Shaolin temple on UK TV

Anyone else catch Jack Ozbournes adrenaline Junky 3 this week. He took the students to Shaolin to study. Two days were spent at the monastry and the rest of the week was at what appeared to be a commercial kungfu boot camp nearby.

Training looked physically tough. They had them doing loads of cardio and body weight exercises, stretching then plyometrics. One of the exercises involved sprinting or jumping up flights of steps then crawling face down back down them.

There was the usual Wushu and acrobatics along with sanshou sparing in the regular school. The monastry seemed to concentrate on gymnastics, fitness and weapons work.

In a previous episode he took them to a Thai boxing camp. As you can imagine there was little in the way of gymnastics there, but the fitness from it stood them in good stead for this latest challenge.

When was it on? What channel? I’d like to have seen it and may be it will be repeated on, say, ITV2/3/4.

I know that they also have Week long courses (or used to) so it might have been one of those.

Fingers crossed.

They spent a week training in China. I am sure the programme will be repeated on ITV 3, but I am not sure when.

The sparring in the temple is called ‘freesparring’, it’s not a big part of classes etc, but i’m pretty sure their allowed to spar with people in free time or personal traing time. This is what i got from my teachers, who are monks at the temple and recieved all thier training there. But thier English isn’t great so…

As far as the step things go, near the temple they have a staircase up a hill (or mountain as far as i’m concernd) that takes an average adult about an hour to climb (?) at a steady pace, they are required to run up and crawl back down.
I could be wrong, so please, dont take this as bible.

I can tell you that my own training is taken up mostly by conditioning. And then partner drills and forms. As a side, those forms work you pretty hard…

Also, this show sounds good, does it have a website? Or anyway i can get my hands on a DVD or something?

I am sure the bbc must sell it on their site. The monks were shown running up the mountain to a statue then running and crawling back down. They did seem to spend most of their time on conditoning.