The Latest Pushing Hands Workshop was September 19th, 2008
My thanks to
Scott White and his
Personal Training Zone
4022 South 2700 East
Salt Lake City, UT 84124
(801) 596-7035We do push hands in most classes, and the next Full Pushing Hands Workshop is in March 2009.
- Single Pushing Hands
- Double Pushing Hands
- Corner Pushing Hands
Done well, with firmness and structure, elasticity and sensitivity, balance and timing, each Pushing Hands Drill provides insight into body-mind movements. Inspire strength and expire fear-reactions to grasp and hone these drills.
Each one compounds on the lessons of the others and integrates into a fluid-flowing, combat-training system. They provoke awareness. Breath deepens, body structures strengthen, and movement sophisticates, through repetition in each drill, stimulating potent healing potential.
Single Pushing Hands
“If you learn nothing else, learn Ward-Off (Peng)” suggests a Classic Taiji Writer. And indeed, Single Pushing Hands teaches Ward-Off-By-Lifting-Upward. A great reality and powerful metaphor, this concept develops strength and sensitivity in the resisting arm — through resistance. First and foremost, train the Ward-Off with a firm structure to produce strength in the tissues of the warding arm.
Push firmly toward the opponents center, and resist steadily throughout the pushing motion. Train this repetitive motion until arm muscles tire, ache, and weaken, then notice core body muscules participating and guiding; wear out that arm long enough to feel the core. This gross motion becomes subtle as one gains enough structural strength to resist with less and less mental effort. The body begins to feel, through and beyond tensions, resisting minimally, exactly where necessary. The body begins to read the opponent’s force trajectories, smiling with just the right amount of tension. Fascia and tendons and ligaments gain tensile strength through repetition.
Make sure that the opponent pushes with force. We work this until feet ache.
Mental applications include employing the metaphoric Ward-Off-By-Lifting-Upward by complimenting an aggressor’s sparky attitude or revering a superior’s lovely helm (or hairdo). No sarcasm necessary, Ward-Off-By-Lifting-Upwards is an honest, if difficult to find, lifting of another’s spirit to Ward-Off their offensiveness. Be sturdy (feet firmly planted) and nimble (use a small stance, stepping-quickly) to line this up.
Double Pushing Hands
In this drill, switch the role of Ward-Off from resistant-structure to sensitive-reader. Lu — Rolling Back — becomes our hammer of resistance. We learned structural strength in Single Pushing Hands, and we apply that knowledge to our Luey arm, resisting right at the elbow side of the forearm. Use subtleties of Warding to guide the opponent’s force into your bashing forearm; Roll-Back that bashing arm to slam the opponent’s force the other way. This gross motor function, while repetitively applied to real force, sensitizes and sophisticates.
Coordinate the limbs with twisting the waist and coiling the legs. Go deeper into the finesse of Lu, until that Luey arm slips past the opponent’s projected force and reveals a hidden, potent strike.
Employ An (Press) and Ji (Squeeze) to strike at your opponent: give real force! Take turns learning to protect yourselves from aggressive energies: force. If one refuses to throw, push, punch, or strike out, one neglects to properly train your partners. Give your training partners something to dodge, to resist, and to circumvent. Get close enough and attempt to really pummel him or her, and she or he will learn fast.
Non-physical applications include guiding (peng) your tyrant boss into bragging about his offensive nature, then (lu: gross action) pound them with legal or social consequences, or (lu: more sophisticated) slip past as your tyrannical enemies find themselves in the midst of social blunders or critical, career-disrupting errors.
Corner Pushing Hands
Traditionally utilized to correct our errors and mistakes, this drill dives into close-range fighting. Though we learn peculiar and easy stepping methods in the previous drills, Single and Double Pushing Hands allow us to remain standing in place. Corner Pushing Hands —Da Lu— insists on circling into and out of cornered positions.
More like Slamming Bodies than Pushing Hands, Corner Pushing teaches shoulder slams and elbow strikes and jerk-pulls and twists (and shouts) and bend-backwards and slapping. More overt attack methods, revolving in spiro-graphic circling circles, wrapping tighter and tighter, this drill is fun and exciting. If it’s to correct our errors — it’s the error of boredom! This fantastic and necessary close-range method is pounds of fun.
Internal applications include learning to be vulnerable near anyone: even enemies or big, bad meanies. When a venomous, dangerous person lurks nearby, a Corner-Drill Practitioner can be even closer, knowing that the eye of the storm entitles some kind of safety, some measure of control in the midst of an otherwise chaotic, incoherent mess.
