Tai chi chuan (taijiquan) is, despite appearances to the contrary a Chinese martial art. The Chinese have always been very serious about their martial arts training. For centuries your martial skills would be all you had to protect yourself your family and your home from attack. So you would seek out the finest teachers you could afford and train religiously. Also the martial arts training enabled those who could afford to train in them to gain and maintain a level of health and fitness that few people in the West even today could ever hope to attain. What’s more, this is a type of health and fitness that lasted virtually the whole of your life.
A lot of Western exercise isn’t actually all that good for you. This is why so many professional sportspeople retire in their forties. Their bodies simply can’t cope with the stresses of their sport any more. They’ve been torn apart by overly intense training.
Chinese martial arts is different. A lot of emphasis is put on training the body how to relax and let go of its tension. In this way it lasts a lot longer, doesn’t waste energy, enables more efficient and powerful movement and it also helps a lot with both physical and mental health issues. It’s not uncommon for Chinese masters in their seventies or eighties to be more powerful than they were when they were in their thirties.
Chinese martial arts training involves learning fundamental skills.
Firstly you learn exercises to free up your body of tension so that could move more easily and gain greater levels of flexibility.
You then learn to develop and coordinate a wide range of movement skills. Each of these would be practiced and drilled endlessly at different speeds and with different variations. These wouldn’t be drilled mindlessly but with full awareness of your balance, your posture, how the body connected together to deliver power and so on. You would also learn how to use and adapt these skills to a wide range of attack and defence scenarios.
At the same time you learn static postures that would develop a strong internal structure around which your muscles could relax. This relaxation training was of paramount importance. These exercises would both teach you to let go of your tensions and strengthen the body at the same time. Every part of you would relax down and be fully supported by the ground. Then any move you make would be fully connected to the earth so that it would contain extraordinary power. This is a more natural and effective way of absorbing and delivering power than any form of weight training.
You would learn to breathe more slowly and deeply to be able to relax your whole body more fully and deliver energy and vitality to every part of the body. Your stamina and energy levels would go through the roof.
Finally you would learn a sequence of movements that would bring together all the skills you had patiently learned over many years. This form would act as an aide memoire to help you practice and develop the skills you had trained over many years.
Unfortunately Westerners have seen the health and vitality that many senior Chinese martial artists possess and seen them performing the sequence of movements of a form. They concluded that if they too could learn that sequence of movements then they would also be as fit, flexible and powerful as the Chinese were. They are unaware that the form represents just the tip of the iceberg. Underneath that tip lies many years of patient training in a wide range of skills and practices.
It is common practice now for many so-called tai chi teachers to just learn a set of movements and be ‘qualified’ to teach those movements with no real idea of how to do them properly, how to adapt them, how to use them in combat or even to use them to improve your posture, balance, breathing, root, energy flow or a dozen other things.
Schools that stick rigidly to learning a form are missing out on so much of the art. Each form movement represents just one way of doing that movement but those ways have become solidified over time to represent the way of doing it. They are nothing of the kind. Unless you fully understand what each movement does and how to adapt it you can never call what you do a martial art. And if tai chi isn’t a martial art then what is it?
So don’t focus on the forms. Learn to train the movements, understand the difference between yin training and yang training, work with your breathing, train to focus your mind and then start to bring all of this together in a single movement that you fully understand. Then add another movement and another. Eventually you will start to understand on a far deeper level that which you claim to study or teach. Never be afraid to experiment as that is how you will learn. Take nobody’s word as gospel but learn to test everything yourself.
Tai chi chuan, when trained properly and fully understood is still a highly effective martial art. It is unique in the way that it uses the concepts of yin and yang to develop power in the body. If you don’t understand that then you don’t understand tai chi chuan and have no business teaching it. The yin yang element is literally the signature of tai chi chuan.