Daily training

Taijiquan was designed to be practiced daily. This is why the exercises are so mild: no strain, no pushing. Gentle effort. Little and often is the mantra.

Taijiquan students should be aiming to build strength carefully and progressively.

5 mins = £100

Imagine if you were told that 5 minutes training would earn you £100... Would you do the exercises? Of course you would.

Yet, people are told that daily home practice = good health, fitness and better quality of life... and they dismiss it. Curious?

This illustration shows how many people value an obvious monetary reward but are unwilling to appreciate the value of health, vitality and fitness.

A commitment to health

If a person was overweight and sought to diet, would one healthy meal per week enable them to lose weight?

It seems unlikely. There must be a daily commitment. Taijiquan is no different to this...

You need a good tai chi teacher to adjust your posture physically, to help calibrate your alignment, to point out where you are holding tensions, and to note any musculoskeletal imbalances. The nonverbal physical adjustments you get from your teacher help you develop a level of self-awareness not accessible through solo practice alone.

(Harvard Medical School’s Harvard Health Publication, May 2009) 

Mild cardio work

Our syllabus contains mild cardio work. Nothing strenuous but just enough to get the heart beating faster.

Breathing hard?

If you are tired and out of breath after a few minutes of exercise, then you are simply not fit enough. You must improve your fitness considerably if you want good circulation.

This means training qigong and form regularly.

Oxygenate your blood

Breathing adds oxygen to your blood stream and this helps to keep you alive and healthy. Pay attention to the act of breathing and the quality of the air.

Rather than force the breath, feel it instead. Once you can feel the air going into your body, leave the muscles alone and let your body breathe by itself.

The less you tamper with the breath, the better.

Getting stronger

You can undertake the hardship of the walk without undue difficulty. You need to use just as much energy to complete it.

Yet, your body has grown stronger. More efficient. Compared to somebody who does not undertake daily training you will be far more capable of sustained exercise.

What is condition?

Consider this example:

You decide that you are unfit and you commit to a 3 mile daily walk every morning. On the first day when you complete the walk, you are out of breath and your limbs are shaky.

After two weeks you can finish the walk without losing your breath and you feel pleasantly energised.

Eventually the walk feels too easy and you look to try a more challenging route. What has changed?

Full contact

When people say 'full contact' they are typically referring to no-holds-barred combat, unrestrained, without rules... But what do they really mean by full contact? That they hit one another?

That they use full-power?

• If you apply a break full-power then the bone will snap
• If you strike full-power then there will be internal damage or death
• If you throw full-power there will be concussion or serious injury

Our students are required to make contact, but are not permitted to use full-power under any circumstances.

Most people do not train martial arts in order to be injured or crippled. They want the ability to defend themselves in a varied, realistic manner. They do not want to get hurt in class.

 Our next induction course is Monday 6th July.

New starters are welcome!

Self defence courses

Self defence courses show a limited range of techniques designed to provide the illusion of genuine martial competence against a real life assailant...

The untrained person panics in the face of genuine threat. Their emotions take over and they freeze. A self defence course will not rid you of panic in just 3 lessons.

Such a course will give you an inflated sense of your own competence. This might prove fatal against a serious attacker.

If an instructor really feels that a youngster not yet into puberty is worthy of a black belt ranking in an art, what does that say about the sophistication and profundity of the art? What would you think of a college that awarded degrees to kids learning their multiplication tables?

The only people who were ever impressed by a black belt were the absurdly uninformed general public.

(Dave Lowry)

Conditioning

Being in condition entails:

• Increasing your strength

• Improving your ability to last (endurance)

• Overcoming fatigue 

• Being fitter

• Being more efficient in your body use

• Being more capable

• Overcoming stress

• Improving circulation

Low stances

Low stances are a throwback to a time when martial artists wore heavy body armour and fought battles in muddy fields. The urban sphere is quite another scenario altogether.

Horse stance training is about developing leg strength, not combat. Your body usage needs to feel as comfortable and as natural as possible.
This will improve mobility, attract less attention and protect your knee joints.

If you cannot get power from an everyday standing position, you are overly dependent upon the hips and the solidity of your base. Whole-body movement generates power in a wave-like fashion.

A low stance is simply redundant.

Wushu

The modern off-shoot of Chinese martial arts is called 'wushu'. It combines martial art-style movements, gymnastics, acrobatics and dance choreographed to look exciting.

Wushu is all about aesthetics, theatrical displays and entertainment.

Traditional martial arts are not a performance art, nor are they sport.

Name-dropping

Some tai chi people love to 'name-drop'. They travel to see all manner of visiting masters and add them to their tai chi curriculum vitae.

Collecting forms and snippets of information is a popular pastime in tai chi.
What can you really learn from one workshop or a weekend seminar? Is a visiting expert really going to bare his secrets to a room of total strangers?

Be honest about this. Training with a renowned expert in no way translates to mean that you have been given that person's skill. Do not be naive.

The only proof of skill lies with the individual. What can you personally do? Your master may be brilliant at tai chi but you might be lousy.

Similarly, your instructor may be mediocre yet your skills are excellent.

Slow martial art

External martial art schools frequently add tai chi to their syllabus because it attracts students seeking something more relaxing.

Unfortunately, these classes often have no understanding of tai chi whatsoever. Instead of tai chi, they offer slow-motion movement. And that's it.

The tai chi principles are completely absent and the instructor is unaware of their existence. It may as well be a karate class practiced in slow-motion.

This is not tai chi, regardless of what is advertised.

Judging

(i) Hidden

Chinese martial arts were usually a family or village system used for self defence. Sharing with outsiders was not encouraged.
Tai chi was designed specifically to hide the applications and skills within an innocuous-seeming range of forms, drills and exercises.


(ii) Feeling

Tai chi skill can only be determined by how it feels. Martial arts are hands-on.
If your tai chi is generating the effect using the correct means, then this will be physically evident when you partner up with somebody else.
The very definition of 'jing' is somebody else's experience of your tai chi.


(iii) The Tai Chi Classics

Tai chi must adhere to the tai chi principles. Given the internal nature of tai chi, many of these cannot be gauged through observation.


(iv) Aesthetics

The danger with aesthetic concerns is that the context is askew.
People look for particular alignment considerations based on how nice they look instead of determining how they add to your ability to generate jing.
Tai chi is a living, breathing martial art in the hands of the right person. Arbitrary aesthetics will rob the practice of any viable self defence application.

Qigong in tai chi

A tai chi beginner is not adept with tai chi so they need to do a lot of qigong. It provides the necessary fitness benefits by serving as a stopgap pending higher level tai chi skill.

An advanced student starts practicing the round form version of the Long Yang form. This increases the fitness benefits of form; allowing them to spend less time training qigong.

Neigong replaces qigong as the primary source of power. An expert is more adept with higher level tai chi skill, so they only do a small amount of qigong.

There is simply no need to stand for an extended duration since greater benefits can be gained through whole-body movement.