This video has been doing the rounds online, showing some tai chi (taijiquan) fighting applications.
I don’t think there’s much to say about it, but it does perhaps prove useful for answering that question you get a lot: “can tai chi be used for fighting?”.
Let’s just try to say a few things about it though:
Firstly, he’s clearly just taking a tai chi posture (‘Play Guitar’) that looks very like that an ‘on guard’ position and using it in the same way a boxer does to parry and block punches. The hand he has by his chin he’s using in just the same way a boxer does their back hand to parry a jab. Is there anything wrong with that? Maybe not. You could use the posture like that, but is that its purpose?
Is that what that posture is designed to be used for? At this point, who knows. Usually you see ‘play guitar’ used as an arm locking posture, or combined with a foot sweep into a shuai jiao-style throw.
On the positive side, he’s actually getting the guy to throw the attacks properly, which is nice to see. Maybe they could be a smidgen closer together, so the punch would actually land, but compared to most applications you see from non-committal attacks, it’s not bad.
No, it’s not sparring, but not everything has to be. I don’t think it would look quite as much like ‘tai chi’ if it was sparring.
Finally, is there much ‘tai chi’ going on here? I’d be looking for smoothly flowing into sticking, yielding, and neutralising. He follows up a couple of times, but I don’t see much in the way of controlling the opponent here. The opponent is more often than not just blocked, and not controlled.
The bar for tai chi applications is pretty low. There are too many videos of people bouncing away at the slightest touch to muddy the water, so I think we have to say that this is at least a step in the right direction.
Let’s see if we can explain this without getting lost in too much theory…
(N.B. I’m writing this, to help my own thought process, rather than producing a tidy finished article, so let’s see where we go.)
Yi is one of those confusing terms in taijiquan. I don’t think you can talk about it without reference to jin and fangsong (probably qi too, but let’s try to leave that for now).
Amongst the taijiquan community there are a lot of varied ideas about jin, the “refined strength” or “trained strength” that you find mentioned in the Chinese marital arts, particularly taijiquan.
Many people seem to think that jin is about generating force maximally for whatever movement you’re doing, so a swimmer has ’swimmer jin’ or a weightlifter has ‘weightlifting jin‘.
It’s a tempting idea – after all who wouldn’t want to move with the grace, power and agility of an athlete, but I don’t think that practicing taijiquan should be looked at as some sort of shortcut to those abilities.
Athletic abilities are hard won, don’t last forever and require an awful lot of maintenance to keep a hold of. You can’t just short-cut them.
In taijiquan that is not what’s really meant by the word jin anyway, or there wouldn’t be anything different, at a fundamental level, between the training a boxer does and the training a taijiquan player does (and at this point you may actually be standing on the sidelines shouting, “No, there isn’t and difference!”, however, that’s your choice, but let me try and change your mind…)
In taijiquan we are specifically talking about ground force when we talk about jin. By ground force I mean the solidity of the ground manifested to our fingers. As the saying in the taiji classic says
The jin should be rooted in the feet, generated from the legs, controlled by the waist, and expressed through the fingers.
This is achieved by letting whatever forces we’re working with find their way to your foot to rest on the ground. This ground force can be bounced back from where it comes, turning it into something that can be used actively as well as passively.
When people talk about jin the next word out of their mouth is usual fangsong, to relax. There’s a reason for this.
The only way to let the forces you’re working with rest on the ground as directly as possible is by relaxing your upper body. (Relaxing your legs doesn’t really help much, since the weight of the body is sinking down into them). It’s getting the tension out of your upper body, by letting it dissolve down, that works the magic.
So what does it mean to ‘let forces rest on the ground’, and how do you do it?
Let’s make this a practical example.
If you’re sitting at a desk right now reading this on a laptop, I want you to pick up your laptop with your hands.
Got it? Good. (If you haven’t got a laptop, grab something of equal weight)
Now, you might think you’re fairly relaxed as you sit there holding your laptop off the desk, but what happens if you say to yourself “let the weight of this laptop go to the ground, through my chair”.
