In this episode I talk to two Wudang Tai Chi teachers from Brighton, UK: Nick Walser and Ian Kendall. Both students of the late Dan Docherty, they have continued to practice the tai chi that Dan taught them and developed a new training system called 5 Snake.
5 Snake is a unique and powerful method for finding flow, resilience, and calm through partnered close- quarter practice, and they’re here to tell you all about it.
Find out more at 5 Snake and on Instagram, YouTube and Facebook.
One of the things I often notice about my rolling partners in BJJ is that when they’re passing guard, they’re too easy to pick apart and attack because they let their spine bend by allowing their head to drop. As soon as this happens, I can attack their limbs easily because they’re suddenly not as strong. The spine is an integral part of the structure of our body, and when it’s not properly aligned, we’re weaker.
When we’re rolling in BJJ, and I’m in teacher mode, I’ll stop and point out when their head is down, and it’s often a kind of revelation to them. What I mean by “when their head is down” is that their head (and neck) is not in alignment with the rest of their spine. Once your head is aligned with your spine, you’re much stronger physically, without even trying. You’re also much more resistant to attacks from your partner. The game in BJJ then becomes about how you can break their spinal alignment while they try to keep theirs and break yours.
This takes you beyond the realm of just techniques and into the realm of principles. My BJJ book is certainly full of techniques, but I also tried to include a lot of text, especially in the intro pages for each section, about principles and strategy, too.
Having a background in tai chi, I think I’m more aware of spinal position than people who don’t have some sort of bodywork background before they start BJJ. In the 10 essentials by Yang Cheng-Fu as recorded by Chen Wei-Ming, it says, “An intangible and lively energy lifts the crown of the head. This refers to holding the head in vertical alignment in relationship to the body, with the spirit threaded to the top of the head. One must not use strength: using strength will stiffen the neck and inhibit the flow of qi and blood. One must have the conscious intent (yi) of an intangible, lively, and natural phenomenon. If not, then the vital energy (jingshen) will not be able to rise.”
Now there’s a lot of Chinese jargon in there that we can probably do without, and the way it’s written is not incredibly helpful. In BJJ, I usually just say “keep your head up” because that covers a multitude of sins, but what I’m really talking about is keeping your head in alignment with your spine.
If I’m teaching tai chi and I tell a student to keep their spine “vertical,” or lift “the crown of the head,” as it says in Yang Cheng-Fu’s recorded sayings, they almost immediately stiffen up straight like a soldier, holding their shoulders rigid and looking really uncomfortable. That’s not what you want in tai chi.
I think this stiffness is what Yang Cheng-Fu meant when he said in the next sentence of Chen Wei-Ming’s work: “One must not use strength: using strength will stiffen the neck and inhibit the flow of qi and blood.” A good tai chi spine is not a fixed position; it’s an alignment, and that means it’s an ever-changing position that adapts to your movement.
The general movement of your body in tai chi is always down. You are always relaxing and sinking down. That doesn’t mean you give up and slump on the floor like jelly; it means you just stop trying to hold yourself up all the time. You don’t really ‘do’ anything.
Relax the shoulders and just stand still for a bit in a wu chi posture. If you relax and allow it to happen, your head will naturally find the right spot where it sits in balance on top of your spine. The key is to stop trying to make it happen and let it happen. It wants to be there; you’ve just got to get yourself out of the way and allow it to happen. As it says in chapter 2 of the Tao Te Ching, “The sage acts by doing nothing.”
You’ll know when it feels right, and you can transfer that feeling to other situations: driving, working on a computer, and even, doing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
Just watched a great clip of 1980s Wushu in China – featuring Sun Jianyun, Sun Lu Tang’s daughter performing Bagua. But there’s also some clips of Tai Chi and some kids doing Northern Shaolin (at least I think it’s Northern Shaolin). Well worth a watch. The martial arts are on their way to being the heavily performance-based WuShu we have today, but are not quite there yet, with martial technique still a priority.
I’ve seen a lot of things come and go in the Tai Chi universe over the years, but the latest marketing trend has got me scratching my head. Almost every advert for Tai Chi courses I see on Instagram and Facebook at the moment promises ripped muscles and a hyper-masculine physique, mainly for men over 50!
Tai Chi, with its soft, slow, flowing, gentle movements, is perhaps the least masculine-looking martial art you could imagine, yet here is “Master Lee” strolling around a TV studio with his top off showing off his impressively-muscled abs, which he says he got from tai chi.
