Nima King spent his teenage years working as a bouncer in Sydney. He trained in Wing Chun, sparred regularly, dealt with drunk patrons and physical confrontations. When he finally made it to Hong Kong to train with Grandmaster Chu Shong Tin—the real deal, the master who had effortlessly dropped him to the floor during a demonstration—he expected intense sparring sessions, maybe rooftop battles like in the old kung fu films.

Instead, he got hours of standing practice in a small living room.

I’ll tell you, Craig, this was the hardest thing at that time that I had to go through, both physically and mentally, because it’s just so difficult, you know, standing still there, not moving. It’s just so difficult! All these inner demons start to come up. You start thinking, and you know, there’s nowhere to hide.

Wait. Standing still was the hardest thing? Harder than bouncing as a teenager? Harder than the physical demands of martial arts training? Harder than traveling to another country to study with a master?

This is the moment worth sitting with, because it exposes something we consistently get wrong about what makes physical practices difficult.

We tend to measure difficulty through external metrics—intensity, duration, complexity, physical demands. The harder you push, the more it burns, the more technical the movement, the more difficult the practice. That’s the logic. But King’s experience points to something else entirely: the hardest practices might be the ones that strip away all the distractions we use to avoid actually being present with ourselves.

When you’re sparring, defending yourself at work, or executing complex techniques, there’s always something external to focus on. An opponent. A goal. A problem to solve. Your attention has somewhere to go that isn’t inward. Standing practice in a small Hong Kong living room removes all of that. There’s no opponent to blame for your struggles. No technique to master as a distraction. No external challenge to justify why this feels so hard.

Just you, standing still on hard floors, with nothing to do but notice all the tension you’re carrying and all the thoughts you’re using to avoid feeling that tension.

“There’s nowhere to hide” turns out to be a much more revealing description of difficulty than “this requires maximum effort.” Because hiding isn’t about physical intensity—it’s about all the ways we use movement itself as a buffer between ourselves and the uncomfortable work of actually paying attention to what’s happening in our bodies and minds.

This helps explain why beginners often feel like they’re “not doing enough” in practices that emphasize stillness, breath work, or subtle internal work. The practice doesn’t feel difficult in the ways we’ve been conditioned to recognize difficulty. There’s no obvious external achievement, no clear sense of progression, no satisfying exhaustion. Just the profoundly challenging work of standing with yourself, noticing tension points, watching thoughts arise, and discovering that you can’t think or force your way through.

King mentions that his teacher eventually banned him from asking questions—a teaching move that sounds harsh until you realize it was protecting him from his own preferred escape route. Questions are another form of hiding, a way to intellectualize and conceptualize instead of simply experiencing what’s actually happening.

What if the practices that feel “too easy” or “not intense enough” are actually the ones we’re avoiding because they’re genuinely difficult in ways we don’t want to acknowledge? What if nowhere to hide is exactly what makes something hard?

This field note references the Movers Mindset podcast episode “Subtraction with Nima King,” published November 24, 2025.