Now, if you’re anything like me you’ll notice that something invisible subtly changes inside yourself when you do this. There’s a noticeable switch of the internal musculature of your body (the qi) that is rearranging things for the weight you are holding to be supported by the ground.
I don’t know what exactly changes, because subconsciously your body just does it, and that subconscious switching is a function of your yi, which is usually translated as “intent”.
You can put your laptop back down now.
What I notice when I do this is that when direct forces to the ground my neck feels freer, my shoulders looser and space seems to open up. Mentally I also feel clearer. These are a lot of the benefits that you get from practicing taijiquan.
Your yi is activated when you imagine a direction that you want to send a force into. It does all the hard work of plotting the path through your body on a subconscious level that you aren’t usually aware of. In fact, trying to work out how it’s doing it is a sure way to mess up actually doing it.
If you see people practicing taijiquan, or other internal arts, with that kind of faraway focus that’s about halfway between open awareness and fixed attention, that’s what they’re doing. They’re not communing with the angles, they’re imagining directions for the jin to ‘flow’ in. They are using their yi while doing the form.
Now that was quite a lot of concepts to throw at you in a short while, and probably enough for now, so let’s stop there.
Judo and (Brazilian) Jiu-Jitsu might have exactly the same origins, but they’ve gone down really different paths in their evolution. While Judo has focused more on the sporting elements and becoming an Olympic grappling sport, BJJ has always wanted to keep things closer to its Value Tudo origins, which evolved into modern MMA.
Even today, many BJJ classes have a strong self-defence element, however BJJ is a broad church and some associations and classes are much more orientated towards sport grappling, particularly the no-gi variation.
One of the frequent criticisms of modern Olympic-style judo was that it had sacrificed too much realism in pursuit of beautiful big throws in competition. One way it did this was to make any grab of the pants or legs illegal. This seemingly simple rule change had dramatic effects on the sport. Since the legs were no longer a target the stance of judo players became more upright in their stance, leading to more possibilities for big dramatic throws.
Remember, under Judo rules a match can be won with an Ippon, a throw that lands the opponent on his or her back. In BJJ no such rule applies – a spectacular throw simply earns you two points and the match continues.
All Japan tournament rules
I hadn’t noticed before, but there has been a recent rule change in judo, in a particular Japanese tournament called the All Japan Championship, that means you are allowed to grab the legs again, opening up a whole range of possibilities for long-forgotten judo techniques to make a reemergence.
There are some restrictions though. To grab the pants you have to have a grip on the upper body with one hand, and you cannot grab the legs with two hands. This rules out popular BJJ and wrestling techniques like the single leg or double leg.
Will the new rules get adopted by wider judo federations and ultimately the Olympics? It’s unclear at this stage, and too early to say, but it will mean that going forward, judo could end up looking very different to the way it does now.
Traditional martial arts, which are perhaps better described as “martial arts that are not sports”, tend to have a lot of forms, or kata. I’m thinking of karate, tai chi, wing chun, choy li fut, etc.
But what exactly is the role of kata, or forms? And has it changed over time?
In this new episode of the Heretics podcast I discuss the role of kata with Damon Smith who has extensive experience in various martial arts over decades.
It certainly became very trendy once MMA became a big deal to describe forms as useless, however, I think they do have uses, even today. As usual Damon has some pretty interesting insights into how forms have changed over time, and he can look back to the way they used to be trained in the 1980s compared to today.
So pleased to get my signed copy of Perseverance (US and UK Amazon links) from Stephan Kesting in the post today. I worked on an early draft of the book with Stephan.
I wasn’t expecting a thank you in the acknowledgment section but it was nice to see my name mentioned! It was a pleasure to help Stephan – I’ll go a long way to help a fellow member of the jiu-jitsu community who isn’t part of the awful Joe Rogan-inspired multiverse of antivax alt-right madness that afflicts so many in our sport.
The book is a great read about how to keep going when the going gets tough, and it was an incredible feat to take a solo 1,000 mile voyage through the Canadian North. I’m sure I’d have been dead by day three, even if I died without “silly errors, cliche, and repetitions”, I would still be dead.
