It's quite the opposite of modern competitive training. While there is
nearly always conditioning at any good dojo or gym that goes alongside technique training, my experience has been technique being focused on first and conditioning being focused on second when preparing for something like MMA or full-contact Karate. You still do both during that time, but one just gets more attention than the other.
The thing that I should've clarified is that people who get to that point and do the "technique, then conditioning" training have already been at a dojo or gym long enough to be allowed to represent said dojo or gym in competition. Usually lazy people or people with bad character weed themselves out because the normal daily training clashes too much with their outlook on life too much that they can't stay dedicated to it.
Thanks for filling in the
Gongfu gap for me. I know about
Sanda/Sanshou and
Qigong basics, but it ends there for me. My own training took me down the path of
ki being "energy" in the sense of "spirit," or "who and what you are in every moment." Coming from that perspective, the training to strengthen
ki is more related to the training of
yi and
shen in Qigong. It's more about perceiving, developing, and correctly using
your inner feeling of being (or "Mind Power" as a lot of Japanese DBZ material translates it) in that
Zen sort of way, only that "beingness" is treated like an actual thing; a "something or other" or "non-specific stuff" kind of extremely vague thing, but still a thing. Food, water, air, and exercise quality play into that in a much different way than it does in Qigong.
Current scientific theories related to that perspective are even so much different than the current theories on qi. Instead, working with ki in science is more about trying to figure out the human conciousness more than it is working out the energies of the universe. While those things do sort of run together in that "become one with the universe" sort of way, it's like studying human qi compared to studying qi in general and eventually studying how those two connect.
The reason I stuck mostly with the qi perspective on the podcast was to stick to my initial Toriyama quote. However, there is a lot of evidence that should push me toward the ki perspective when it comes to English used on Japanese Dragonball products and in Japanese Dragonball books and some of the more recent quotes from Akira Toriyama about spiritual training supplementing physical training.
I wish I could've included both perspectives with an equal amount of attention in the episode, but that would've taken twice as long and twice as many instances of "y'know" coming from my mouth.
Like I said, I plan on going deeper into the ki perspective after I get back from traveling later this week. Until then, here's a few samples of one of the many things I'll be looking into for developing that perspective and how any Dragonball fan can apply it to their lives:
-
http://www.daviddarling.info/works/ZenP ... _ch14.html
-
http://www.synogenes.com/2008/03/how_do ... _work.html
-
http://www.fightingarts.com/reading/article.php?id=158
When it actually gets written into something that can actually be followed rather than it just being a jumble of thoughts in my head and a bunch of shorthand scribbling on a notepad is another matter entirely. Hopefully sooner than later.