When Should You Start To Learn Push Hands?

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Applications in Tai Chi, Form, Progress, Push hands, Tai Chi

A common question from beginners and non-practitioners especially who are interested to start studying T’ai Chi Ch’uan, is about when they can start to learn push hands.

There is a common view that form should be practiced first and push hands later. Many teachers, even some established and well known, will teach form and basic exercises for the first one or two years, and then go on to start teaching push hands. Applications and combat practice will be initiated even later.

Some people say that you need to practice form first to be able to understand push hands. I don’t agree with this conception. Form practice is not a prerequisite for push hands. In my opinion, the truth is quite the opposite around. Push hands is a tool for learning how to practice the form correctly, especially in terms of balance, alignment and intent. Form should be taught together with, and alongside, push hands and applications. Otherwise your form practice will be just as good as walking around with an empty bag. Later you’ll probably need to re-learn how to do your form… if you haven’t already cemented a false appreciation of the form and still are able to change it…

But practicing push hands, and applications especially, early when you have started to train, doesn’t mean that you should do it in a purely ”technical” or ”external” manner, as you commonly see in Karate or Jujutsu. No, on the contrary, you should do this using tai chi principles and practice this to learn and understand Tai Chi principles. My own teachers paid a great attention to details right from the beginning. When we did simple applications and “leading & following” exercises, my first teacher would show me how to stand correctly, how to relax properly, how to sink into the stance and how to use my waist. He would to tell me how to breath correctly or not to hold my breath. And he would constantly repeat “relax, relax, relax”. Tai Chi principles were taught and drilled right from the start, practically. The first thing my first Tai Chi teacher did on my very first class was not about showing a form or any kind of solo exercises. No, instead he taught some simple evasion and guiding exercises, as well as balancing and unbalancing. These few exercises set the course for the whole progress in my Tai Chi practice. For the years to come, form, push hands and applications were always fully integrated. I learned balance, rooting & structure more from the latter two parts of the practice and I would continue to study what I’ve been taught in class when I practiced form home alone.

In my own opinion, this is the correct way to teach form, push hands and applications. For push hands, I believe that the basic simple drill also could be taught from the start. But the progress from drills to free push hands exercises should be achieved by a gradual process. In my own opinion, free push hands is always better as a semi-cooperative game where you help each other solve problems and come up with solutions. Free combat practice and sparring should is in my opinion better learned from other formats of practice.

 

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Form, Push Hands or Sparring? – On developing Fighting Skills in Tai Chi Chuan

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Fighting, Push hands, Sparring

I know a Tai Chi teacher who… Oh, sorry. I don’t know him. I know about him and I have met him briefly. I won’t mention any name, but he teaches the short 25 movements form. Only this form and one or two basic push hands drills. When someone asks him how you learn to fight in Tai Chi, he just says that fighting skills comes with time through form practice. Many teachers says “fighting comes from the form.” So most people just practice forms, drills, jibengong standing meditation and other solo exercises.

I’ve heard so many people who practice form, form and form. They practice one or two or three or even more hours of Tai Chi solo practice exercises everyday. Some people I meet says that their goal is to spend so and so many hours of Tai chi practice everyday. Spending a lot of time practicing and developing your Tai Chi as well as yourself is obviously a good thing. But you should not confuse this practice with fighting skills. Even if those people who says that fighting comes from the form have practiced for thirty plus years, most of them still get stiff and and use strength when I meet them in free push hands practice. They show absolutely no Tai Chi skills.

Li Yaxuan (Yang Chengfu’s most acclaimed student) wrote:

(Scott Meredith translation)

Li Yaxuan believed that it’s essential to practice against others, testing and developing your skill against others. You can’t develop fighting skills in your own room by yourself. You can’t learn following skills, like adapting to the opponent’s structure or learn to listen to his energy from solo practice.

Tai Chi is meant to use against someone else. It’s meant to be used as self-defence and fighting. Think of Tai Chi Chuan the same way as you learn to use a tool or an instrument. You can’t learn to be good at bowling without practicing with the bowling ball. All movements you perform in the thin air means nothing compared to holding that ball and use it. The same thing goes for learning to play the violin or the piano. You must really practice with the instrument to become good.

