Most people encounter Shaolin as an image: shaven-headed monks performing spectacular kicks in a dusty courtyard. It is a vivid image, but it is also only the lowest level of what the tradition actually contains. In a series of interviews and instructional videos on The Martial Man YouTube channel, the Malaysian martial artist and healer Master Yap Boh Heong has been arguing — patiently, and with careful demonstrations — that this external picture hides far more than it reveals.
Master Yap is a lineage holder of Yan Shou Gong 延壽功, the “Art of Longevity,” and one of very few active senior practitioners of Wu Mei Quan 五梅拳 and the Southern Shaolin branch of Wuzuquan 五祖拳 (Five Ancestors Fist). He teaches these arts from Kuala Lumpur, at international workshops, and through an online course structured around the 36 Yan Shou Gong sets. What follows is a synthesis of the framework he presents in those videos: the history, the lineage, the operational concepts of the internal work, and the roadmap by which a modern practitioner can actually make progress.
Shaolin as a University
The first reframe Master Yap offers is that Shaolin was never simply a school for fighting. For at least two thousand years it has functioned as what we would today call a university — an institution of learning with three parallel curricula: Buddhism and the philosophy that surrounds it, traditional Chinese medicine (herbs, acupuncture, energetic healing), and martial arts. Monks entered through a selection process and progressed through levels of competence. The vast majority never reached the most advanced tier; the few who did rarely taught outside the temple walls.
The physical, hard, external arts that modern audiences associate with Shaolin are — in this analogy — the bachelor’s degree. Beyond them lie the healing arts, and beyond those, at the highest level, Nei Gong 內功 — the “internal work” that integrates martial, medical, and contemplative training into a single practice. Because so few reached this level, and fewer still passed it on outside the monastery, Nei Gong was never widely disseminated. Not, Master Yap insists, because it was deliberately kept secret, but because it has genuine prerequisites in the way that any doctoral-level subject does.
Nei Gong and Qigong — A Useful Distinction
This historical background produces one of Master Yap’s more controversial claims: that the word Qigong, as most people now use it, refers to a relatively modern and deliberately simplified subset of Nei Gong. Under pressure from the imperial court, the Shaolin tradition extracted the health-facing components of its internal practices and repackaged them for lay use. That repackaged form — stripped of the martial dimension — is what has come to be called Qigong. Older literature, Master Yap observes, scarcely mentions the term.
Authentic Nei Gong, by contrast, always retains the martial component. Not as a separate fighting style bolted onto a health practice, but as an inseparable feature of how the training is conducted. The martial dimension does three specific things that pure health-Qigong cannot do:
First, it supplies precise movements. Martial forms have been refined over centuries specifically to maximize body-mechanical efficiency. Those precise shapes happen to be exactly what is required to align and connect the body’s internal structures — fascia, tendons, ligaments, and the myofascial chains that flow through them. Vague arm-waving does not kick-start the engine; a precise posture does.
Second, it supplies pressure-testing. A practitioner doing Qigong alone has no reliable way to know whether the posture they believe they are holding is actually the posture their body is in. A partner who pushes firmly reveals the truth. If the alignment is real, the force grounds. If it is imaginary, the practitioner topples. Master Yap is fond of the warning that practicing a movement ten thousand times wrongly will not make it right.
Third, it supplies discipline. Serious martial practice demands the kind of perseverance that energetic and contemplative work also requires. Those who train seriously are drawn to the latter, and those who approach Qigong in a casual or purely therapeutic spirit rarely acquire enough skill for the underlying theory to mean anything in their body.
The Parent Arts — Wuji and Luohan Ru Yi
Yan Shou Gong is a modern creation — it was designed in the early 1980s — but its roots run directly back into the Southern Shaolin tradition. Its two parent arts are Wuji Quan 無極拳 (the “Emptiness Fist,” comprising 36 forms) and Luohan Ru Yi Quan 羅漢如意拳 (the “Arhat Realization Intent Fist,” comprising 108 forms). Both were considered among the highest of the Southern Shaolin Nei Gong arts, and both were almost lost after the destruction of the Southern Shaolin temple.
The transmission of these arts into Master Yap’s lineage turns on a single dramatic encounter in the early 1930s. An elderly monk named Yi Sim — the surviving custodian of Wuji and Luohan Ru Yi — was living in a cave behind a small temple on an island off Xiamen, with only a few inexperienced young disciples. Knowing he did not have long, and unwilling to let the arts die with him, Yi Sim sent one of his monks to seek out a more accomplished successor: a young man named Chee Kim Thong, already a combat veteran of the anti-Japanese “Big Knife Brigade” and a recognised master of several southern fist traditions.
