The precision of movement: Another note on Tai Chi form practice and relaxation

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Form practice, precision, Relaxation, Softness

I’ve written a lot on softness, on why I believe in relaxation and how strength comes  from softness and not by using hardness. Mostly, I don’t write separate posts on this subject, though there are one or two separate posts, as this one: Strength from Softness – Softness from Strength.

One important point I would like to add to all of this about relaxation is why it’s important to practice with complete relaxation, being as soft as possible without compromising the structure and angles of the “shapes” or the individual movements.

Shouldn’t you try to hold your muscles at least a little “al dente”? You know, having a rubber kind of feeling or something similar? No.

No? Why no? Well, imagine that you are playing pool games, billiards or bowling or painting with Chinese ink technique, or doing any other kind of movements in sports, handicrafts or anything that demands a kind of very, very precise movement. Just like you aim for that ball with the cue, you need to cut off any other muscle, and muscular movement, that disturb or prevent the precision of your aim and movement.  This kind of precision of movement is exactly what you practice every time and all of the time in Tai Chi Chuan. You always practice to do only exactly what a certain movement demands from your body.

So, if you lift up your hands, you should relax everything to the extreme so that the body support only the movement and the structure behind the shape of the movement. The more you relax, the more you will let go of unnecessary effort and only use the muscles that do the movement. Moving is enough, don’t to anything else that is necessary. Even if you move with your whole body, using whole body movement  and whole body coordination, only move exactly what is necessary of that movement.

This is the same for push hands and applications. Don’t use effort, don’t use strength, don’t add anything else for structure, have a feeling of “al dente” or anything else. Just move and relax. Why? Because when you throw, punch or do anything, you want to use your body as efficient as possible. You don’t want to fragment your energy, using muscles for anything else than for exactly what you want to do. If you can find the same precision as some movements in different sports and handicraft demands in whatever you do, your punches will be stronger regardless what punch or punching technique you use. Your throws will be stronger and you will preserve your energy to continue on fighting. Practicing this skill of precision of movement and preserving energy begins in your form practice. No even before, even as you just stand, relax and breath. If you can completely relax your body while moving, without interfering posture or movement, you have already come a long way.

Of course, you need to remember this when you practice against resistant partners and opponents as well. When it come to this, especially challenges and competitive events, people tend to lack in faith in their relaxation and this means that they will abandon their best skills. So always when you practice against someone else, pay special attention on always relaxing as much as possible and only use exactly what in your body that is necessary for any kind of application or technique you perform. Don’t add structure, strength, “peng” or anything else. The refined movement and your body’s ability to change will give you any structure or “peng” you need. Your body knows what to do, if you only listen to it and keep relaxed.

How often should I practice my Tai Chi and for how long? (And some other stuff like a few points about “warming up the system”)

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Form, Form practice, Tai Chi

So how much should a Tai Chi practitioner practice Tai Chi and for how long? Sometimes I read books from people as Yang Jwing-Ming who has very special demands on very slow speed of form practice as well as tons of jibengong exercises, (basic practice) advice on sitting meditation (about two hours a day recommended by the mentioned teacher) and has a whole lot of different Qigong sets with different demands. So I wonder if he and similar teachers practice about 36 hours every day. At least, they can’t get any food, because they never eat one or two hours after training. But then I think about that they still have time to write a whole lot of books and make videos. So their demands can’t be so serious after all.

Others says that 20 minutes a day is quite enough. They speak about form practice of course, as there was nothing else in Tai Chi worth practicing. Sun Lutang, the creator of the Sun Family Internal Arts, proposed 20 minutes of standing meditation in wuji stance before practicing form. So there goes the twenty minutes that the common “Yang short form” teachers speak about, just on preparation. Jibengong, other stance practice, stretching and  similar is not included.