An impressive adventure, my friend – both the book and the trip! If you like wilderness survival epics then get yourself a copy now.
Mike Sigman’s post on qi has made me want to think more about jin and qi again. I realise I haven’t been posting about it very much recently – partly because I’ve been distracted by writing a book about BJJ – but now the book is finished it’s time I came back to the subject. I read another post Mike made recently on his 6H group about pushing against a wall, which I think is a brilliant idea, because it’s so simple.
In a way this post is just me writing it out in my own words as an exercise, so I can understand it, and contextualise it a little more in terms of my tai chi practice.
Pushing is a big deal in tai chi because it features so prominent in the form – one of the four ‘energies’ of tai chi is called push in English, which (as I discussed with Ethan Murchie in my last podcast) is confusing since the translation of “an” into English is more accurately to “press down”, which isn’t what the push posture in tai chi looks like, or how you’d push a wall.
An AI-generated tai chi ‘push’against a wall
Pushing is also part of tai chi’s two person exercise, tui shou – “push hands”. So most tai chi people are pretty familiar with the concept of pushing.
Now imagine you are pushing against a wall and somebody asked you to push harder. Most people would simply push harder with their arms and lean harder into the wall. What you’ll feel when you do this (try it) is that it pushes your upper body backwards and away from the wall quite a bit because it’s impossible to push hard with your arms without introducing excess tension into the system.
This is the “you’re using your shoulder too much!” criticism that a lot of tai chi teachers sling at their students, without really explaining how not to push using the shoulder.
So, let’s look at exactly how you could push harder without using the shoulder.
The only another way to increase the power of your push is to increase the downwards power through your legs. Now, it’s pretty hard to push downwards with your legs, since we have nothing above us to push off from if we want to push downwards. Instead, all we have in a downwards direction is gravity, so how do we use that gravity power? The answer is to relax and sink down into your legs harder.
Put your hands on a wall and try it.
As you sink and relax more through the legs you should feel the power in your arms increasing.
What you’ll notice is that you have to internally align your body correctly for this power to reach your hands. The good news is that you don’t need to think very hard to do this, you can just feel how you need to arrange yourself and your subconscious will do the rest. But you need to properly relax. If you tense up parts of your body – your shoulder being the main culprit – the power won’t slow smoothly and uninterruptedly through the body to reach its destination.
At this point you should start to realize why the word relax (or “sung” in Chinese) is said so often in tai chi practice.
That path from floor to hands is what you’d call a ground path, or a jin path. And the force you are channeling into your hands is known as jin in Chinese. The usual English translation of jin that you see used is “refined strength”.
Again, don’t get hung up with where the path goes through the body, just where you want the force to go.
You should also notice that as the jin force in your arms increases, you don’t get knocked or pushed backwards as easily as you did when you were using brute strength, because there is less tension in your upper body.
Obviously you are not going to push a wall over! But you can now feel the forces in your body that we should be dealing with when doing the tai chi form, and hopefully when you do “push” in the form, your push will now be a little bit different, more refined, a little less clumsy and a lot more tai chi-like.
Tai Chi Notebook blog has been selected as not only one of the Top 45 Tai Chi Blogs on the web, in fact, it has been put at no.1 position.
I’ll now wait for the money to start pouring in so I can retire early and live in a remote island with no wi-fi.
FeedSpot say that “This is the most comprehensive list of Top 45 Tai Chi Blogs on the internet.”, so check it out, because you’ll discover something new, I’m sure.
In this podcast I talk to internal martial artist Ethan Murchie about this teacher Vince Black from whom he learned xing yi mixed with elements of Sufism and Shamanism, as well as the North American Tang Shou Tao Association which Vince set up and which is still running today.
We also discuss how traditional arts can survive alongside MMA, the Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal medicine (the Huangdi Neijing) which Ethan teaches through his Living Neijing website, the meaning of Chinese terms like qi, peng, lu, ji and an, as well as his tai chi teacher Liang Dehua and the Yang Shouhou lineage of Yang family tai chi.
