Poles For Kung Fu Exercises Used By Students During Training At Shaolin Temple.

Master and students on kung fu poles demonstrate stances for visiting photographer. The kung fu poles are bound with rope to improve grip during exercises. Practicing on the kung fu poles helps to improve agility and balance for experienced kung fu students. The less experienced might practice on stones or logs rather than the kung fu poles. Leaping from the top of one of the kung fu poles to the top of another demands skill and exceptional balance control.

" "Originally, to practice kung fu did not just mean to practice Chinese martial arts. Instead, it referred to the process of one's training - the strengthening of the body and the mind, the learning and the perfection of one's skills - rather than to what was being trained. It refers to excellence achieved through long practice in any endeavor. You can say that a person's kung fu is good in cooking, or that someone has kung fu in calligraphy; saying that a person possesses kung fu in an area implies skill in that area, which they have worked hard to develop. Someone with "bad kung fu" simply has not put enough time and effort into training, or seems to lack the motivation to do so. Kung fu is also a name used for the elaborate Fujian tea ceremony (Kung-fu cha). There is a curious contemporary twist on this meaning in the hacker culture: there the fu has been generalized to a suffix, implying that the thing suffixed involves great skill or effort. For example, one may talk of "script-fu" to refer to complicated scripting. It is unknown whether this was consciously based on the original, broader meaning of the term or whether it was a simple wordplay on the less general Western notion of "kung fu"."" Src: Wikipedia.org