So how much should you practice your Tai Chi and for how long? First, I must ask you: Why the heck do you ask me? I am not your teacher. And besides that, everyone has different goals with their practice. What do you want to accomplish and why do you practice Tai Chi? If you can’t answer those questions, how could you know how much you should practice? If you know the answers to these questions, just practice enough so you can see that you develop in the speed that you want to develop. Easy answer, huh?

But then, are there no general rules or any minimum amount of amount of time for practice? No, of course there are not. Again, it depends on what style you practice, what exercises you are working on for the moment, your own level and it depends on what you want to accomplish, i.e. your personal goals. You need to come to your own understanding about what is enough, what is too much or what is too little.

But I can tell you something about practice, like this: When I practice form, I need at least 20 minutes to “get into the flow”. After twenty minutes, and often it takes the double amount of that time for my system to warm up properly, I get my “motor” running. AND first after that time, the real practice and the real progress begin. I will move, breath and focus in a completely different way after that time of warming up. This is my own personal experience. But of course, sometimes I might focus on drills and jibengong, and stance training instead of form practice. Then it’s another way to deal with the whole thinng, another way to warm up the system, a shorter or a longer time. And also there’s another way of dealing with my own body after this time of warming up the system. “You need to pump up the qi”(ch’i) as a Qi non-believer so wisely said.

This might be the very reason for practicing long forms instead of short forms or drills. And I agree with this. Drills has it’s own place, but there is really something very special about longer forms that other kind of martial arts practice can not give you. So from my own experience, I have become a real fan of long forms practice. It can be both very demanding and very rewarding.

Then after “getting warm”, how much do I practice? Hopefully one or two hours, at least. But mostly, I won’t have the time to practice as much as I would like to. I am a busy man. But there’s another component to the deal than the time you do practical exercises. You are not actually limited to the time you do physical practice. If you practice regularly, practice is a way to tune and refine your system. It’s a way to develop your nervous system and muscle memory. Practicing Tai Chi, if you do it regularly, 20 minuets a day or 2 hours a day, a progress of development that goes on 24/7. If you are very passionate about the art, and do a lot of thinking and reading about the art, the overall development will go faster and reach deeper. This is my conviction anyway. I haven’t read things like this in other places, but  I know something about learning. And I speak from my own experience.

No, I have never heard anyone speaking about practicing time the way that I do in this article, or have read anything similar. You can throw everything I said into your mental bin if you like, but still, I hope that you will think more about thus subjekt in terms about how you develop yourself into your tai chi, or how you personalize your practice to suite your own goals and your own personality. This is actually a more “Chinese thinking” than giving general advice about time and amount of practice. A Chinese doctor creates an individualized cure for every patient. The way to handle a decease, how to cure it, is different for every situation. I look at Tai Chi as a “good decease”. You must be like a good doctor and treat yourself according to your own prerequisites. Don’t listen to other “doctors” as different teachers. The only way to develop in Tai Chi is to find the right road by yourself. Maybe easier said than done, but the art of Tai Chi really demands responsibility from the person practicing it. You can’t really hide away from your own responsibilities if you want to develop and progress for real.

Body awareness – The real key to success in Tai Chi Chuan.

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Body awareness, Form practice, Shenfa

If I were going to mention only one thing, or the most important thing, that I believe that anyone who practice Tai Chi Chuan should focus on more than anything else, and would ultimately lead to success in the art, well, that would be body awareness.

What we do in Tai Chi and why practicing slow, focused with awareness is for developing control, fine and refined motor skills. The kind of fine motor skills a Tai Chi artist wants is the kind of skills dealing with small details of painting, or operating with a laser. There’s an absolute precision we are looking for. When we can control our movements in an absolute manner and with awareness, spontaneity and freedom of movement will be the result.

Therefor, when we practice form slowly, we should try to be aware of every slight tension that might occur in our body. Sometimes, or often, it’s good to move really slow so we have time to feel what is going on throughout the body, from toe to fingertip, from the bottom of the feet and up to the crown of the head. Try to feel what ever slight change do to your body. When does tension occur and where are weaknesses in movement? Move in an absolute even pace. Pay attention to your movement at every inch of your movement. When the movement is straight, it’s perfectly straight. When it’s round, the round form is perfectly even. Perform your movements as you were operating with a scalpel or a laser.

