Building Tai Chi combat skills from pressure and testing

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Combat, Push hands, Tai Chi, Tai Chi Combat, Tai Chi Push Hands

Some teachers don’t like their students to compete. But others, like Li Yaxuan, Yang Chengfu’s most famous and competent student, said that you must practice your Tai Chi in free push hands and free sparring. Li also encouraged Tai Chi people to compete in Push Hands and Sanda/San shou tournaments. But if you do, he meant that this is to test your Tai Chi skills. You must really use your Tai Chi. You must be confident in your art, know how to always breath, stay relaxed and not use excessive or unnecessary strength.

But I can never see real Tai Chi skills when I look at Tai Chi Push Hands competitions. They all use brute force, tricks and speed. How come? Why is that so? I read about a quite famous teacher who commented Push Hands tournaments and why you hardly see anyone who use Tai Chi skills in competitions. That teacher said that even if students do everything right in class and use their Tai Chi when they practice free push hands in class, they tend to not trust their skills and practice when they meet the pressure in a competition. So they use brute force and speed instead.

This is somewhat a strange phenomena. One of the reasons of course could be that many of these competitors practice to compete in competitions and not too build genuine Tai Chi skills. Another reason could be that many of them are young and have not enough practice to keep their skill when they are pressured. I couldn’t not always do so for the first five or seven first years. Even when I met Tai Chi people for free push hands practice, I sometimes tensed up, and especially so if the other person was tense or used strength.

But the question is, if you want to develop genuine Tai Chi skills, what way, how and how often should you meet pressure and have your skills tested? Maybe competitions is not the best way. If you lose too much confidence in yourself and in your skill, will you have enough courage later to really use your Tai Chi? Will you ever be able to use it?

In my own humble opinion, the best way to test your Tai Chi skills is to test them against a Tai Chi practitioner who is much better than you. If you meet someone who really know how to relax, can keep relaxed all of the time, and can still play around with you just like you were merely a leaf caught in the wind, you will learn far more than if you put yourself into pressure when you yourself yet don’t know how to keep relaxed all of the time. If you meet up with skilled teachers and practitioners, you will feel how they feel, you will experience their timing and eventually come to understand their Tai Chi spirit.

This is the right way to approach Tai Chi and build genuine skills that can be used for real. First, learn to relax properly in a Tai Chi environment. When you can keep yourself relaxed and not tense up, then test yourself against non-Tai Chi practitioners. When you can demonstrate and keep your Tai Chi body all of the time, without interruption, you might want to expose yourself to people from various styles who are skilled in wrestling, competition push hands and free fighting. If you want to make your Tai Chi work for real, my advice is that you make your progress to develop in clear levels, taking one step at a time and learn how to keep your Tai Chi skills when dealing with different levels of pressure. Make one achievement at a time and let your progress in Tai Chi develop over the time it takes to jump up one level at a time. By doing so, you will always progress further without compromising your Tai Chi or your confidence in your art.

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.

A suitable amount of dedication and practice in daily life

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Daily practice

Obviously different people have different kind of relationships to their Tai Chi practice. Some people are very dedicated and others practice just as little as possible or if they do, they do it in a mechanical sort of way. Some people just go to a class once or twice a weak, practice whatever is on the schedule and when they go home, they hardly even think about their practice until the next class. Others practice Tai Chi daily, but even if they do the movements of their form, they spend very little thinking about their art or do anything to practice or develop their art outside of those 15, 20 or 40 minutes they spend everyday. Yet others live with and inside their art 24/7. They often try to find ways to practice their art, regardless what they do and spend a lot of time thinking about it.

Whenever you want, wherever you are, there are a lot of opportunities to practice Tai Chi without practice a certain form, drill or posture. You can relax, check tension in your body. You can stand upright and feel your balance. When you open a locker, how do you use your body? Are you balanced? Do you feel tensions in your body when you make a certain movement? When you lift or push something, you can practice whole body movement and how to coordinate hand with feet or with the Dantian. When you walk fast is a terrific opportunity to check your breath. You can always take a breath deep and relax the chest and release tensions in the jaws.

When I was a kid, just after I had started practicing Tai Chi, when I was about eleven or twelve years old, I often stood close to my mother for a reason. I would put my foot so I could just shift my weight, leaning slightly against her and see how she reacted. I would try to do minimal movement to affect her balance. She was very, very irritated that I would sneak up to her or do this while she was cooking or cleaning. I was fascinated by how easy it was to manipulate someone’s balance. So I learned how to find opportunities to practice in daily life from a very young age. (Watching Kung Fu movies as Drunken Master and Dreadnaught certainly helped as well.)

Dedication is one thing, but obsession can also become a not so fruitful kind of dedication. If it goes far, you can suffer a kind of burnout or fatigue. Your practice might become an obstacle in your daily life and I know a person who completely stopped all of his practice after more than 40 years of dedication.

You don’t need to practice all of the time, anywhere, everywhere. Development in Tai Chi needs to grow, take it’s own time. There are no shortcuts in this art and too much practice might become a negative issue that affects your daily life. If you are dedicated, let it take time. There’s no need to pressure yourself or rush it. And you also need to grow as well and your Tai Chi needs the chance to grow together with you.

On Integrity

Tags

Body method, Learning, Shenfa

I was told that before everything you do or while anything you do, you must always consider  your integrity first and always. Actually, the teacher I studied briefly for about twenty years ago didn’t phrase it exactly like this. I can’t remember his exact words. I think it was just more or less: “You must always keep your integrity”. Does it make sense? Or maybe not?

