If Fei Kune Do, Volume I was the map — the philosophy, the forms, the axioms of the art — this is the ground: the drills, the schedule, the sweat.
習 · The Practice Book is the exercise-and-attributes companion to the canon. Volume I asked what is true? This book asks how do I train it into the body? The name is 習 (xí) — to practice, to drill, to repeat until it is yours; the same character opens 習題, “exercise problems.” That is what this is: the exercises to the volume you have already read.
It sets out to do three things — refine the practice (slow down and sharpen the techniques that matter, with the drills that were never written down), lay out a training schedule for growing new dimensions, and fill the gaps (the acrobatic, dance, and tricking grounds that Volume I only glanced at, researched properly and given the structure they were missing).
This is a living workbook — I’ll keep extending it, lesson by lesson, alongside the main canon. What exists today:
The Documents#
The workbook so far — twenty-one chapters and a field log, grouped into five arcs.
Arc I · The Capoeira Grade#
- 📄 習 · Foreword — The Practice Companion (PDF) — The workbook’s front door — why it exists, its three purposes, and an honest word: you’re reading the lab notes.
- 📄 壹 · Chapter 1 — A Corda Preta (PDF) — A hypothetical Capoeira black belt — a six-station exam on Bimba’s 8 Sequences, with the fight-or-dance resistance test.
- 📄 貳 · Chapter 2 — Capoeira Black Belt Speed Run (PDF) — Compressing crua to Corda Preta — a Top-12 leverage-ranked checklist; you can rush the schedule, not the tissue.
- 📄 參 · Chapter 3 — Hard Moves (PDF) — The moves with a real learning cliff — seven breakdowns, each with its failure mode and what only a spotter can fix.
- 📄 肆 · Chapter 4 — Training Alone: The Park Program (PDF) — Training alone — a solo capoeira session template, weekly rotation, and gym strength layer; ginga is the cement.
Arc II · Contact Range#
- 📄 伍 · Chapter 5 — The Internal Roda (PDF) — Three battlefield arts, one convergence — Tai Chi, Capoeira, and JKD: one energy, one sensing drill, three names.
- 📄 陸 · Chapter 6 — The Take Down (PDF) — The contact range — six grappling arts, one law: contact is control (connect → off-balance → leverage → finish).
- 📄 柒 · Chapter 7 — The First Stripe (PDF) — Pink Belt · 1st Stripe — the first grade you can film and pass: an 8-test exam across every range, one camera.
- 📄 捌 · Chapter 8 — The Finish (PDF) — Once you’ve controlled, how do you end it? — the ground finish (rear naked choke, submissions) and the standing finish (Wing Chun’s five).
Arc III · The Third Dimension#
- 📄 玖 · Chapter 9 — The Third Dimension (PDF) — Taido moves the axis itself — the five taisabaki engine and a five-kick set; karate gave the plane, Taido gives the sphere.
- 📄 拾 · Chapter 10 — The Second Stripe (PDF) — Pink Belt · 2nd Stripe — harder: 8 tests across six arts, half of them aerials, capped by an invention.
- 📄 拾壹 · Chapter 11 — The Silk Engine (PDF) — Chen Tai Chi deep-dive — the spiral-powered grappling system: silk-reeling, Lan Zha Yi, and the Eight Energies as doors.
- 📄 拾貳 · Chapter 12 — The Third Stripe (PDF) — Pink Belt · 3rd Stripe — read a movement off a screen and put it in your body: eight moves from Reina’s Tekken 8 list.
Arc IV · Reading the Masters#
- 📄 拾參 · Chapter 13 — Siu Yu 小魚 (PDF) — The little fish turns — Ling Xiaoyu’s Bagua strategy; three arts independently concluded the straight line is a trap.
- 📄 拾肆 · Chapter 14 — Coming Home (PDF) — Grading the game against your own art — Eddy Gordo vs Capoeira 100: half his moves are real, including Vingativa, native kuzushi.
- 📄 拾伍 · Chapter 15 — 化發: Issue & Yield (PDF) — 化發 — fa-jin and ‘Ultra Instinct’ are one skill, two directions — issuing (發) solo, yielding (化) only against live resistance.
- 📄 拾陸 · Chapter 16 — Eight Limbs, Five Fists, One High Line (PDF) — Where the book grows its hands — Muay Thai’s eight limbs, Taido’s five fists, and the high kick as active mobility.
- 📄 拾柒 · Chapter 17 — Kenpo, the Cookbook Art (PDF) — The art that wrote your system down first — Ed Parker’s Form → Principle → Invention, sixty years early, as a state machine.
Arc V · The System Sees Itself#
- 📄 拾捌 · Chapter 18 — The Empty Cells (PDF) — Run KEGA on your own system — model the fighter as a graph and read the whitespace; the empty cells tell you what you are.
- 📄 拾玖 · Chapter 19 — Tai Chi Lesson from AI (PDF) — The follow-step opens a door — 跟步 as a connecting edge; Tai Chi stores pairs, not moves, and each pair holds its way out.
- 📄 貳拾 · Chapter 20 — The Eighteen Doors (PDF) — A new domain: the weapon — the sword/bow arts and the ninja’s eighteen doors; only seven are fighting, and that’s the point.
- 📄 貳拾壹 · Chapter 21 — Measuring What You Feel (PDF) — The first witness is a machine — formcheck on my own side kick; the hip peaks 200ms late, so the mass never arrived.
- 📄 貳拾貳 · Chapter 22 — Eighteen Ways to Stand Still (PDF) — 步型 and 步法 — a stance is a state, a step is an edge — Taido named the edges and proved its own 360° coverage; Wushu named the nodes and put deductions on them; Capoeira refused both.
- 📄 貳拾參 · Chapter 23 — Slower on Purpose (PDF) — Structure outranks speed — the 限度間合 gendo maai trap: three witnesses who never met — a pose estimator, a torpedo pilot, and a competitor who won on a broken foot.
- 📄 貳拾肆 · Chapter 24 — Last Chapter (PDF) — 無盡 · write your own — seed with a question, not a vocabulary; semantic search can never return nothing, so the mention ratio is the only honest test of whether your library can answer at all.
- 📄 記 · Field Notes — 2026, Week 3 (July) (PDF) — Optional · lab notes — a week on the floor: kick setups, Compasso entries, a body-worked Lan Zha Yi, AI Sifu disagreements flagged.
More to come: the full exercise sets — 🥋 Drills · 🔬 Proofs · 🧠 Diagnostics · 🎨 Inventions · 🌊 Flow-Labs — with the park-innovated forms as the worked solutions.