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.

doesnt this build the wrong muscles? i thought the space between the wrist and chest had to be the same distance?

regards

andy

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

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