This teacher who I am not going to mention by name often summed up things in short, brief sentences that I have a feeling of that very few of his students took notice of. However he really phrased it, I liked the sentence very much, especially considering that it was a comment to push hands and applications practice.  And it made sense for what I was dealing with right then. You can not compromise your integrity, not even the slightest.

So what does it mean? Keeping integrity, keeping it intact. In general, the word “integrity”  is mostly associated with a moral standard, keeping a high moral standard and being consistent in accordance with this standard. There are also other disciplines that use the term in their own way, like in action philosophy and technical engineering. So how can we use this term in Tai Chi to benefit our understanding of our own place in this art?

Integrity in Tai Chi can mean:

• Structural integrity,
• Integrity of balance,
• Integrity of mind,
• and Moral integrity

 

But Tai Chi is a practical art. We learn by doing. Our knowledge is not greater than how we understand to take something and use it in action. Thus, Integrity, to sum up these points means to always keep the standard of integrity, in a most practical sense, regardless what happens.

In a practical sense, this means that you can not compromise your balance or structure even less than by an inch. And you can not compromise your calmness or focus, even less than a tenth of a second. You can not entertain thoughts that makes you worry and you can not get angry. You can not tense up, become stiff or become affected in any way that disturbs your integrity.

You can practice your sense of integrity whenever you practice your Tai Chi, when you practice form or when you play Push Hands or practice applications with a friend. What it means is that you must always stand firm in your “shenfa” (body method) – You should develop your shenfa, i.e. your “Tai Chi body” to such an extent that you always know when you are “inside” of it or not. Slightly being off balance, physically or mentally, might compromise the integrity of your shenfa.

If someone pushes you or lunge a fist at you, your timing must be great, so you can keep your balance and structure intact. If someone does a movement very fast, you must be so focused, calm and relaxed that no sudden movement can take you out of your focus, calmness and mental balance.

There are many more examples one could address. But the essence is the same, the point is to try to always keep your integrity intact. Then how do you know for sure if you keep your integrity intact? You’ll know it by any slight little thing that brings you out of balance one way or the other. You will easily learn to feel when you are inside the right “zone” or not if you practice with awareness. “Integrity” can be like a feeling that everything is on the right place where it should be. The more you practice to become aware of this feeling, the more you will learn to not compromise anything that can affect your integrity.

 

 

 

 

Learning what and how – Do you evaluate what you really learn from your Tai Chi practice?

Tags

Form practice, Health, Learning, meditation, Tai Chi Practice

If you study tai chi, you learn tai chi, right? Is it that simple? Really? Sometimes it’s necessary to make things more complicated than necessary. This can make you think and help you to re-evaluate your own motifs for practicing, or make you better aware about them.

There are a whole lot of different variations of T’ai Chi out there and people have different reasons for starting to practice the art. You really must have a very strong idea about what you want to achieve and why. Otherwise, it’s all too easy to practice the art without really studying, without really learning.

First, let us return to some basic statements so we can agree about what Tai Chi is before going on with the discussion on what we actually practice when we study tai chi. First, tai chi as an art has the potential of three main fields.
These are: Studying the art
1) as a martial art/ for self defense
2) for health
3) as meditation

These are the three pillars of tai chi. I would rather say that these are not three different potential. Tai chi is the same and is one art that has the potential for three different main fields of studying. It’s one art and we don’t need to study the art very differently to study any of these areas.

Also, tai chi is an art of movement and stillness. It’s an art of the body. It’s about movement, but also about stillness. We practice slow movements, fast movements. We practice different ways of standing in postures. Some schools also believe that you should practice sitting meditation, but there are only a few schools that incorporated this way of practicing. Sitting mediation is not a prerequisite for the meditation of tai chi practice. For health practice, you don’t need to add anything outside as qigong sets. And for self defense and combat, tai chi is a complex and complete art. There’s no need to add any methods from other styles or combine tai chi with anything else.

So Tai Chi is a complete art. Yet, how we practice and what we achieve varies. Many practitioners and teachers believe that practicing the movements of the form is enough. We all practice tai chi form slowly, focused. Still there’s a difference between doing the movements and really doing them. Many practitioners just do the movements over and over again, regarding the physical movement and performance of them to be the way of development. Doing the same thing, over and over again, day out day in is this the way to develop? From health perspective, physically and mentally, together with the meditative aspects will still be good practice. But the question is, don’t you want something more? Don’t you want to explore what Tai Chi can give you? And how do you know if you are good at what you do if you don’t evaluate what you do? So many people let their teacher do the thinking for them, or don’t let anyone think at all because they practice themselves what they have learned and think that the movements of a form is all that is needed to practice. This assumption is true in some ways if you only are concerned with keeping your health as you grow older.

But as you get older, not only as you get old, but for every year, you will continue to learn and grow as a human. You will re-evaluate a lot of things in your life, get better, learn more. Don’t you want your Tai Chi to grow and develop together with you?

And above all of those three pillars, health, meditation and self-defense/martial art, there is actually something else. There is self-discovery. Without self-discovery, there is no Tai Chi and none of the three pillars. By learning more about yourself, you discover more about your Tai Chi. The more you learn about about your tai Chi, the more you learn more about yourself. But your Tai Chi is always only as good as you know yourself.