The monk tracked down Chee at his parents’ house in Xiamen and formally challenged him. Chee, by now well accustomed to such challenges, agreed to meet in the courtyard. A single strike sent the large monk flying backwards through the heavy wooden door frame, which collapsed around him. Instead of retaliating, the monk rose, knelt, and explained that his master wished to meet. Chee travelled to the island. On arrival, the elderly, half-blind Yi Sim extended a single finger to him and said, in effect, that if Chee could move that one finger there would be nothing for him to teach. Chee could not move the finger. He stayed to study for over three years.
Through Chee Kim Thong, and then through Master Yap’s own father, Grandmaster Yap Cheng Hai (1926–2014), the two arts reached Malaysia and became the seed material for Yan Shou Gong.
Distillation, Not Simplification
After teaching Wuji and Luohan Ru Yi for something close to a decade, Grandmaster Chee and Grandmaster Yap observed a practical problem. The parent arts were simply too long and too demanding for anyone without a monastic lifestyle. A single Luohan Ru Yi form could take five to fifteen minutes to perform; the full curriculum ran to well over a hundred such forms. Committed students in the modern world — with jobs, children, and limited practice hours — were not progressing. So the two masters pooled their combined century of experience and created something new.
The crucial word, Master Yap emphasises, is distilled rather than simplified. Distillation concentrates: it takes the most essential properties of the original and compresses them into a more potent form. The resulting system, Yan Shou Gong, comprises 36 sets. Each set takes about twenty to thirty minutes to learn and between two and three minutes to run through in practice. The forms are short enough that the old excuse of “no time to train” evaporates, but they carry the full depth of the parent arts — depth that a committed student can spend five years uncovering in a single set.
The name itself signals the intention. Yan Shou 延壽 translates as “extending life.” Master Yap is careful to distinguish this from mere longevity in years. The target is a fulfilling life: a mind that still thinks clearly, a body that still walks, eats, and travels, and an energetic system that still has vitality — all of it maintained into old age. Living to a hundred while confined to a wheelchair is not the goal; living to eighty or ninety with the capacity to still train, still heal, and still teach, is.
A Roadmap for the Practitioner
The most useful thing Master Yap offers the modern student is not a technique but a map. Over more than a decade of teaching, he has articulated a framework in five components. The first three, he argues, are generic — any authentic internal art should contain them, and any system that lacks one of them is incomplete. The last two are specifically Southern Shaolin.
The Learning Triangle
Every complete Nei Gong system rests on three supports. Theory supplies the conceptual foundation: the language of Jing and Qi, the model of the body as a network of strings and junctions, the understanding of how energy is generated and transmitted. Technique is the physical manifestation of the theory. If a concept cannot be shown in the body — if a teacher can describe the sinking of Jing but cannot demonstrate it — then the concept is inert. Practice is the repeated, embodied training that wires theory and technique into the nervous system. A system missing any one of these legs will not support real progress.
This triangle is also a diagnostic tool. Master Yap has seen practitioners spend years — and in some cases substantial sums of money — on systems that offered impressive-sounding theory with no demonstrable technique, or technique with no coherent theory behind it, or either with no structured path of practice. The triangle lets a student ask the right question before committing: what exactly am I being offered, and does it actually form a complete system?
The Power Plant Model
The second model asks whether a system provides the full chain from energy to application. Master Yap draws the analogy to electrifying a country estate. Three elements are required: a power plant that generates the electricity, a transmission network that carries it to where it is needed, and the appliances that actually put it to work.
Most Qigong systems, he observes, teach generation. They explain how to accumulate Qi in the dantian. Far fewer explain transmission — the mechanisms by which energy moves from the dantian to the hands, or from the foot to the fingertip. And fewer still teach application: what to do with the energy once it has arrived, whether the goal is a martial strike, a healing touch, or a simple act of rooting. A complete system must answer all three questions. An incomplete one leaves the practitioner with a generator and no wires, or wires and no appliances.
The Five Stages of Learning Internals
Traditional masters often summarise the internal path with a pair of slogans: first use the outside to move the inside, then use the inside to move the outside. True enough, Master Yap says — but the slogan conceals three intermediate stages that are where most of the actual work happens.
The first stage really is the familiar one: correct external movement reshapes the fascia, tendons, and muscles, teaching the body which alignments connect and which do not. The second stage is awareness — once the movement is no longer cognitively demanding, the practitioner turns attention inward and begins to feel what is actually happening inside the body as the shape is formed. The third stage is control: the internal structures that have become perceptible are now trained until they respond reliably to intention. The fourth stage is generation of energy through those now-controllable structures. Only then does the fifth stage — using the inside to move the outside — become possible.
