I met a Shaolin Master who can karate chop bricks, do press-ups on his thumbs and bend a spear with his throat. This is how YOU can follow in his footsteps: DAVID LEAFE

Throughout my interview with Shi Heng Yi I can’t help feeling strangely nervous. The diminutive yet powerfully built figure in front of me is capable of feats that seem almost superhuman.

A teacher of the Shaolin philosophies and martial arts first developed in China 1,500 years ago, he was recently introduced on the hugely popular The Diary of a CEO podcast hosted by Dragons’ Den star Steven Bartlett as ‘the world’s most hardcore monk’.

It’s true that he can karate-chop bricks, break planks of wood on his own body and throw a sewing needle at a glass window with such force that it pierces the pane and pops a balloon on the other side.

He can also do 20 press-ups supported only on his thumbs, bend a spear by pressing down on the pointed end with his throat and balance on a tilted pole.

In short, he is not someone you would want to mess with. But what’s stressing me is not the fear of upsetting him, rather his promise to teach me a testing posture he adopts as part of his morning routine.

According to his new book Shaolin Spirit: The Way to Self-Mastery, this will lead to the ‘cultivation of vitality and strength’ but only by pushing the practitioner ‘to physical and mental limits they will never have encountered before’.

Crikey. I’m all for a bit of keep-fit but whereas Shi Heng Yi is a lithe and extremely athletic 41-year-old, I have just turned 60 and have dodgy knees so I am worried that the Squatting Monkey, as it’s known, might soon have to be renamed Crippled Journalist.

We are meeting at the Daily Mail’s London offices, a snatched opportunity to catch him during a hectic promotional tour which has included sold-out talks and meditations at the Hay Festival in Wales.

Shi Heng Yi helps me take my first step on the long journey to inner peace by attempting the Squatting Monkey

According to Shi Heng Yi’s new book, followers need to be willingly pushed ‘to physical and mental limits they will never have encountered before’

The book should do well given the remarkable interest in a man who has become a worldwide internet sensation. A Ted Talk he gave in 2020 has since attracted 17 million views and he has nearly a million followers on Instagram.

Indeed, he is so popular that my 29-year-old nephew Sam, who has never previously expressed such interest in my work, has asked if he can come along to meet him.

Watching the berobed Shaolin master pose for selfies with my starstruck relative invites comparisons with the popularity of kung fu legend Bruce Lee who supposedly honed his reflexes by throwing grains of rice into the air and catching them with chopsticks.

Yet Shi Heng Yi’s appeal lies not just in his astonishing physical feats but also his claims that thinking and acting like a Shaolin can help us all in our everyday lives.

He lives, in many ways, a very modern existence himself. In Shaolin tradition there were the ‘scholar monks’ who were akin to priests and lived celibate lives within temples, and the ‘warrior monks’ who inhabited the outside world and practised martial arts as their main focus.

He regards himself as a warrior master rather than a monk, as they are not monks in the way Westerners think of them. He has both a partner and a five-month-old baby son and, although he follows a largely vegetarian diet ‘to reduce suffering in the world’ admits to being partial to the occasional steak and even tried bacon and eggs on a previous visit to London.

‘It wasn’t bad,’ he says.

He is also a big fan of the cinema: the last film he saw was Gladiator II.

Shi Heng Yi’s appeal lies not just in his astonishing physical feats, like balancing on a tilted pole, but also his claims that thinking and acting like a Shaolin can help us all in our everyday lives

Yi karate chopping a brick (don’t try this at home)

‘I wouldn’t want to face any of them,’ he says, but I fancy his chances against Paul Mescal’s character Lucius any day, even if he sees the real point of martial art techniques as being to train and develop your mind.

These are skills taught to disciples at the Shaolin Temple Europe, the Buddhist community he founded in a converted rural restaurant in Otterberg, southern Germany. Paying around £6,000 to live in the community for a year, they are mostly men in their 20s and 30s and they are given a crash course in recognising their impulses but not yielding to them with bans on ‘worldly pleasures’, ‘sexual activities’ and ‘material luxury’ during their stay.

Above all, the website warns, they should expect a life of ‘strict discipline,’ something Shi Heng Yi became very used to during his extraordinarily regimented childhood in the town of Kaiserslautern, about a 15-minute drive away.

His parents were originally from Laos, the landlocked nation bordered by countries including China, Thailand and Vietnam, but fled to Germany as ‘boat people’, escaping the persecution and oppression perpetrated by the communist regime which came to power in Laos in 1975.

Leaving all their material possessions behind, they began a new life in the poorest part of Kaiserslautern, an area where, even today, most people would hesitate to go.

