As you can see, it’s important to fit your training into your life, and the local park provides many different training opportunities.

As it says in the Tai Chi Classic,

“In motion the whole body should be light and agile, 
with all parts of the body linked 
as if threaded together.”

Obviously you need to be light and agile to keep your balance while stepping on this childrens’ ride. Lightness and agility are important qualities that need to be trained in Tai Chi, and always practicing on a perfectly flat wooden floor of a dojo, or the flat concrete of a patio won’t help you. I strongly advocate training the form on a variety of surfaces, both even and uneven, sloping, staggered and even moving, as shown here! Also, it never hurts to have a little fun time with your kids

Credit: Image courtesy of www.marriedtothesea.com

This blog post is written after reading Scott Phillips’ excellent account of his encounter of pushing hands with another notable Tai Chi blogger… Tabby Cat here.

Interesting post. It reminds me a lot of all the (sometimes depressing) Tai Chi push hands encounters I’ve had with other practitioners. I think the problem is that everybody has a different view of Push hands than everybody else, and these encounters always end up in ‘passive aggressive smiling through gritted teeth’ ideological stand-offs.

My push hands seems to be a lot freer than other people’s. I’m not a fan of this idea that ‘you lose if you move your foot’. As the author says, if your training this as a martial art that’s an absurd conclusion to come to, also moving a foot is yielding, should we not yield now in the art of yielding to force and overcoming it?

But I can also see the value of attribute training.

It comes down to push hands being a useful vehicle for a teacher to use to get across their teaching to a student, but an essentially useless vehicle to test a stranger’s skills out. Sadly it seems to be used for the later all the time!

I don’t know what the solution is. I’m trying to come up with something called GPF Push hands, which is a rule set that will allow for an actual test of skill. (Humorously known as Ground Path Free Push Hands). It’s still a work in progress and the main issue to overcome is ‘what makes this different to wrestling?’

Anyway, you can see a few of my videos of GPF Approved Basic Techniques at:

http://www.YouTube.com/macmus98

A field of silk pyjamas

Here’s an interesting quote I read recently:

“Chinese Martial Arts people are looking for 100% perfection, but staying in elementary school all along.” – John Wang

You might expect me to defend Tai Chi Chuan against such a stinging attack, but I actually think the author has a point, and something needs to be done about it.

In Tai Chi Chuan we have the form, which is typically learnt first, then you move onto push hands, possibly a year after starting your training. At this point your form is by no means “finished” – you’ve just started refining it really. Some styles have neikung exercises to learn and then there’s weapons forms, and possibly more hand forms. It’s a big old chunk of learning just getting to the end of the forms in most styles, and remember, if you want to do things traditionally and learn the proper long form, it can take up to half an hour to perform it once!

To reach any kind of standard in Tai Chi Chuan you really need to practice the form every day. It’s a bit like swimming upstream. If you stop paddling the current just takes you back downstream. It requires an awful lot of time to progress, especially when compared to other martial arts. Worse, you risk never actually moving on to learning how to apply your martial arts because you’ve got so much to do just maintaining a standard in all your forms! It’s very easy to slip into the habit of staying in ‘elmentary school’ all your life.

Compare this to somebody learning MMA, Judo or Jiu Jitsu. There are very few (if any) forms, you start with techniques on a partner straight away from day one.

I think the point is to be honest about what you’re training, the level of intensity you’re working at and have a realistic view of what you’re hoping to achieve from it all. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that because you can unbalance people in push hands you can ‘fight’. if you want to be able to hold your own in those sorts of environments then you need to be training in a way that most Tai Chi purists would dismiss as ‘low level’ or ‘external’.

Globalisation and the ‘Internal Alchemy’ in Chinese Martial Arts:The Transmission of Taijiquan to Britain

Yang Cheng Fu performing the Single Whip posture.

Single Whip is one of the most recognisable yet least understood postures in any Tai Chi form. I think the confusion arrises from the name. Hearing “whip” most people think of an Indiana Jones style whip – a strip of leather or cord fastened to a handle. Add to this the phrase “whipping power” that’s often used to describe the type of force used in many Chinese Martial Arts and you get people trying to use the Single Whip posture as a strike that’s like a whip crack. Worse you also see them trying to use the beak-like rear hand to strike with, but more of that later.

Let’s try and solve this mystery.

Personally, I don’t think Tai Chi does use a whipping type of power at all – not in the same way that other Chinese martial arts, like Choy Lee Fut, for example, do. Choy Lee Fut genuinely does use a whipping power – the arms whip out, somewhat wildly, powered by the turning motions of the waist and body, but that’s not the same as Tai Chi movement.  When you ‘whip’ the arms out in this manner you give up control of them for a brief moment, so they’re moving independently. In the  Tai Chi classic by Wu Yuxian it says:

“Remember, when moving, there is no place that does not move.
When still, there is no place that is not still.”

It’s not possible to stop a whipping motion like this, once it’s started, which means it’s not really Tai Chi Chuan, at least not in my book.

Here’s the deal: The ‘whip’ mentioned in the name of the Tai Chi posture isn’t a flexible whip, as you’d imagine it was – it’s more like a stick. If you think about it not all whips are flexible – take a riding crop, for instance. The posture is called Single Whip because the finishing posture looks like somebody carrying a yoke, but only on one side, hence the “Single”.

The Chinese have used yokes – sticks carried across the shoulders and back – to transport good since ancient times. Buckets are usually hung from the ends of the yoke. Here’s a picture from a historical website of an 1860′s Chinese gold digger, starting for work with his tools suspended from a yoke on his shoulders.

Now take a look at this illustration of a Chinese man carrying a yoke with just one hand on the yoke:

That’s starting to look very like Tai Chi’s Single Whip posture, isn’t it?

The ‘whip’ could also be used as a weapon in Chinese Marital Arts. Again, it was usually referring to a short stick, not a flexible whip. In the excellent “Chinese Martial Arts Training Manuals”  by Brian Kennedy and Elizabeth Guo you’ll find a description of a book called “Tiger Tail Whip” by Jiang Rong Qiao published in 1930. It features a “long routine for the metal tiger tail ‘whip’, which is rigid and actually amounts to a type of cane.”

In English the words ‘Single Whip’ cause an understandable confusion. The name is simply an aid to memory for the visual shape of the posture, and it’s not meant to be a clue to how you use it.

And the beak-like hand? It’s simply a stylised version of a grab to the opponents wrist. It’s more elegant to make your finger tips touch your thumb when you perform the form, and it reminds you that this is a wrist grab. A simple application of the Yang style version of Single Whip is to grab one of their wrists and pull it in one direction, while striking them in the face with your other hand. There’s nothing mysterious there, either!