Recently there have been a few clips online of people applying Tai-Chi in a realistic way, as in demonstrating skill against a reasonably non-compliant opponent. They are useful clips to watch even if you are not interested in the martial side of Tai-Chi as they give you a good idea of the body use Tai-Chi engenders and a practical demonstration of 'internal power' beyond the simple 'throw my own student through the air' demos.







This last one is worth it for the flares alone:

I have a bit of a love/hate with coach Scott Sonnon. On the one hand he is obviously skilled and I generally agree with most of the things he says, on the other hand he chooses to say and sell it using the relentless marketing patter of the American infomerical and has the habit of inventing new buzz words and ad speak (my favourite was 'Weaponizing your Architecture', or 'using any part of your body to strike' in English) to market stuff as 'the best thing since the last best thing'.

Saying that....I found yesterday that he has put a large chunk of his 'intu-flow' (see what I mean?) system on youtube for nowt. I first came across the intial incarnation of this years ago when he was selling it as 'Warrior Wellness' and I liked it then (as long as you turned the sound down to shut him up) it seems he has developed and improved it and as I said I may not like his manner but I do like his exercises.

This is the first part, you should be able to double click on the youtube vid below to open it in a new window and find the rest of it.

Below is an excerpt from a longer interview found here of the now sadly deceased Mike Martello, I think it sums up my attitude to teaching and learning exactly:

Wang approaches his students as training partners. All he wants to do is practice and by practicing he gets better. So by building and growing together we foster this intense dynamic of teacher and student, where really there is no teacher or student, everyone is the teacher and the student. Wang Laoshi is the first to tell anyone that he is just a student practicing, and will be forever. I have never seen the man tell someone how to do something, he is there showing them how to do something! It is inspirational to get tossed around by an 80 year old man with this outlook on training.

Once you start teaching people there is a real danger that fear can start to creep in, fear of looking bad in front of your students, fear that you won't live up to their expectations of you. I go out of my way to break that illusion as much as I can, I have a certain level of knowledge and skill otherwise I wouldn't feel I have the right to be teaching, but I'm forever going to be a student and because of that I'm always trying to push myself, to try out new ideas, be honest with my failings and most importantly sometimes cock things up. I'm sure that I've lost some students because I don't try to cultivate an air of mystique, but any teacher that does that is lying to his students and more importantly lying to themselves.

So things have been a bit quiet on the blogging front for a bit, but I'm going to try and get back to making regular posts. The videos below are of a contempory of mine in the Zhong-Ding traditional chinese martial arts organisation, Ken Mead, I reccomend them to any of my students who're trying to remember any of the warm up exercises we do or the beginning of the form.

This new blog by martial artist Jake Burroughs is worth a look, thoughtful posts and a nice writing style.

http://www.threeharmonies.blogspot.com/

Though Tai-Chi was and is primarily a martial art it's beauty is that because it places so much inital emphasis on relaxation and intellegent movement it has lots of benifits outside of it's origional remit as a method of self defense. I can honestly saying that I'm fitter, stronger and more flexible now in my mid 30's than I was when I took up Tai-Chi in my early 20's. Am I ageless, able to run up walls and blessed with a perfect body befret of disease and postural imbalances? Far from it (yes you can stop laughing at the back there) but if I compare the way I move and feel now to that of my 20 year self it feels like I'm thinking of a different person.

And I'm still learning. That's important, everytime I come back to The Form or I go through a basic exercise I find something I haven't noticed before, some nuance that shed new light or takes me down another ally. I'm proud to say that in Tai-Chi I know no masters, I just know many endlessly enthusitic students. Some have been walking the path far longer than me and like to share their expierence and others are just taking their first tentative steps on their own journey, one that will last as long as they do.

That's what I've got the most out of Tai-Chi, that for me is it's main health benfit, an activity with seemingly bottomless riches which will inform and inspire me and many others until we cease to be.

For those wanting more concrete information on the health benfits of Tai-Chi then the articles below make fro interesting reading.

http://www.osteoporosistreatment.co.uk/tai-chi-prevent.php
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/tai-chi/SA00087
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/03/070323105002.htm
http://www.williamccchen.com/Medical%20Studies.htm

Good article about martial arts training by Matt Thornton of the Straight Blast Gym. Also has a lot of relavence to life my previous post.

http://www.straightblastgym.com/newbook.htm

Probably the hardest thing to deal with when we are in any new situation is our expectation. You run into it in many forms in Tai-Chi, when you first start a class there's your expectation of what a class will be and how a teacher should act, if you stay with it long enough to begin to teach there is the expectation of what your students should be doing and how you are teaching them and finally, the worst one of all, there's the expectations you have of yourself.