This is in my opinion “correct” form practice. Drills and push hands can be practiced with the same kind of focus. This kind of practice demands extreme focus and concentration. Yet demanding, but it’s actually not hard to achieve. Just know how to practice and continue to practice. A kind of awareness should be developed throughout the whole body. Also calmness of mind and a certain natural beauty of body movement could be the result. If you look at professional dancers, they often move with a certain authority or beauty that looks perfectly natural. If you look at “masters” of different martial arts there is often something similar. Sometimes when they enter a room, there might be the impression like they take up the whole room. I believe that this is an expression of moving with awareness, a type of body awareness that is achieved through many, many years of practicing with awareness.

On Movement, Drill, Form and Artistic Expression

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calligraphy, Form, Tai Chi

What is a drill and why form practice? It is said that earlier Tai Chi was postures and later individual movements and drills. Forms came even later.

Postures of a form can also be practiced as “ding shi”, or  “holding postures”, a kind of standing meditation. I was taught a method of practice that through the form, one should stop in every posture for six minutes before moving into the other. A long form of 88 or 120 movements consists of many six minutes of standing. 8 or 12 hours of practice a form? I would not have time nor courage to spend a whole day moving through one form.

A posture or a single movement is like a brush stroke, a drill is like a character. And a Tai Chi form is like painting fluid calligraphy. A tai chi form is like writing in “Grass style”, which is a highly personal expression where the artist condense and make abstractions according to his own personal, artistic choice.

People ask: Why so many forms? The I ask: Why not? Create your own form if you want, or change the one you know according to your own personal judgement. Change directions, duplicate or take away movements. Let the postures flow together or separate them. Do it beautiful or make it look bold. Just make sure you don’t copy any one else and be sure to find your own voice, your own artistic expression.

On long movement in Yang style Tai Chi

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Changjin, Large frame, Long Movement, Shenfa, Tai Chi, Taijiquan, Yang style

What is long movement or Changjin in Tai Chi (Taijiquan)? People translate Changjin as “long energy”. I think that “energy” is always a bad translation for jin and it’s better to leave all kinds of energies out. At least for this discussion. “Quality” is a much better translation. Changjin means that there must be a “long quality” in the medium and large frame practice of Yang style Taijiquan. Long quality is in the shenfa or body method. In Yang style “just making movements large” is not enough. Long movement must have quality. Long movement is a “stretching quality”.

But the arm does not visually have to be fully stretched. The secret is not in the arms. Instead, the stretching quality starts from the lower back and here, it’s supported from the dantian. The stretching movement goes from the lower back, the whole way up from the lower ribs, spine, through the scapula and it’s carried out through the whole arm, right out to the fingertips. The arm can have a certain firmness but can not be tensed. If the movement of the wrist is coordinated with the movement of the waist, there should be a twisting sensation felt through the whole arm. Connected with the dantian, this is practicing what is called “twisting silk reeling” in Chen style. The movement should be smooth and uninterrupted. The movement is very strong. In movement, an opponent can not fold the practitioners arm or in any way compromise it’s structure.

If all of this you feel uncomfortable and tense, well, you might tense too much. Focus more on the legs and the waist/dantian and try to stabilize your movement from the roots and up. Successful and relaxed long movement in Yang tai chi demands a very strong base and great waist movement. If the stance is lacking or the roots are not fully developed, the practitioner is suggested to focus more on relaxation and comfortable movement instead of the stretching quality.

Take a look at these two Yang masters. If you have practiced for a while and is acquainted with form practice, can easily see that they have a “stretching quality” through out the arms, all of the time and in any movement. You should also be able to see that the strength of the arms comes from the back and legs.

Yang Shouzhong:

Niu Chunming: