at convincing human beings that they have suddenly become more advanced.
But later Chow Gar depends on qualities developed earlier.
If the foundation is missing, advanced exercises do not solve the problem.
They simply give the same body something more complicated to perform.
This is why we introduce the system progressively.
The first phase builds the framework.
Later phases develop deeper connection.
Then increasingly sophisticated power qualities and bridge methods can be built on top of it.
You do not lose time by respecting the foundation.
You save time.
Saam Bo Gin is not lesson one
People familiar with Chow Gar may expect to begin immediately with Saam Bo Gin.
It is, after all, the foundation form of the system.
But in the MyChowGar curriculum, we prepare the student first.
Before reaching Saam Bo Gin, the beginner has already worked with stance, stepping, fundamental hands, strengthening, Qigong, breathing and a range of characteristic Chow Gar techniques.
Why?
Because memorising the choreography of Saam Bo Gin is easy compared with developing what the form is actually designed to teach.
Structure.
Loading.
Connection.
Body organisation.
Bridge quality.
Release.
The beginner does not need to master these before starting the form.
But having some reference for them changes the way the form is learned.
You are no longer simply asking:
“Where does my hand go next?”
You can begin asking:
“What is my body doing while the hand moves?”
That is a much more useful question.
Expect the simple exercises to become difficult
One of the recurring experiences in Chow Gar training is discovering that apparently simple things become less simple the more you understand them.
A stance looks simple.
Until you begin paying attention to every structural relationship inside it.
A short step looks simple.
Until you try to preserve the entire body method while moving.
Bil Jee looks simple.
Until you try to prevent the shoulder, elbow and hand from separating from the body.
Saam Bo Gin looks simple.
Until you begin understanding what it is actually asking you to develop.
This is normal.
It is not a sign that you are becoming worse.
Quite often, improvement begins with becoming capable of seeing problems you previously could not detect.
The exercise did not suddenly become more difficult.
Your awareness became better.
You will probably feel awkward
Beginners sometimes assume that correct movement should immediately feel natural.
Usually the opposite is true.
Your current movement feels natural because you have performed it for years.
Chow Gar asks you to organise parts of the body differently.
Different stance.
Different tension.
Different relationships.
Different stepping.
Different use of the bridge.
At first, this can feel artificial.
Awkward.
Overly deliberate.
That does not automatically mean it is wrong.
A new physical pattern usually needs to be conscious before it can become natural.
The important question is not:
“Does this feel normal?”
The useful question is:
“Am I developing the relationship the exercise is designed to teach?”
Normal comes later.
Feedback can save enormous amounts of time
Training alone has one major weakness.
You are both student and examiner.
If you misunderstand the exercise, the person checking your work has exactly the same misunderstanding.
That is inconvenient.
A teacher provides an external reference.
Video feedback cannot detect everything that direct physical contact can.
But it can reveal a surprising amount.
Foot placement.
Posture.
Elbow relationship.
Shoulder compensation.
Timing.
Unnecessary movement.
Loss of structure.
Incorrect technique paths.
Misunderstandings of the exercise.
A small correction early can prevent hundreds or thousands of repetitions of the wrong pattern.
That is why feedback should not be treated as an optional extra.
It is part of training.
What if you already practise another martial art?
You do not need to abandon everything you know.
But you should resist the temptation to translate Chow Gar immediately into your existing system.
“This is basically like…”
“This must be the same as…”
“In my style we call this…”
Comparisons can be useful intellectually.
They can also prevent you from experiencing something on its own terms.
Chow Gar has its own body method.
Its own approach to structure.
Its own bridge.
Its own power development.
Its own relationship between tension and release.
Give those things enough time to become physically meaningful before deciding exactly what they are equivalent to.
You may eventually find genuine similarities.
You may also discover that movements that look similar from the outside are being trained for very different reasons.
How long before you become good?
Nobody can answer this honestly with a number.
People begin with different bodies.
Different previous experience.
Different coordination.
Different training frequency.
Different ability to recognise and correct mistakes.
And different definitions of “good.”
But Chow Gar should be understood as long-term skill development.
You can learn useful things immediately.
You can feel physical changes relatively early.
Your stance can improve.
Your coordination can improve.
Your understanding can improve.
Your bridge can begin changing.
But deeper internal qualities are built through years, not marketing deadlines.
This should not be discouraging.
It is precisely why the system remains interesting.
There is always another layer.
Three ways to begin with MyChowGar
There is no single correct entry point for everyone.
Short Courses
If you are curious about Chow Gar but do not yet want to enter the complete training path, a short course can introduce a specific part of the system.
This can also suit practitioners interested in a particular form, Qigong method or training subject.
Short courses are focused.
They are not a replacement for the progressive main curriculum.
The Main Program
The main MyChowGar program gives you the full structured path and allows you to progress largely according to your own schedule.
This suits practitioners who value flexibility and are comfortable managing much of their own training rhythm.
You can spend longer where necessary.
Move faster when appropriate.
Return to earlier material.
And develop over years according to your own circumstances.
The Cohort Path
The cohort follows the same Chow Gar progression but adds a guided training environment around it.
A defined schedule.
Regular feedback.
Live instruction.
Personal correction.
Milestones.
A group moving through the same developmental stage.
For beginners, this means the Awakening Cohort.
It is designed to take a new practitioner through the foundation with considerably more structure around the learning process.
Different people need different amounts of freedom and guidance.
The important thing is choosing a format that makes you more likely to train consistently.
The best way to begin is not to wait until you feel ready
There will always be a reason to postpone starting.
You want to become fitter first.
More flexible.
Less busy.
You want a bigger room.
You want to understand the system better before committing to it.
You want to watch another twenty videos.
Eventually preparation becomes a very sophisticated form of not training.
You do not need to understand Chow Gar before you begin.
You begin in order to understand it.
You do not need the correct body before you start.
You train in order to build it.
You do not need advanced power.
You begin with the conditions from which that power may eventually develop.
The beginning is supposed to be the beginning.
Start with the body
Chow Gar can become extremely sophisticated.
Its internal power methods, bridge development, Qigong, conditioning, fighting methods and forms can occupy a practitioner for a lifetime.
But the first step remains remarkably simple.
Stand.
Move.
Pay attention.
Practise.
Receive correction.
Repeat.
Then allow the simple things to become deeper.
That is where Chow Gar begins.
Not with secret techniques.
Not with advanced power.
Not with trying to look like somebody who has trained for twenty years.
It begins by teaching your body something new.
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The Awakening Cohort begins September 21, 2026
If you are ready to begin Chow Gar through a structured, guided path, the Awakening Cohort is our 10-month journey through the foundation of the system.
You will work progressively through the first phase with:
- structured lessons and training
- regular feedback
- live instruction
- personal correction
- clear milestones
- and a group beginning the same journey alongside you
You do not need previous Chow Gar experience.
You do not need to prepare before joining.
The preparation is the training.
Explore the Awakening Cohort:
By Zoltán Bereczki, Siheng