The thing is none of these expectations will ever play out in reality exactly how you think they should, because at the end of the day they are just stories in our heads, stories about the reality of our experience not the experience itself. This is why we can tie ourselves in knots trying to make the world match the one in our heads, because we've essentially got it the wrong way around, we are trying to make reality fit our ideas when really we should make our ideas fit our reality.

This is not to say we shouldn't have goals or aims, goals and aims are good. They give us a focus, they make us channel our energy into something constructive instead of letting it dissipate in too many directions. However before we can set ourselves a realistic and achievable goal we have to have a realistic and non judgemental idea of our starting position.

In Tai-Chi there are four main 'energies' that we deal with, Ting-Jing or listening energy, Dong Jing or understanding energy, Hua Jing or neutralizing energy and Fa Jing or emitting energy.

Of the four energies the first two are the ones appropriate here. Ting-Jing could also be translated as sensitivity, it is not listening with the ears but rather developing a keen kenisthological sense of our own body/mind and how they operate as a unit. It is trained in Tai-Chi first in solo exercises and The Form and then expanded in partner exercises, as the Tai-Chi maxim goes 'first understand yourself and then understand others'. You first learn to listen to your own movements and responses and then extend that sensitivity outwards to understand anothers movement and responses, looking inward to learn how to look outward.

From Ting-Jing comes Dong-Jing or understanding, once you can listen you begin to understand and the more you understand the more you can listen. This understanding however must be 'rooted' in concrete experience and trial and error, and this leads us back to the beginning of the article, we can never have understanding if we do not have listening. Our expectations, our hopes and dreams can never be realistically achievable if they are not grounded in shifting nature of our lives.      
   

American Zen teacher and monk Brad Warner is interviewed in the link below. I really like his writing it manages to convey a lot of wisdom and useful advice while at the same time confounding the perceived image of what a Zen Monk should be like. Almost all of what he says is equally applicable to the worlds of Tai-Chi and Yoga.

http://psychjourney.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=435676

 

This is a really good article on the importance and technique of standing post, goes into a quite detailed but easy to understand explanation using western terminology.

http://www.yiquan.org.uk/art-pom1.html

One of the 'party tricks' of Tai-Chi is a seemingly impossibly powerful push that sends someone flying with seemingly minimal effort. When you first see it it can appear almost magical, but when you break it down it's just the application of certain principles done in a subtle and clever way. Looking at examples of this on youtube it's possible to break down some of the ways this power is generated and used.

If we first look at a clip of Chen-Man Ching used on an old UK TV programme on martial arts. The man being interviewed in the clip is Robert Smith, now in case you're thinking 'he's let himself go a bit' this Robert Smith is not the lead singer of popular 80's miserablists The Cure, rather he's an old school Martial Artist well known for popularizing Chinese martial arts in general and Cheng Man Ching in particular in the west. The bit of the video we're interested in for this article is at about 1.07. You see Cheng Man Ching doing some push hands patterens with a student who he then suddenly sends flying. If you watch the slow motion replay carefully you'll see a couple of important points. Firstly the timing, just before he pushes he steps in between the guys legs, so that as the guy pushes he's 'stolen his root' or dropped his centre of gravity slightly lower than the students so that he has control of it. Secondly he uses his right arm in the classic 'ward off' position firstly as a way of hiding his movement (with his arm relaxed the student can't feel him close the gap slightly with a step) and secondly it gives him the space he needs to fold inwards with the push allowing the kinetic to compress his muscles and then release with an explosive force (the arm has to be relaxed, tension would give away any movement and give a lever to the rest of the body). In essence he is storing the energy of the attack in his body and then releasing it back as a push.

    


Another clip here is of some Spanish Tai-Chi players running through some similar exercises, note again on most occasions before the other guy is sent flying the teacher will slightly move in to take the students centre. Another thing to note is that he will first move in one direction to load the movement before releasing in the other (so he'll move down before he goes up or back before he goes forward, sometimes only very slightly). 


Finally to see some of these principles in a more un -cooprative environment this is footage of a push hands competition in Tiawan. Notice how the guys in the white t-shirts (who are quite frankly kicking everyone elses arse) position their feet and use similar techniques to the other clips to take their oppoents centre of gravity before throwing them.




As a PS none of the above should be mistaken for the clip below which is just the product of suggestable students and a deluded or manipulative teacher.

The head honcho of my Tai-Chi organisation Nigel Sutton posts a newletter once a month(ish) on the main Zhong Ding site. The December one is particularly worth a read:

http://www.zhong-ding.com/news200812.html.

I bought a swiss ball or stability ball recently, mainliy because I wanted to do some balance and stomach exercises with it. However while doing some research on possible exercises I came across some Brazilian Ju-Jistsu drills that utilise the ball in a novel way.