The second stage is also where Yi — intention — begins to develop. Attention turned inward during form practice is the seed of every subsequent internal capacity.
The Six Levels of Internal Energy
The fourth element of Master Yap’s framework is specifically Southern Shaolin: the sequence of six levels that describes the progressive refinement of energy in the body. Each level depends on the one before it, and skipping levels is the most common reason for decades of frustrated practice.
The first level is Li 力 — simple physical strength. A baseline requirement: without enough muscle to hold a low stance, no progress is possible. The mistake is to stay here, adding more muscle as though strength alone were the goal. The second level is Jing 勁 — elastic power, the energy stored and released through fascia, tendons, and muscles working as a unit. Jing behaves like a drawn bow: loaded by precise tension, released in a flash when the whole system lets go at once. This is why the principle of Song 鬆 — total looseness — is so central to internal work. A bow released while still gripped produces no shot.
The third level is Yi 意 — intention. Strictly speaking Yi is not an energy in its own right; it is the control circuit that directs the energies below and above it. Master Yap likes the analogy of a modern electric train, in which a massive motor running on hundreds of volts is driven by a small low-voltage control signal. Yi is the control signal. Without it the engine runs wild, or not at all.
The fourth level is Qi 氣, the familiar life-energy of Chinese medicine. Master Yap treats Qi as simply another kind of energy, differing from Jing the way an electric train differs from a steam engine: the steam train is loud, visible, dramatic; the electric train moves as quickly or more quickly with none of the external display. The common error is to reach for Qi directly, before Jing and Yi are in place — like trying to teach university physics to a kindergarten child. With the stages taken in order, Master Yap reports that students can reach Qi in roughly a third of the time the conventional route would require.
The fifth level is Shen 神 — spirit, in the sense of the human spirit that radiates outward: presence, aura, courage, the quality some people carry that warns others not to test them. At this level, training begins to work with the energy field outside the body as well as the structures within it. The sixth level, Xu 虛, is emptiness. Master Yap refuses to speculate about it. He states plainly that he has not yet reached that level and will not pretend otherwise — a refreshing piece of honesty in a field with no shortage of unfounded claims.
Milestones
The fifth component of the roadmap is a sequence of concrete, testable milestones that mark real progress. The first is grounding: the ability to receive a pushing force and transmit it structurally through the body to the earth, using the skeleton and its fascial rigging. The second is rooting: the active ability to send Jing down into the ground and draw the rebound energy back up. Many Qigong practitioners believe they are rooted but collapse under a single fingertip — a sign that their internal target is imaginary rather than real. The third milestone is centering: maintaining a stable centre — spine, or more precisely the vertical line from baihui to huiyin — while the body is in motion. Stillness in motion, motion in stillness. The fourth is the ability to manage a boundary: actively blocking, absorbing, and returning force.
Beyond these four lie further milestones — connecting into an opponent’s structure, directing Jin to a specific internal target in their body, and so on — but those later skills only make sense once the first four are real. Each milestone, crucially, must be something a practitioner has felt on themselves or on a teacher, not merely imagined. A genuine teacher can let a student experience rooting, either by being rooted under the student’s push or by adjusting the student until they themselves feel it. Without that felt landmark, the practitioner aims at a target that does not exist.
The Strings — The Operational Core
If Master Yap’s roadmap is the frame, the concept of the strings is the operational core. He describes the human body as a tensegrity structure in the engineering sense: the skeleton provides the compression elements (the masts of the ship, to borrow his metaphor), and the fascia, tendons, and muscles provide the tension elements (the rigging and guy-lines). The “strings” are the integrated myofascial chains that run through this rigging. When the strings are aligned and connected, the body acts as a single continuous network. When the alignment is broken — by poor posture, by a misplaced elbow, by a wrist at the wrong angle — the chain snaps and the practitioner falls back on muscle.
The implications for ordinary health are considerable. In a well-aligned posture, the fascia carries the structural load and the fascia does not fatigue. In a poorly aligned posture, muscles must compensate, and muscles do tire — which is why bad posture produces chronic aches, stiffness, and the slow attrition of middle age. Yan Shou Gong movements are designed, among other things, to restore the body to its natural alignment so that the muscles can hand the load back to the skeleton and the fascia.
For the martial and energetic dimensions, three zones must be continuously linked: the legs, the torso (including the head), and the arms. The two critical junctions between them are the kua 胯 — the hip joint, front and back — which links legs to torso, and the shoulder complex, which links torso to arms. Southern Shaolin emphasises keeping the elbows drawn in toward the body precisely because this secures the shoulder junction and allows force rising from the ground to reach the fingertips unbroken. A flared elbow, even by twenty centimetres, is not a small aesthetic error; it is a broken circuit.
