The Shaolin Training Schedule: A Real Week at a Kung Fu School in China

Search for a Shaolin training schedule and you get the same vague block of text on every site: wake early, train hard, eat vegetarian food, sleep. Almost nobody publishes the actual timetable, and nobody publishes what is trained on a Tuesday as opposed to a Thursday. So here is a real one, hour by hour and day by day, from a school that sits 1 km from the Shaolin Temple gate.

The day, hour by hour

This is the full timetable. Note how little of it is optional and how much of it is not training: the eating, the resting and the language class are as fixed as the Kung Fu.

Add it up and it is four hours and ten minutes of formal Kung Fu, plus the morning Qigong, which is the number most schools mean when they advertise "4+ hours a day". It is a long way from the eight hour figure that circulates online, and there is a good reason for that: eight hours is what the full time Chinese children at the big competition academies do, and they have been doing it since they were six. Nobody expects that of an international student who arrived on Tuesday.

Why the day is built this way

The shape of the day looks strange to most Western trainees, and the part that gets questioned most is the two and a half hour hole in the middle of it.

That hole is the reason the rest of the schedule is survivable. Training in four short blocks rather than two long ones keeps the quality of every repetition high, and the long midday rest is what lets you come back at 15:50 and still move properly. In China this rhythm is completely normal. Schools, offices and factories all break for a midday sleep, and at a Kung Fu school it stops being a cultural quirk and becomes a training tool. If you spend that window on your phone, the afternoon blocks are noticeably worse. Everyone learns this within about four days.

The 15:00 language class is doing something similar. It sits between the rest and the afternoon training as a gentle restart, and it is also the only session where you are a complete beginner in a way nobody minds. Learning to count to ten in Mandarin after a morning of failing at crescent kicks is unexpectedly good for morale.

The phrase belongs to Shi Yan Chen, the headmaster of Zhong Wu, and it is the honest explanation of the whole timetable. The schedule is not designed to break you in a week. It is designed to be repeatable for a year.

The week, day by day

Here is the part almost nobody publishes. The four daily blocks are not filled at random. They run on a fixed weekly cycle, so every skill gets hit at least twice, and the two hardest sessions of the week land on Thursday and Friday when the group has already been warmed up by three days of work.

Two things are worth noticing. Fist forms appear four times a week, which tells you where the real curriculum sits: everything else is there to make the forms possible. And Friday is a deliberate soft landing, flexibility in the morning and stance work in the afternoon, so you finish the week tired rather than wrecked.

The weekly plan shifts with the season, the weather on the mountain and the level of the group. Treat it as the shape of a normal week rather than a contract.

What each session actually contains

The labels above are the Chinese categories, and they do not translate cleanly. This is what you are actually doing in each one.

Qigong (气功), every morning

Ba Duan Jin (八段锦, the Eight Brocades), Yi Jin Jing (易筋经, the Muscle and Tendon Change Classic), Tai Chi, and standing posture. It is the gentlest hour of the day and the one most students end up valuing most, because it is the only session that is explicitly about the internal side rather than performance. If you have read our guide to Shaolin meditation, Chan and Qi Gong, this is where that material lives in the timetable.

Leg training (腿法训练)

Front kicks, outside crescent kicks and the related drills, done across the training ground and back, then again, then again. This is the session that produces the famous first week soreness. It is also the one that changes fastest: most people can see a visible difference in their kick height inside two weeks, mostly because they have finally learned to keep the supporting leg straight.

Fist forms (拳法训练)

Seven Star Fist, Thirteen Fist and others as you progress. Forms are taught in small pieces and drilled to death, and progress is not measured in how many forms you know but in how few mistakes are left in the one you have. This is where the 100 foundational movements of jibengong stop being a list and start being a language.

Groundwork (地躺训练) and acrobatics (腾空训练)

Tuesday and Thursday mornings. Groundwork is the rolling, dropping and recovering material: how to get to the floor without damage and how to get up again with a technique attached. Acrobatics is the jumping and aerial work, which is the part of Shaolin that the internet knows and the part that takes longest to earn. Beginners get a scaled version. Nobody is thrown into aerials in week one.

