Comparing diao gung to weightlifting, Wang said that he starts every workout light, using only 1kg. From there he works his way up, maxing out around 60kg, which he holds for only a few seconds, as he did at a recent open house.
Another of Tu's students, Tu Chuen-hsin (涂春心), can heft up to 100kg. A taxi driver of 22 years, he will speak of the tonic powers of chi gung like most other practitioners. And after five or 10 minutes of talking about it, he'll smile, lower his voice, and remark as an aside, "my wife stays good and satisfied."
"Sometimes if you don't warm up," he said, "it will go really fast. But if you use chi gung, you can go for a long time. It comes in handy, especially when you're tired and your wife is in the mood."
Master Tu also makes no secret of diao gung's benefits for virility, saying that a man's testicles begin to shrink when he is 30 and that "exercise" will keep them in shape. Hsieh Ru-tun (謝汝敦), a uroligist at Taiwan University Hospital, says this is not exactly correct however. "After 30, the testicles don't shrink, but men begin producing fewer hormones, which affects the libido but not sexual functioning," he said. "At an advanced age, men can also face andropause, or a cessation of sexual functioning."
Unlike many doctors quoted in Taiwan's local media, however, Hsieh is hesitant to criticize diao gung as dangerous. "Chi gung is not exactly medicine, and I know that acupuncture has been known to cure impotence," he said.
Chen Ruei-hsin (陳銳欣), chief resident of urology and Hsieh's colleague at Taiwan University Hospital, holds a similar opinion despite having treated a penile fracture (a rupture of the tunica albuginea, a key membrane for containing the blood pumped into the penis during an erection) that resulted from diao gung. "If the weight isn't too heavy and there is no erection, there shouldn't be any danger because it is just stretching the skin," he said. "The biggest problem is that it will hurt."
Tu said none of his students has ever been injured (Chen was not sure where his injured patient had practiced diao gung), and his students say that the dangling is not painful. And 20 of them, ranging in age between 30 and 72, are ready and willing to pull a Boeing 747 -- if they can get the chance. The only problem now is finding a plane and a sponsor. After recently contacting Taiwan's EVA Air, Tu was told that the company's planes were in near constant use and thus unavailable. Last Tuesday, the Guiness Book of World Records Museum in Taichung also yanked support, saying first, that "no such record exists," and second, that "we are not interested in such a challenge."
Tu, however, is not dissuaded. "If we can't get a 747, we'll try to pull a military plane at Sungshan Airport," he said. "And if we can't get that, we'll pull a tractor trailer bed holding 500 people."
RSS