You Need Strength For Push Hands
Learn to do…
One Arm Push Ups.
Yep.
I know: it flies in the face of common Tai Chi ideas. But let’s be real.
If you want real self defense, you need some strength. If you want to stop predatory perpetrators or save yourself from violence or physical aggression, you need strength. You gotta have some.
Certainly avoid terrible streets and alleys. Learn to talk nicely and give away your wallet. Do that stuff. But be prepared to protect yourself. It’s fun and useful knowledge.
Beside that, though, you need strength for daily life, really. I mean, come on, change a tire, pick up a child, or chop wood; you’ll need some strength.
Sensitivity and feeling is important too. But you discover deep feelings as your structure develops functional and useful strength. And if can’t do a one-arm push up (the way I describe below)…you have work to do. Before sensitivity will be useful for self-defense, you’ll need some strength.
First: one arm push ups.
It’s not so tough: no need to do it on the floor, fully horizontal. A wall is okay. You can get a great one-armer (if you’re my height: 5′11”) on a kitchen counter.
Check it out…
Notice the Yang Hand and the Yin Version at :25-:27. Later, you’ll use the Yin Version to protect (to ward-off) force. You’ll push with the Yang Hand.
When you create the proper physical structure to push, you’ll learn fast. Please breathe. Breathe deep and long. As it gets easier, relax more and more. Let your tissues hold your structure as if your tissues wrapped, snuggly, around your bones. Pushing up will get easier. So will push-ups.
Push as if Punching
If you cannot deliver force, you’re no good to train with. If you cannot won’t mock a perpetrator’s aggressive attack, you won’t help your friend develop self-defense. So do not train too softly. Learn softness and sensitivity as your structure grows taut and confident. You’ll get what’s called tension-integrity.
When you develop the one-arm push with the Yin Wrist, the cool stuff happens. You create round tension-integrity and learn to ward-off force.
If you cannot resist force, do these intense, wrist-bent-inward pushes again and again. Please, learn to resist. You’ll get strong wrists too, preventing all sorts of other typing-related dis-eases.
The Only Resistance is Mine.
–Erin Geeseman-Rabke, a somatic movement artist
It’s quite difficult to resist force-on-force, by-the-way. Force has one vector. A punch flying at your face goes one-way. It goes—Bang—right in your throat. It doesn’t wind around and about, this way and that, searching for your center.
You’d have to be very sensitive to find that exact vector, to meet force-on-force, but…
When people say don’t use force on force, it’s more likely people mean: don’t meet force with lots of confusing, fear-reactive tension. Or: don’t meet force with unified, inward-contracting, self-defeating forces.
And yeah: don’t.
You need resistance to do simple stuff, though, like stand or hold your mouth closed. You don’t need much. But don’t give it all away. You also need resistance to act like the crazy rebel that you are…don’t give that away either. (I like your inner rebel…do you?)
Just drop the useless, self-defeating, deprecating, overly-tense, ridiculously bitter and cynical stress-tensions that keep you from your true strength.
Relax enough, yep.
And have fun.
You can develop a real, solid foundation for Pushing Hands with One Arm Push-Ups.
I concur! I do pilates in addition to my Qigong. Yeah, pilates is not *quite* the same as push-ups, obviously, but I’ve noticed that it does improve my Qigong practice. The pilates I do mostly works my core muscles and I find this helps me with posture and balance.
Very nice video. You’re absolutely right when you say we need strength and proper structure. If the structure isn’t there, the energy can’t flow and it’s hard to hold your structure without strength.
One of the ways we build strength is through the use of long poles. I remember the first time I touched my master’s back and felt a “blanket of muscle” where on most of us is bone and uneven muscle. He doesn’t look all that strong but can manipulate a heavy long pole with seemingly little effort (not to mention me).
Thanks for posting this,
John
Very informative.
Your push ups look like they will result in good energy issuing skills over time for those who stick with them. Combined with WTBA push hands I am certain it develops some potent martial skills.
My own opinion is that conditioning is important, but that tautness goes against my own taijiquan.
After exercises that can create tautness I do loosening exercises myself so as to remain as supple as possible. I seem to notice that being supple increases the amount of force transmitted, however it makes the blows seem less powerful compared to strikes that involve muscular force as their primary power source (li jing), instead of channeling the energy of an entire body into the strike (chi jing). I guess this is because with the feeling of doing more work can be confused with the transmission of force, however the transmission of force cannot be felt by the person issuing the energy unlike the feeling of resistance.
One nice example is that if you hit an object that can break, if you transmit enough force to break it you will often feel much less resistance than if you had transmitted less force and it didn’t break. The less powerful in these cases actually feels as if it has much more force where the powerful blow feels strangely light. This can be noticed for sword cuts too.
The physics of it can also be found in the use of a hammer, a sledge is a great example. If you hit a stone with a sledge hammer and don’t break it the force of the blow travels back up the shaft into your body and jars your hands and arms at the least, however when the stone breaks the force goes into the fracture of the stone and it flies apart,the blow is hardly jarring at all. This is a lot like taiji, taiji is soft like the blow like the strike that breaks the stone, not hard like the blow that stops at the stone. One is as chi, the other is as li.
The result of course that matters is not how the movement feels to you so much as how it feels to the duifang. Effective is effective is effective and that is all it can ever come down to when it comes down to actual encounters.
Thanks,
Josh
hey steven,
thanks for a great piece of visual training. Not only because you made this very informative video for us to look at but because, and I dont know if anyone noticed this…
you have a shirt on with lines in it. yep that’s right. In the video you talk about how the oncoming force goes into the arm and pushes out the scapula. The lines in your shirt show almost exactly where that power travels. Pretty neat. keep em comming. and I’ll look keep looking for those little clues.
Arlie
hi
doesnt this build the wrong muscles? i thought the space between the wrist and chest had to be the same distance?
regards
andy
I’ve been working on softness in my own push hands practice. It is hard for me to be soft enough.
I am a believer in never using force against force. Force is as Yang, thus I must meet it with Yin and this results in neutralization. This is why the term Taiji is relative to the art I practice. It represents the balance of yin and yang.
I like practicing my soft style of push hands against the WTBA’s hard style. Both of them work well but the hard style yields much quicker results in terms of conditioning.