And also this guy



I've been playing around with these ideas (and falling on my arse all over the living room, it's like being 5 again) but I've also started playing around with similar ideas standing up, using the ball against a wall while practising push hands drills. It seems to work really well because the movement is fluid and the rebound of the ball gives you feedback into your body, so you can check your body position as you move. It's early days yet and I'll keep you posted as to any progress.

When you first start Tai-Chi you'll often go through the form stopping at each move while the teacher goes around the class adjusting your posture or moving your arms and legs. Each new move has an often strange name, fist under elbow, step back to repulse Monkey or snake creeps down and as you progress you can spend ages adjusting your posture so the arm feels just right or the leg has just enough weight before you move onto the next move.

This is fine right at the beginning when you are suddenly finding your arms and legs are not as co-ordinated as you thought they where and you're struggling to mimic the shape your teacher is making. However as the form unfolds it is important not to get too attached to end shape of each movement because in reality it is the transition between the moves that is important. Each move is an expression of that transition, not a culmination, as soon as one move becomes manifest it flows away into the next move and the next and the next like a wave forming and breaking in an ocean.

The names are anchors, points of reference, to give form to The Form, however we are ultimately aiming to use that form as a stepping stone towards formlessness, where we the structure of movement becomes so integrated and natural it appears seamless.

This concept is also applicable to Tai-Chi as a whole. It is good to have a goal, something to motivate us and give structure (form) to our practice, however if we concentrate totally on that end result, say learning The Form or becoming a master, and keep looking forward at this thing on the horizon then we are completely missing the process of getting there, the process where we are actually doing all the learning and having all the experience.

Most people equate tai-Chi with slow movements however this is just the inital stages, once a student can move slowly correctly then the speed and power of the movements can be increased without losing the essential structure (this is the internal bit of internal martial arts).

The clip below is my teachers, teacher Nigel Sutton performing the Fast Tai Chi form at the opening of his new training hall in Malaysia. Notice the vibrating or shaking at the end of each move, this is known as Fa-Jing or short force. It's a speciality in Tai-Chi, whole body strength concentrated within a very small movement. 

This is a nice example of a Tai-Chi form, it's traditional Yang Style so is the longer version of the form I teach and has some stylistic differences however all the principles are there (notice how he uses his legs and hips).



You don't have to do the form that low all the time but it helps strengthen legs, increase blood flow and the constant compression and release builds the polymetric strength (see earlier post) that allows tai-chi masters to send people flying with seemingly tiny movements. 

I've had the pleasure of Training with  Master Lau Kim Hong on a number of occasions and it has always been a pleasure. He is a wealth of Tai-Chi knowledge and sets an example to all of us in his constant enthusiasm, inquiry and practice which sees no sign of waining even though he must be now into his mid to late 70's.

For a full bio click here go to the Zhong-Ding website.

These are 3 short videos of him teaching some of my contemporaries from Zhong-Ding in Malaysia earlier this year:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3   

I'm always very reticent when it comes to talking about chi in terms of Tai-Chi, the question sometimes comes up and my answers are usally deliberately vague, the reason for this is two fold.

Firstly Chi is a much abused word in the west, it has been misappropriated by all manner of people and used and abused totally out of context. This means that many people already have a muddled conception of Chi in their minds that would distort any explanation I could give. Secondly the word is much used and abused in it's native China, it's meaning has evolved and changed over the years and it's used, often with completely different meanings, in disciplines as far apart as faith healing and martial arts.

On the other hand (and this is where those preconceptions have the potential to come into play) I do not dismiss it outright. Tai-Chi players of the past were often pragmatic and down to earth people and yet the writings of Tai-Chi are full of references to chi, it is my belief and experience that when they talk of say 'sinking the chi to dan-tien' or 'threading the chi through the body' they are talking about real bodily and mental sensations using terminology familiar to their time it is us looking at their teachings out of context and through the distorted lense of history that heap mystical and magical meaning on to them.

When I was a child and I watched my Dad drive a car I marveled at how he new when to change gear, I remember asking him on numerous occasions how he could do this amazing feat. "You can just feel when" is all he'd say.

Now I could imagine what it was like to be able to feel when the gears needed to change, I could form a detailed picture in my mind of what it must be like to have this mystical 'feeling' and how I'd 'just know', but of course when I actually learnt how to drive I found it was nothing like I'd how I'd imagined it to be and actually is now something I could do with my eyes closed (not that I've obviously ever tried, being in a moving car and all). Chi is something like that we have to leave our expectations and ideas behind and just practice, eventually the meaning will become apparent and you'll know when you get it, but I can grantee it will be nothing like what you imagine it's going to be.         

