Better late than never... Indoor Rock Climbing

Once upon a time in 2013...

Modern/Contemporary wushu training usually consist plenty of lower body workouts and to keep things in proportion we (Khoi, Chris and I... everyone else was too lazy) decided to do some rock climbing while checking out each others' behind :)

Always happy and ready for any challenge.

Making sure he will still have babies later.

Making sure the knots are done correctly

He must be praying to himself up there.

Going the orange

Checking that bum out :)

Giving up :( ... nah I'm quite sure he made it all the way :)

.....After a few hours of climbing we had forearms of steel :) Great for eagle claw training!

What Is Tai Chi Anyway?

More than ten years on, I still can't recall what made me choose tai chi over wushu, but I think it could have been what it did to my mornings.  In those days, our coach Sam Gold taught a 7.30 - 9am class, and it was the first taste I'd had of how your physical condition can change your perceptions:  you'd walk in feeling like you dragged yourself out of bed just to be there, then you stretched and meditated and when you left you couldn't remember a time when you were ever tired.

That was the hook, but what pulled me in and kept me there long-term was the open-ended potential for skill development.  It's an incredibly deep martial art, and there seems to be no limit to how much you can cultivate your skills.  I can understand if this isn't the impression you have.  There are plenty of misconceptions held about tai chi, but generally these are held for fairly good reason, and without prejudice   As a martial art, it's in absolutely dire need of some better PR.  What I found was that underlying the mysticism (or 'bs', you might call it) there was a deep and quite profound effort to understand the human body and mind on their own terms.

Sick and/or Old?

People mostly think of tai chi as remedial, or at least very basic. Something people do when they're too old, injured, or inexperienced to do anything harder.  This is absolutely true, but tai chi is not a ladder you climb to reach the bare minimum of ability for a real martial art.  It's more like a spine. Fundamental skills that are completely off the radar for most martial arts are front and centre in taichi, and improving them improves everything.  Things like relaxation, balance, and breath control underpin every technique you will ever perform, but they're jumbled together and ignored, or just called 'talent'.  Or not given a name at all, and left to improve on their own while you focus on other aspects of training like learning forms and doing pushups.  Nothing in tai chi is left to chance.  Some people will need this kind of focused training more than others, but nobody is above it and everyone has room for improvement.  I needed it badly and I noticed a difference almost immediately.   

 taichi has potent anti-ageing powers

This kind of focus on the tiny details does mean there's huge potential for tai chi to become dry or boring, and I admit it's done this for me many times in the years I've trained.  Turns out that was all part of the plan, because finding a way to deal with boredom is just as important as being able to balance or throw a punch.  It takes decades to get really good at a martial art, and you won't always have a master who feeds you fascinating are carefully paced classes.  Tai chi is a daoist martial art, so while you train to maintain a receptive spontaneity in your movements, you also strive to maintain this as a state of mind.  My old master saw a tendency in me to overtrain then stagnate, so he would always tell me that aimless, random training is far better than sitting on your arse trying to come up with the perfect regimen to suit every state of mind, then failing and not training at all.  If you're sick of meditating, you should stop meditating.  Come back to it later, when you feel like meditating again.  Faced with a teacher who keeps your classes varied and dynamic, you might never realise the limits of your self-discipline, and so you would never surpass them. The only correct answer to 'how long can you hold a horse stance for?' is 'I don't know'

Relaxed, Considering the Circumstances

I said earlier on that tai chi was an effort to understand the human body and mind on their own terms.  If that stank of empty mysticism to you, I can't say I blame you.  If it was the first thing my teacher had said to me, I would have run screaming into the waiting arms of the Cobra Kai's Quicksilver Method.  All those words meant was that from day one, the goal is to become a master of using your own body, and you do that using the sense of proprioception: how your body 'appears' to your mind, based on the information your muscles and tendons receive from the effects of gravity, posture, their own tension, and so on. Basically, you're seeing the body from the mind's perspective, not the eye's perspective.   It's remarkable how many people - and not all of them beginners either - turn up to training and honestly do not know what it means to relax a muscle.  That kind of basic body awareness and control is where tai chi should start, and I think meditation is the best way to teach it.