Three Dimensions of Every Movement
When Master Yap teaches a Yan Shou Gong set, he separates every movement into three layers that are trained individually and then performed together. The first layer is the external shape: the precise posture, alignment, and trajectory of the limbs. The second is the activation of the strings, usually by shifting weight between the toes and the heels so that the front and back myofascial chains alternately load and release — yin and yang expressed through tension rather than through metaphor. The third is breathing, typically inhaling through the nose and exhaling through the mouth, with the diaphragm dropping on the exhale and lifting on the inhale.
The opening movement of Set 1 — called the Crane Opens and Folds Its Wings — is a good illustration. The practitioner stands relaxed, feet roughly shoulder-width apart, toes forward, spine upright. The arms lift to a forty-five-degree angle with the forearms hanging loose and the fingers stretched as though pressing gently into soft sand. The movement itself is not in the hands but in the elbows: they rotate inward while the fingers remain fixed in space, drawing the shoulders back, pressing the shoulder blades together, and stretching the upper ribcage open. The strings are engaged by leaning weight onto the toes as the wings open and shifting back onto the heels as they fold. The breath follows: exhale as the weight comes forward, inhale as the body rolls back. Once all three layers are habitual, a fourth extension is added: at the top of the inhale, the fingers push outward and the arms straighten, expanding the chest enough to draw in a further breath beyond what already seemed full.
This single movement, done alone, is enough to raise energy levels, clear mental fog, and open the upper body — which is why it serves as the entry to a long sequence.
The Three Domains of Benefit
Asked what a beginner can actually expect from serious Yan Shou Gong practice, Master Yap groups the benefits into three domains. The physical returns are the most obvious: a deeper felt sense of the body, improvement in posture, the gradual disappearance of the small muscular aches that come from mis-loaded joints and over-recruited muscles, and — for martial artists — a measurable upgrade in body-mechanical efficiency.
The mental returns follow from the nature of the practice. Slow, deliberate movement with the attention turned inward is, structurally, a body-scan meditation. The mind becomes quieter; the reflexive chatter of anxious thought has less to grip on. What the modern embodiment community is rediscovering, Nei Gong has always regarded as central; the only difference is that Nei Gong also insists on the energetic dimension, which embodiment discourse tends to quietly omit.
The energetic returns are what distinguishes this work from ordinary exercise. For health, balanced internal energy underwrites vitality in the way that the classical texts describe. For martial practice, energy can substitute for strength — which is why authentic internal practitioners can continue training effectively into their seventies and eighties, long after physical power alone has begun to fade. For healers, the capacity to use one’s own energy allows deeper bodywork without triggering the client’s defensive muscular tension, and allows the healer to replenish rather than deplete their own reserves.
How to Approach the Path
Master Yap is firm that Nei Gong is not a weekend course. Three days and a certificate will not teach Qigong any more than three days will teach a language. The work is a lifelong practice, and practice in this context means returning to the training with sufficient regularity that the nervous system can actually integrate the material. Breaks are permitted; whole years off for career, family, or illness do not erase what has been built. What matters is that when practice resumes, it resumes properly.
Choosing a teacher, in this framework, reduces to a simple test. Can the teacher articulate the theory of the system in clear terms? Can the teacher demonstrate, in the body, the techniques in which that theory takes physical form? And can the teacher let the student feel the landmarks — rooting, sinking, the connecting-in through the strings — on the teacher’s body or on the student’s own, so that the practitioner knows what is being aimed at? A system that fails any of these three tests is, by Master Yap’s lights, probably not worth the time it demands.
For those who wish to explore further, Master Yap’s comprehensive instruction on all 36 Yan Shou Gong sets is available through his online course at themartialman.com, and further background is available at yanshougong.org. The Yan Shou Gong Online Course playlist on YouTube — in which Master Yap himself walks through the first movement and discusses the underlying principles — is a useful point of entry:
- Yan Shou Gong Online Course — full playlist
- All “Yan Shou Gong – Set” videos on The Martial Man channel
The deeper theoretical videos — Master Yap’s long interviews on Shaolin Nei Gong, the Roadmap, the Six Levels of Internal Energy, the history of Wuji and Luohan Ru Yi, and his conversation on Yi — are also freely available on the same channel, and repay careful watching. What this article has tried to do is collect the scaffolding in one place, so that anyone approaching the Yan Shou Gong path — or evaluating their own current practice — has a map they can use.
This article is a practitioner’s synthesis of material presented by Master Yap Boh Heong on The Martial Man YouTube channel. All teachings are his; any errors of summary or emphasis are mine.
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