‘There were criminal activities going on there and I knew right from the beginning that this life is not just about sunshine,’ he says.

His mother found work in a care home for the elderly and his father in a chemical factory, the kind of poorly-paid jobs which they were determined that Shi Heng Yi and his older brother should avoid.

‘When you grow up in an Asian family, especially as the children of refugees, your parents have a very clear vision of how you should be educated and what you should attain in this lifetime, so as a child you don’t have much say. You just listen.’

When he was four, his father decided that he should give up his first games console and begin training in a local kung fu school where, he says, he experienced suffering which today would see the teachers convicted of cruelty to children.

‘It starts with splitting the legs. Nowadays you wouldn’t be allowed to make a child stretch so much that they start to cry. But the way I trained was that you split, you cried, and even when you cried you still split.

‘I became used to feeling uncomfortable and I learnt not to give a preference for what I wanted, just taking the pain as it was.’

The agony aside, he loved the training and quickly became so much better than the other children that their parents rather unsportingly demanded that he be withdrawn from the school. Instead he was moved to the adult classes where his first bout saw the 11-year-old prodigy knock a grown-up to the ground.

With his childhood and adolescence consisting mainly of school and martial arts training, there were moments when he would rather have played football or gone swimming. But his father never gave him the option of stopping and by 18 he had earned his first black belt, becoming a master in Shaolin kung fu. 

He continued to follow the path set for him by his parents, studying for various qualifications including a degree in mechanical engineering in Germany, and another in European Studies in Romania, funding his studies by working part-time as a nightclub bouncer. And it was only after his father’s death from cancer in 2012 that he felt able to go his own way.

‘I decided to construct my own idea of how I would like to express the Shaolin teachings in a way that is practical for someone for the eight billion people in the world who don’t live in monasteries.’

He drew up a business plan and got funding through donations to set up the Shaolin Temple Europe and began posting on social media the breathing and movement exercises which attracted a huge audience among people trapped at home during the pandemic.

These aim to develop what he calls our ‘inner equanimity’ – the ability to weather ‘the constant pitch and swell of life’ by determining how we face the world and what we encounter in it. ‘The decision is yours,’ he says. ‘Do you want to be angry every time someone ignores your right of way on the road, or nabs the last bread roll from under your nose at the bakery?

‘Do you want to keep allowing the outside world to dictate your inner experience? To keep thinking of yourself as a helpless puppet at the mercy of circumstance? To let your boss decide if you go home in the evening in a good mood or a bad mood?’

The answer to all that is, of course, no. But, as I am about to find out, becoming ‘as strong and sturdy as an oak’ is neither quick nor easy.

‘Oak trees can withstand all kinds of gales and storms,’ he says. ‘But they have only this ability because they have had plenty of time to anchor their roots in the ground.’

I can’t help wishing that my self-growth didn’t have to start today. But the time has come for me to take my first step on the long journey to inner peace by attempting the Squatting Monkey.

This posture is one version of what Shaolin masters call zhan zhuang, which translates as ‘standing like a tree’. These positions are said to produce both physiological benefits – including increasing the production of red blood cells, making the brain more active and helping us sleep more deeply – and also to develop the awareness of our inner selves and willpower which will put us on the road to self-mastery.

Standing patiently by my side, Shi Heng Yi explains that the posture is made up of various elements named after animals including the ‘chicken legs’ produced by squeezing your feet and legs tightly together, the ‘tiger neck’ which results from sinking your head into your shoulders, and the ‘eagle wings’ represented by laying your hands palm upwards on your thighs.

Tucking in your ‘bear tailbone’, you must also adopt a hunched ‘monkey back’ as you bend your knees slightly. And there you remain for as long as 50 minutes if you are Shi Heng Yi, and considerably less time if you are me.

Although it’s seemingly easy at first, I quickly find myself shaking as I struggle to hold the pose and, with pains starting to shoot up my legs, I make it to barely 20 seconds before I have to stand up.

I can see why doing this for any length of time would do wonders for your willpower and I also notice that my hands feel warmer and look redder than before, perhaps because of the promised increase in blood supply.

Perhaps there’s something in it after all but for the moment I’ll leave the Squatting Monkey to Shi Heng Yi whose busy schedule of late has met with the

disapproval of his mother, now 70 and still living in Kaiserslautern.

‘My parents spent my entire childhood telling me to do more and now I’m supposed to do less,’ he smiles before disappearing into a London taxi, an unassuming figure no less impressive for the knowledge that even Shaolin masters are defenceless against nagging mothers.

Shaolin Spirit: The Way to Self-Mastery by Shi Heng Yi is published by Particular Books at £25. To order a copy for £22.50 (offer valid to 14/06/2025; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.

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