And why you shouldn’t train with weights when developing your qi
Mike Sigman has sent me an article to publish on this blog. I don’t normally publish other people’s work, or agree to their requests, but I’ll make an exception because it will hopefully generate some discussion. Regardless of how you feel about him, there’s is always a real depth to Mike’s writings and ideas that you can get a lot from, that you don’t really find anywhere else.
The article is primarily about one of the trickiest subjects in Chinese martial arts – qi (or chi).
I have a few thoughts about it:
1) The article starts by trying to “separate the skin-related qi, which includes the subconscious mind’s involvement, from the theoretical qi of traditional Chinese medicine”.
To some, particularly those people who relish Chinese history and the evolution of the concept of qi as it appears in Taoist thought, or medicine, that just won’t be acceptable, but I think this works for me. It moves the discussion into the realm of the physical and practical. It becomes a feeling and a doing thing.
2) It appears to be written partly as a reaction to a recent trend of mixing, or doing, Chinese martial arts conditioning through the medium of kettle bell or weights training. The question is, is that a waste of time if you want to get to the root of the subject, which is what the Chinese martial artists call qi?
Look, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with making yourself physically stronger at all. In fact, it’s obviously advantageous if you’re learning martial arts… But the article states that to master the internal movement, “the body must be completely retrained to learn to move with the qi, jin, and dantian”, and using weights will not help you in that respect. If you have retrained the body, then you could probably add them.
3) As I’ve said, nobody else really talks about this stuff, or if they do it’s watered down with a lot of other guff. If the article is correct on qi then what exactly are all the big names in modern tai chi seminar circuit and online courses out there actually teaching? Because they talk about qi a lot… but they don’t approach it in the same way as this article does, at least as far as I can see.
4) The article describes internal movement, quite simply and quite succinctly: “Ultimately, you develop a form of movement that uses the solidity of the ground as the focus of all forces to and from the body, while the qi covering of the body is manipulated by the lower-body and the middle to bring power to the arms and upper body.”
I find it hard to disagree with that definition, probably because it’s pretty broad. Sure, we can argue over what the “middle” is, or what the “lower-body” means,etc.. but as a succinct definition, it’s not half bad.
Now, let’s move on to how you do it…
The article talks about breathing exercises as a starting point: “Breathing techniques that stretch the surface of the skin and the involuntary muscle layers are the usual start of the progression.”
Now, I have personally trained in some of the methods that Mr Sigman uses (there’s a link to a video at the end of the article), and experienced what he’s talking about, and I’d agree that I can feel what he’s talking about. But I wouldn’t count myself as an expert in it, or knowledgeable about anything to do with it beyond the initial foot in the door stages, however, I have found that alone to be incredibly valuable and shone a light on some of the other things I was already doing. Even getting a foot in the door took a lot of work and a lot of time.
Anyway, I’ll leave you to read the article now and feel free to comment with your thoughts below.
Graham
Practical Development of Qi
And why you shouldn’t train with weights when developing your qi
by Mike Sigman, March 2025
Discussing qi is difficult because the definition of qi has become a bird’s nest of related topics. Let’s try to narrow the discussion and then describe an approach to practical development.
Most of the skills related to qi, in the physical body, have to do with an area near the skin of the body that is referred to as the “protective qi” or “wei qi”. While the protective qi is often referred to as an “energy”, it is actually a physical set of tissues that is controlled via the autonomic nervous system … but when you learn to control it via the subconscious mind, it does indeed feel sort of like an “energy” because it is apart from the topical sensations of the somatic nervous system, and the qi indeed feels odd, like an energy.
So, let’s separate the skin-related qi, which includes the subconscious mind’s involvement, from the theoretical qi of traditional Chinese medicine: that’s where most of the confusion lies. The skin-related qi and the subconscious mind are the artifacts which give us heightened toughness of the skin, odd sensations of qi, added strength by supplemental our muscle-bone strength, and dantian control of the body as whole connected by skin-related qi, among other things. Jin forces, the manipulation of the solidity of the ground and/or downward forces of gravity, are also the product of the skin-related qi: jin is defined as “the physical manifestation of qi” in many Chinese sources.