Conditioning (功法训练)

Horse stance single arm movements and single leg punching, mostly. Conditioning here does not mean circuits and burpees. It means holding a low position and doing one simple thing correctly for far longer than is comfortable, which builds the specific strength that forms demand.

Qin Na and one strike self defence (擒拿、一招功)

The whole of Tuesday afternoon. Qin Na is the seizing and joint locking side of Shaolin, and "one strike" work is the practical application layer: a single technique, taken from the forms, drilled with a partner until it works without thought. This is the session where the forms stop being choreography.

Strength (力量训练)

Thursday afternoon, and the hardest session of the week. Stone locks (石锁), sandbags (沙包) and the wooden dummy (木人桩). Traditional implements, honest loading, no machines anywhere.

Flexibility (柔韧训练) and bow stance (弓箭)

Friday. Pressing the legs and pulling the tendons in the morning, then long holds in the bow and arrow stance in the afternoon. Flexibility here is trained as a skill with its own session rather than as a warm up afterthought, which is one of the biggest differences between a Chinese school and a Western martial arts class.

What the schedule does to your body

The timetable is the easy part to publish. What it feels like is the part people actually want to know, so here it is honestly.

• Days 1 to 4. Everything hurts, and specifically the hip flexors, the adductors and whatever muscle it is that runs down the outside of the shin. Shi Yan Chen tells every new student the same thing: it passes after a couple of days, and the discomfort is the training working. He is right, and you will not believe him until Thursday.
• Week 2. The soreness moves rather than disappearing. You start sleeping through the midday rest properly, you stop being hungry between meals, and the morning Qigong changes from something you tolerate to something you look forward to.
• Weeks 3 and 4. The forms start holding together. This is the point most short stay students leave, and it is the single strongest argument for booking a month rather than a fortnight.
• Month 2 and beyond. The schedule stops being a challenge and becomes a rhythm. This is what long term students mean when they say the training gets easier and harder at the same time.

If you want to arrive on day one already able to hold a horse stance and run through the basic warm up, that is entirely doable from home. Our headmaster filmed a 10 minute full body preparation routine for exactly this, and The Shaolin Foundations covers the stances and basics in a structured order before you fly.

The seven day version of the same week

Not everyone can take a month off. The seven day camp keeps the same training rhythm and threads the Songshan cultural sites through it, so the mornings look like the schedule above and the afternoons often move off campus.

It runs as one fixed itinerary at $1,000 per person for groups of five or more and $1,100 booking solo. If you would rather set your own dates and simply join the normal week above, open enrolment starts at $100 a day or $700 a week, with a month at $1,500 and long term prepay from $670 a month. We compare that against the other formats in camps, retreats and open enrolment schools compared.

Run a scaled version of this week at home

You can train this cycle without flying anywhere. Keep the structure, cut the volume to about a third, and you have a week that will genuinely prepare you for the real one. Roughly 40 minutes a day.

Two rules make the difference between this working and not working. Do the morning Qigong even on the days you skip everything else, and never move on from a movement because you are bored of it. Boredom is not the same as competence.

Where this schedule comes from

This is the working timetable at Shaolin Zhong Wu Training Camp, on the south slope of Mount Taishi in Dengfeng, Henan, about 1 km from the Shaolin Temple and inside the Greater Songshan scenic area. It was founded in September 2023 by Shi Yan Chen (魏富强), a 34th generation Shaolin disciple who has taught in 32 countries, and the daily teaching is led by head coach Guan Shi Shan alongside Shaolin Temple warrior monks including Shi Yan Xuan, Shi Yan Yong and Shi Yan Yan.

Practically: 33 dorm rooms and more than 130 beds, three meals a day, hot showers, Wi-Fi and washing machines, and a dining hall that seats over 150. Tuition is all inclusive. The application fee is $100 and non refundable, a 20% deposit confirms your dates, the balance is paid on arrival, and airport pickup from Zhengzhou is arranged separately for an additional fee.

If you are still choosing between schools rather than choosing dates, start with our honest guide to the best Shaolin schools in China for foreigners, which sets this school next to the alternatives without pretending they are all the same.

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