Or this guy, who claims tai chi is the path to a six pack. “Real men don’t starve… they do tai chi”, he proclaims.
So, what’s going on here?
Firstly, these confident, super-tonned Chinese gentlemen, are clearly creations of generative AI video apps. Everything about the videos looks as fake to me as the idea that tai chi on its own will get you that shredded.
Tai chi is good for many things, like learning how to use qi and jin and producing a feeling of tranquility, or as a self-defence system, but producing athletic-looking people over the age of 50 is really not one of them. *
When you look deeper into the exercises being offered here they look like simple, repetitive qigong-style movements. The idea that you’d replace weight training and body weight exercise with these and still build muscle is wrong, as far as I can see.
There’s no getting away from it, if you want to lose weight and build muscle you need a diet, cardio and weight training routine.
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* Now, I’m aware that there is another trend at the moment to train intensively with kettle bells and call that “tai chi” or “internal”, but really it’s no different to doing a kettle bell workout and not calling it tai chi.
This is an excellent article called The Sacred Cash Cow: Wudang Mountain’s Martial Arts Tourism Empire by The_Neidan_Master on the massive amount of commercialisation of the martial arts in Wudang, which has really leaned into its claims as the birthplace of tai chi.
I don’t think it’s worth debating the authenticity of these claims again, I’ve done a couple of podcasts with people who have lived at Wudang and trained there, one with Simon Cox, and the other with George Thompson – both very different experiences, which reflects the diversity over such a wide area, since Wudang is a vast collection of mountains and temples/schools, rather than a single place – and I don’t know what more is gained by going over that ground, but I think it’s better to simply accept that there is a growing cultural force that is pushing Wudang, a traditional home of Taoist studies, as one of the centers of modern tai chi training.
If your goal is to train tai chi at Wudang then its worth reading the article to get a balanced view of the place before going there.
Here’s a great quote:
“For travelers seeking authentic martial arts experiences at Wudang, awareness of these commercial realities provides crucial context. Understanding that most schools are modern businesses rather than ancient temples allows for more informed decisions about where and how to invest time and money.”
I think we have to accept that for ancient traditions to exist and continue in the modern age there needs to be some soft of commercial aspect, but that means that you need to approach these traditions with eyes wide open.
I just saw an advert for a week long “Tai Chi for beginners” intensive with the teacher in question demonstrating a tai chi posture with the head thrust forward, so the chin juts out, the hips and pelvis thrust forward so it looks like he’s doing a bad Elvis impression, the arms awkwardly twisted so the shoulders lock up and the souls of the feet rolling to the sides and coming off the floor, so the ankle joint is not stable.
And yes, he was calling himself “Master”.
I think “buyer beware” is good advice in the tai chi market.
One thing I’ve observed in so many tai chi teachers is this desire to be the teacher way before they are ready. People don’t want to be the student – that’s boring! – they want the glory of leading something, of creating something, of being the person at the front of the class sharing their vast wisdom with their adoring students…
Why is this? I think it’s just ego. I’ve definitely felt it’s twinges in me. It’s a subtle trap that you need to avoid. And one I try actively to avoid all the time when I teach.
It is undoubtedly a nice feeling when people ask you for advice, and look up to you. However, I think it’s nearly always a mistake to want to be that person. People are rarely ever ready to teach tai chi when they start. You could say it’s the curse of tai chi in the western world. That’s why we have people called “master somebody” who can’t do basic tai chi postures or understand tai chi movement leading week-long intensives.
But what do we do about this? After all, somebody has to teach something or there would be no tai chi for anyone!
Perhaps some guidelines if you are teaching:
1. Think of yourself as a coach, or a guide, not ‘a teacher ‘master’. After all, people need to do the work themselves, you can’t do it for them.
2. Don’t let people start to treat you like some guru or master – if they do instantly stop that behaviour developing. You’ll be surprised, a lot of people want a guru to take away all their self responsibility.
3. Self reflect. Are you constantly talking about things you can’t actually do? If so, just stop. There’s never any need for that.
4. The most important thing: Be honest. Tell people what you know, how long you’ve been training, where you got it from. Don’t make yourself into something you’re not in other people’s eyes.
5. Finally, you also need a teacher. Find people you can learn from and don’t stop learning.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
The Internet has spoken!
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.
Thanks.
The Tai Chi Notebook 