The qi of traditional medicine theory is/was an effort to explain the workings of strength, including the strength of our involuntary systems. We don’t need to know all the theories about meridians, putative different types of qi, etc., in order to develop the qi. Breathing exercises and focused physical and mental exercises are more important than complex qi-paradigm explanations.
The skin-area wei qi is initially controlled by respiration and “breathing exercises” are our initial approach to control and development of the qi tissues. During inspiration, if we are slightly extended or stretched out, we can feel a slight inward pulling of the tissues of the fingers and hand. Other areas of the body, upon being slightly stretched taut, can also be felt during the inhale, but many tissues in other areas of the body can’t be felt. They must be developed over time by breathing exercises before we can feel them respond to our breathing and before we can develop them further.
Some Chinese texts mention the fact that this superficial qi is something that animals still use (think of a horse quivering its flanks, for example), but which has atrophied in humans over the course of evolution. In order to regain our qi, we must use deliberate exercises of breathing, mental imagery, and posture manipulation.
Training the Qi in General Movement
Jin force-manipulation is a product of the qi tissues applying stressors within the body’s frame. That’s why jin is defined as “the physical manifestation of the qi”, among other things. We use jin unconsciously in our everyday movements, so another common definition of jin is as an “intrinsic strength”. The full-blown traditional movement methodology that permeates the Chinese (and related) martial arts involves both qi and qi’s subset, jin. Qi and jin. Jin forces are the mind-directed forces from the ground and gravity; qi can be thought of, in a simplified sense, as a superficial muscular layer that connects the whole body.
The basic idea of movement with qi and jin is that the power from the ground and lower body is used as the power source for the upper body. The qi and the jin work from the lower body (including the middle/dantian), so what we have with “internal” movement is a system where the arms and hands are controlled and powered by the lower body and the middle.
The general admonition is that muscle and power are used in the lower body, as needed, while the upper body is moved without the use of local muscle. I.e., a person has to learn to control his/her upper body via manipulation of the lower body and the middle. The person who thinks the internal arts would be best supplemented with typical weight workouts at the gym has lost the plot and is giving away a total lack of understanding about how the “internal” martial arts work.
Developing the Qi
Jin skills are actually fairly easy to learn, although it generally takes a few knowledgeable pointers and some personal, hands-on demonstrations to get someone started. There are a number of written attempts at jin explanations on the internet, particularly through the 6H forum.
Qi is difficult to develop because it takes time and the feelings we need to focus our attention are tenuous at first. Breathing techniques that stretch the surface of the skin and the involuntary muscle layers are the usual start of the progression. Many traditional Chinese martial arts talk about “100 Days” of breathing exercises to develop the qi to a usable status.
Movement of the involves directing all forces upward from the solidity of the ground (so you must “sink your qi”) or use the weight of the body as a basis for downward movement.
Ultimately, you develop a form of movement that uses the solidity of the ground as the focus of all forces to and from the body, while the qi covering of the body is manipulated by the lower-body and the middle to bring power to the arms and upper body.
All Asian martial arts that are labelled as “internal” martial arts, formal calligraphy, qigongs, traditional dance, etc., use this combination of qi and jin for movements. Learning the external choreography and appearance of a martial art, a qigong, etc., no matter how much it resembles the movements of an expert, will not be correct until the system of movement is changed over to the qi, jin, and dantian type of movement.
Almost all of the movements we so often see in western semblances of “Tai Chi”, Aikido, Xingyiquan, Baguazhang, etc., are based from normal movement parameters, rather than qi and jin mechanics and it will take effort to re-learn these arts with the correct movement basis. There is an old saying to that effect: “Taijiquan is easy to learn, but difficult to correct”. So, if your goal is to learn Taijiquan, Aikido, or related arts, remember that all the talk about “relaxation”, “don’t use weights”, etc., is because the body must be completely retrained to learn to move with the qi, jin, and dantian.
Here’s a video of Chen Zhaosen, with translation by John Prince, teaching basic movement drills for the Chen-style Taijiquan. Notice his comment about no strength in the upper body, but whatever strength you need in the lower body. https://vimeo.com/141009942
The Tai Chi Notebook 