If you come to any of my classes, I will at some point start banging my drum about the hips and how to use them. They are for me one of the most important parts of the body when it comes to Tai-Chi, mostly because they are effectively the bridge between the upper and lower body and any tensions or imbalances there will radiate out into the whole of our posture. If we want to begin to develop the whole body useage that is the cornerstone of Tai-Chi practice then we really need to develop an experiential understanding of this area.

The article linked to below is by Tai-Chi teacher Sam Masich, it's a really concise and well written article which describes in layman's terms how the hip works and why it's important to not just Tai-Chi but correct body use in general. 

http://www.sammasich.com/index.php?content_id=1128&main_menu_id=2

The bits that stand out for me are:

The hips should always move as a natural consequence of actions initiated in the legs. Since they have no mechanism by which to move in and of themselves, it is an error to think that we move from our hips. Like a tree being swayed by the wind, the hips are caused to move

and

Movement through the hip-track will carry the waist and the upper body passively leaving them free to undertake other actions with the security of a solid base. The range of movement is quite conservative and is accurate only when the joints are possessed of real relaxation.  (emphasis mine)

If you come to one of my classes one of the first things we'll do after some gentle warm up is stand still in postures know as Zhan Zhuang or Standing Post. For a culture that equates exercise to sweating a lot standing still with our knees bent and our arms in the air may seem a tad strange, however most traditional martial arts have some kind of stance based training within there basic repertoire.

Standing post works on many levels. Firstly there is the physical, by removing all other distractions and movement and by giving clear rules for posture the exercise allows the student to begin to form an understanding of what a balanced posture feels like and how to achieve it. Simultaneously by holding the arms in certain raised positions and breathing using the whole of the rib cage (in breath begins with the expansion of the belly and ends at the collar bones then reverses on the out breath) we are working the core postural muscles through dynamic tension. Finally in the physical sense we are strengthening the legs and developing a whole body sense of 'root', a core Tai-Chi principle where we can use our body alignment to absorb force into, or express force out of the ground.

Secondly there is the mental side, standing post is boring and if you hold it for long periods of time it hurts! These two things tend to make us do one of two things, we either grit our teeth and bear it (tensing the body and fighting the discomfort in an attempt to muscle it out) or we run from it (mentally not physically, in the sense we start thinking this will be over soon, daydreaming we are somewhere else or imagining nasty things happening to the teacher for making you do this stupid exercise!). Neither of these two options are useful as they are both examples of what the martial artist Tim Cartmell calls 'conscious conflict', where the mind is divided against itself, fighting or running from the current situation as opposed to embracing and accepting it.

Instead what we are doing with the Standing Post is trying to cultivate an open and accepting awareness of sensation, we are learning to live with pain and discomfort in a controlled setting (because ultimately it up to the individual when we choose to stop) and becoming comfortable with it's presence, learning from it instead of running from it.

Finally here are two clips giving examples of some of the things I've mentioned above.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SH8zd28lM5E (can't embed this one).

I like this guys stuff on Youtube, the application is a little contrivied but you can see in this and his other videos that he has amazing body mechanics, plus when you compare his size to that ot the students he's practising with it's pretty impressive.

Though it may be hard to understand how he can get the guy to fly through the air with seemingly little effort he's not using any mystical energy, Tai-Chi practice builds plyometric strength that gives:

One of the Yoga teachers I've trained with over the years, Peter Blackaby, uses the term 'finding the edge' when talking about postures. This is a important concept to grasp when talking about the learning of any skill, but is especially important when we talk about a physical one.

The edge in question is that thin grey area in practice where we are just pushing the limit of our comfort zone but we haven't gone so far as to lose the integrity of what we are practicing, so we are learning our limit and pushing it but we are not overextending our capabilities and damaging ourselves physically.

However the problem most of us have is that firstly we don't know where the edge is and secondly we wouldn't notice it if it came and bit us on the backside. Even if we think Cartesian Dualism is an Eastern European heavy metal band we have grown up in a culture saturated in its concepts. Here the mind is king and the communication between it and the body is one way, we are so used to telling the body what to do that it will go out of it's way to accommodate our commands without regard for its own safety.

So the first task is to start listening, listening to the messages that your muscles are sending, often noticing their stiffness and unresponsive nature for the first time, and gradually forming a mental picture through the feedback of the movement as to which parts of the body are helping, which are hindering and which are just plain not there.

This is why Tai-Chi and Yoga can seem very slow at the start, we take everything down to very small integrated movements and we gradually build from the bottom up, making sure our movements are built on foundations of stone and not sand. Gradually increasing speed, adding complexity and upping intensity until we can still feel the same bodily unity while moving quickly that we can when performing the most basic exercise.

This is why in my classes I try to emphasize the underlying principles and not just learning the rote moves of the form, pretty hand waving is nothing but pretty hand waving if you don't gradually build an understanding with firm foundations. Our practice is the gradual process of finding the edge of the each movement and incrementally pushing it back.