Do you know what I mean?
Josh Young
August 30th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
Mr. Smith do you teach the single and double push hands with linear forward and backward stepping?
Also is your push hands (not da-lu) based upon the Grasp the Sparrows Tail sequence from the Yang form?
Steven Smith
August 30th, 2008 at 10:08 pm
Josh, please call me Steven.
Forward and backward: a touchy bit. I will teach it with single push hands as a way to reflexively lift the ward-off arm for protection. In double-pushing, we learn to step around, laterally, as in the drill goats-butting (which we’ll try on at the workshop). Also, change-step stepping works here, as it doesn’t matter (like it does in single push) which foot is forward.
We don’t want to learn (nor will I teach) to step back when being attacked.
When attacked, attack first! Two-man-saw drills cut self-defense right out of tai chi. Two-man-saws are good for: getting a sense of where your space ends, where your safety zone is. That’s it!
Push hands, especially single, should eventually feel like lateral motion, not back and forth. By shifting laterally, we create forward-like motion in both attack (push) and defense (ward off). Oh - of course, we employ the little, bus-stop, waiting-in-line, power stance. There’s barely a front or back foot, but there’s always a left and right foot.
The sequence of grasp swallows tail is different than in pushing hands, and the hands and arms do different applications. Peng, Lu, An, Ji (with two neutral bits) in Pushing Hands; Double Peng, Lu, Ji, Sit Back, An in GST. In the form we’re slamming and hammering, poking and cutting, slamming, squeezing, jamming, and twisting (in that order), peculiar and specific pressure points. Methods change as form experience progresses.
In the pushing game, we develop principles of structure, sensitivity, and timing. When we fine tune it we begin to see holes (empty spots) in our own and another’s structure, motion, and timing.
The sequence is a key to unlocking pushing hands; I think that’s it’s not taught because 1. it’s difficult to learn and 2. it’s tough to teach. I go right for the first advanced stage of pushing hands: hinge arm used in for Lu. Once you get this sequence, you’re on your way in a legitimate internal martial and healing art.
We vary speeds, pressure, intensity, seriousness, and fun throughout the practice. Inevitably though, some consistency drives deep sensations and blossoms inner awareness.
It’s a brilliant drill done the old-way! I hope you’ve seen Mike and Becky Pushing Hands - they’re good at it. I hope you’ll join us.
Da Lu is lots of fun too.
Josh Young
August 31st, 2008 at 8:09 am
I done some push hand with mike in the WTBA single push hands style. It is an interesting drill, very unique to the WTBA. I assumed Earl invented it since its not like the push hands of Chen, Wu, WuHao, Sun, Michuan, or Yang style taiji. In the Yang style I was taught the push hands comes directly from the form and uses the graps sparrows tail sequence as its basis. There were 3 stages before the diagonal stepping sequence, being single, double and double moving back and forth, then diagonal stepping, then da-lu, then freestyle. Our Da-lu is pretty close to yours but it has a few different moves in the sequence, like using sink energy to neutralize the shoulder blow. The WTBA system has such novel methods of teaching taiji it is quite interesting.
Is there someone in the WTBA whose competitive fighting record we can use as an example of the effectiveness of the system? Like CC Chen or Zhang Qin lin?
Steven Smith
September 2nd, 2008 at 6:11 pm
Records beg for inaccurate assessments of martial arts. The records of Mike Patterson training internal artists to fight in tournaments is astounding! But the footage of the skill level of the practitioners is not the same kind of quality. (YourTube will provide the footage, I won’t offer links here.)
So in answer to competitive fighting records?: me.
Though my shallow records predate my exposure to the WTBA, my early Shotokan Karate years sparkle with silly trophies. Silly because they were based on external judgment: POINT - WINNER! You’ve seen Karate Kid. Others people’s fight records impress me no more than mine.
I’m continually surprised that these pushing practices are missing in other Taiji schools. I imagine, if others do practice it, it’s guarded well: because it works. I sunk into Erle Montaigue’s Taiji because it resonates deeply with a dark, existential truth - we are all equally capable of self-defense. Because fajing lurks in your nervous and tensegrity systems, these pushing hands methods help weave that inherent nature. While not so attached to getting rooted, we develop fast stepping and ruthless, sturdy stillness.
Josh Young
September 4th, 2008 at 9:35 am
Nice! Thanks for your reply!