There's a variety of ways to meditate, but I prefer standing meditation.  You stand with arms out to ensure 'good qi flow', which basically means you're in a position where you're not cutting off blood to any part of your body (like you would when kneeling).   From there, you maintain this posture and go through a series of 'stages' where you first relax your muscles, then control and regulate your breathing, your thoughts, and so on.  Maintaining a posture while you simultaneously try to be as relaxed as possible teaches you efficiency. If there's little excess tension in your muscles, you use less energy and take longer to get tired.  Yes, the stance training will make you stronger, but that's not the only reason this training will help you improve.  Outside of class, the skills you pick up meditating can help you realise when you need to get up from your desk and stretch, help you calm down if you get stressed or panicked, or keep your mind off the next episode of Banshee while you're trying to study.  The benefits of meditation increase the more you do it, and there's no real ceiling to how long you can meditate for.  Holding the stance will strengthen your muscles, but it also teaches you to discipline your mind.  

Define 'Stronger'

At the end of the day though, tai chi is a martial art.  It's not just a martial art, but the skills are useful in a fight, and that's always nice to know.  When they say 'tai chi chuan can be used to defeat a stronger opponent' your mind might go to those ludicrous demonstrations where buff guys are sent flying by a frail, maybe even crusty, old man.  I won't go right ahead and say 'these are absolute crap', because there are certain tricks of posture and balance that make it happen.  It's not likely that you'd find somebody that strong with so little awareness of balance and posture; it's absolutely possible to subtly throw somebody off balance or to rob a punch of its power by twisting out of its path... but it's rarely that dramatic.  The youtube channel 'Team WuJin' has some good stuff on this; he's a far better martial artist than I am, and he's got a lot of interesting things to say about internal styles such as tai chi.  Anyway, the point to all this is that when you say somebody is 'stronger', you're probably just thinking in terms of raw muscular power.  You'd want to know how much this person could lift, how many times, and how long it took, but this really only gives you an idea of their power in certain situations.  When you add in all the dynamics of a fight; things like angle, purchase and leverage, it's damned hard to actually put yourself in a position when you can generate power in a movement, and then deliver that power into your opponent's body.  This is fairly obvious if you're talking about throwing a punch that misses because it got blocked, but it gets a bit more interesting if you actually manage to lay your hands on somebody and find that when you try to shove them or trip them, you just can't quite get the angle right.  You give them a real shove, and they just 'disappear' like you tried to catch a bubble.

pushing hands practice

In tai chi, you train these skills with an activity called 'pushing hands'.  The most basic practice is a constant, circular exchange of pushing and yielding that takes its form and philosophy from the 'tai chi' symbol of daoism.  At at extreme of force there is weakness, and at the extreme of yielding there is a potential to create power. This is basically teaching you that if you overcommit on a punch, or hyperextend a joint, you are highly vulnerable to being thrown off balance.  If you yield, you are creating the potential to counterattack, but if you give too much groun you'll be constantly retreating, or your movement might became hard and stagnant and you'll be easy to throw off balance.  While these rules apply at the extremes of movement, they also apply at every point during a move, and as you progress in pushing hands, you might become more competitive and gradually abandon strict form as you try to unbalance your opponent at any point during the movement.  As you train, you will become more and more sensitive to subtle changes in your opponent's posture and muscular tension, and learn to exploit them.  These skills are later utilised in joint locks and more aggressive elbow and shoulder attacks.  

If I'm being perfectly frank, I have to admit that in fighting, tai chi has numerous limitations.  It does at my level, anyway.  Tai chi does really well when it's supplemented with other styles, but it is not magic - it's just physics and perhaps some human psychology - and in my experience it's mostly built for close-range fighting where you react to touch, not vision.  As an exercise philosophy though, it sets itself apart.  Tai chi starts you out at a level more fundamental that nearly anything else you'll find.  You re-learn your whole body, and develop skills that will be with you through injury and old age.   

- Ben M.