You learn the correct balance and alignment not when you practice form without any martial practice. You learn these qualities when you meet the opponent’s pressure, when you evade from a punch or try a takedown against him. It’s when you practice push hands and sparring you should practice your Tai Chi skills. Practice following and leading against your partner. Learn to handle a push or leading away pressure from your practicing partner. The knowledge you attain from push hands and applications practice is what you should take into your forms, drills and other solo practice. My teacher said that most people practice form as they were statues. But Tai Chi should be a functional form. Practicing a Tai Chi form is not like practicing like you are a statue. It’s like practicing as you were a filled tea pot. A statue just have a stationary weight. But a Tai Chi form should have a functional weight, form and balance. The correct function and balance is what you learn from push hands and applications practice. Then you take that knowledge and fill the form with it. If you don’t have this knowledge to put in the form, practicing your form and your drills will be like carrying around an empty bag. Then you don’t use it for the purpose it was created for.

Practice your forms, drills, meditation, jibengong and solo practice. But don’t believe that this will help you even slightly to apply your movements correctly in push hands or fighting. You need practice push hands again and again, both drills and free push hands against many different people. You need to test applications and combat methods against resisting partners. Only when you can understand how to be insubstantial and formless in different formats of practice and in different competition formats, and have succeeded to keep your Tai Chi body and your Tai Chi mind dealing with many different people in different situations, you can claim to have reached a point where you can truly say that you know how use your Tai Chi Chuan for real.

Also read about how to gradually build Tai Chi combat skills from pressure and testing and what it is like fighting with Tai Chi for real.

On Tai Chi and Longevity

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Health, Longevity, Qi

The legendary Tai Chi Master Sun Lutang expressed the meaning of Tai Chi as a way to stay healthy long and die fast. He got ill when he was 73 years old. From what I have read, he didn’t want to stay ill or become a burden to his family. So he gathered his students together and willed himself to death.

But there are a lot of other stories and there are Tai Chi teachers who became very old and stayed strong and healthy the whole of their life. I recently watched a video with a Tai Chi teacher I had for twenty years ago. Here he was 85 years old. He had a little bit of stiffness in his back, but otherwise, he looked very strong and moved very well for a man of his age. Tai Chi seems to preserve the strength of the body and slow down aging.

I met another teacher, a Chinese man, for more than 20 years ago. I am not sure how old he was. There were stories about his age, that he was very old and much older than he looked. He didn’t want to speak about his age. I looked up some information about him and through what I found and also from his own stories, I made the conclusion that he must have been at least 70 years old. This was his minimum age. I talked with another person who was a teacher in gymnastics and had studied physiology. He was convinced that this Chinese teacher can not be older than 50. Why? Because you can see it in  the bone structure. He explained that you can preserve the skin very well, but the bones will keep changing and that you can make a good appreciation of someone’s age through looking at his bones. But I remember this teacher’s stories, about his childhood and details from the early 1930’s. Even if he had very early memories, he must have been at least 70 years old. This man was quite short, but had a tremendous energy. When he walked, everyone had a hard time to keep up with his speed. No one of these two teachers practiced anything else than Tai Chi Chuan.

Some of what you see from old Tai Chi teachers might of course be a combination of living style, foods, genes and the practice.  Speaking of myself, I started studying Tai Chi at quite a young age, only 11 years old. All of my friends that started practicing when they were about my age all look very young and healthy. We are all in our forties now. Our bodies are still strong and we don’t get ill easily. Our skin is smooth, the women have little wrinkles and the men have suffered no or almost no hair loss. Tai Chi practice seems to have an effect of conservation of the body. It keeps the strength of the body and seems to slow down aging.

One aspect of longevity might be about keeping the body in movement and keeping the mobility of all of the body. The aspect of preserving the body might have to do with the internal practice of using the nervous system, some of it from the meditative aspect to keep the mind calm and focused. Or it might have to do with that you heat up the body from inside with Tai Chi practice. Some people would just say that it has to do with developing the body’s “Qi” and circulating it by using the movements.

Anyway, Tai Chi Chuan seems to be a powerful tool for health and keeping the body  in shape. As I am in my early forties as I write this, I have lost some muscle strength. But my stamina is excellent and I feel in great shape, at least not in less shape than in my 20s or 30s. In fact I can now run a longer distance without getting exhausted than I could in my 20s. Why? Because my legs are stronger and I have learned to use my body better now.

One aspect might be about having a naturally deep breath. As people get older, they tend to breath more shallow. I always breath deep from my belly. Maybe keeping the leg strength through daily low form practice is another aspect. There’s a Chinese saying that age starts in the legs. There might be some truth to this.

But above all, living a healthy long life or not, I do believe that it’s important to really enjoy the Tai Chi practice and have a genuine interest to continually develop it and explore all of it’s aspects. And also to use it as at least one tool to continue to grow as a human being.