Tai Chi / Taijiquan

Wild Colonial Boy review by Steffan Stringer

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My latest podcast with Alan Wychereley, who was as student of the late UK tai chi legend Dan Docherty inspired my listener/reader Steffan Stringer to track down Dan’s autobiography “Wild Colonial Boy” (I have to admit, I’d heard of this book before, but never read it, and in my mind it was always called “Wild Caledonia Boy”, which, I think, given the Scottish-centric design of the cover would have been a far better title!)

Steffan has written a review of the book on his blog, Blackwater Tai Chi, which is well worth a read.

The book’s blurb reads:

“In 1975, Dan Docherty, a young Scots law graduate and karate black belt, left Glasgow to spend nine years as a Hong Kong police inspector.

As well as serving as a detective and vice squad commander, he also took up Tai Chi and won the 5th Southeast Asian Chinese Full Contact Championships in Malaysia in 1980.

In 1985, he was awarded a postgraduate diploma in Chinese from Ealing College.

He travels extensively teaching Tai Chi and has written four books on the subject.”

When I started Tai Chi in the early 90s everybody had heard of Dan Docherty, and he was something of a big name, not only because of his competition success, but also because of his reputation for unmasking frauds. I remember him gaining a lot of notoriety for pouring a bottle of water over the head of an ethnically Chinese Qigong teacher who was doing seminars on Ling Kong Jin or “Empty force”. Dan’s reasoning was that if he could move people without touching them then he should be able to deflect the bottle without the need for physical contact. It didn’t work. He was also famous for “getting into it” with one of the Yang family representatives in the UK, who ended up leaving the UK after their encounter.

Sadly Dan Docherty died of complications from Parkinson’s disease in 2021. I never met Dan in real life, but his impact on the UK tai chi community continues to be felt long after his death. That’s probably the best legacy a tai chi teacher could hope for.

Also read: Phil Brown remembering Dan Docherty.

Tai Chi Notebook podcast is top 10 for Tai Chi!

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So, my podcast has appeared in Feedspot’s latest rankings for the Top 60 BJJ podcasts and the Top 15 Tai Chi podcasts (I’m number 7 and 3, respectively)

Thanks to everybody who has listened to The Tai Chi Notebook Podcast over the last couple of years! And, if you were wondering, I’ve got a new episode already recorded and coming out in a week or two…

Thank you FeedSpot.

What’s your biggest fear in Tai Chi

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No, it’s not scary clowns… or is it?

I often wonder what most people’s biggest fear is in Tai Chi. Or what it is that stops them trying it out? Is it looking silly? Is it the fear of other people in the class looking at you as you struggle to get the movements? That you won’t fit into the group?

Believe me, everybody feels the same. You do need some willingness to be open to new experiences if you’re going to try a Tai Chi class for the first time, but just say to yourself, what’s the worse that could happen?

You can learn Tai Chi online these days, but nobody I’ve met in real life who learned online had much of a real practice, as far as I could see anyway.

To learn Tai Chi you need somebody to point out everything you’re doing wrong, because on your own, you won’t see it. Even if you know that your knees aren’t supposed to bend inwards, and are supposed to be in line with your toes, you’ll let your knees collapse in without realising your doing it.

Often those ‘light bulb’ moments in Tai Chi occur when somebody points out what you’re doing wrong without even realising you’re doing it, and for that you need a teacher.

If you’re thinking about starting Tai Chi classes in the new year then dig deep and give it a go. You won’t be the only one who is a bit nervous, and once you realise that everybody else is just as worried as you are you can relax a bit and enjoy it. Believe me, your teacher will simply be pleased to see you. What have you got to lose?

“Some karate bullshit that looks silly but works”

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Tai Chi as a grappling art

Doing both BJJ and Tai Chi I love seeing moves from one art crop up in the other. Imagine my surprise when I happened across this BJJ seminar clip where the coach seems to be cycling unawares through a variety of Tai Chi moves.

At one point he says that one of the moves looks like “some karate bullshit that looks silly but works”, which is funny because you could describe Tai Chi like that as well 🙂

If you do Tai Chi or Bagua or pretty much any long fist style Chinese martial art, or probably Aikido, you’ll recognise these moves. I’ll give them Tai Chi names:

Breakdown

It starts with a grip break, that is similar to Hidden Hand Punch from Chen style (0.00- 4.00)
The first technique from here is like Needle at Sea Bottom (4.17- 6.15)
The second is like Diagonal Flying (6.15 – 9.20)

After that it becomes more traditional wrestling/judo takedowns, but it was nice to see some Tai Chi appearing fora minute there.

While the rest of the video is much more of the usual jiu-jitsu fair, the initial positions have a strong similarity to Tai Chi moves, and could definitely help Tai Chi practitioners become more aware to the martial potential of Needle at Sea Bottom and Diagonal Flying.

Simple alignments for Tai Chi

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One of the first things I talk about when it comes to alignment is:

Head over shoulders
Shoulders over hips
Hips over ankles

These three are the basic alignments for standing upright at the beginning of almost all Tai Chi forms and looks something like this (ignore the arm positions):

Image taken from a free Zhan Zhuang course by Water Dragon Arts:

If one of these things is out of alignment then you are leaning forward or backwards, or your posture is out of whack.

It’s easy enough to keep these three alignments in a standing stance, but things can get more complicated in movement, and when you introduce forward and back-weighted stances. At that point I try and keep the following two alignments:

Head over shoulders
Shoulders over hips

The ankles can now be in different places, as reacquired by the stance.

It depends on the style of Tai Chi you do, but if you do a style that advocates a forward lean then you need to make sure that there’s a straight-ish line between your back foot and your head. If you do a style that doesn’t advocate a lean, then your back knee must be bent and you want to keep your body upright with your shoulders vertically over the top of your hips.

But the real answer is that no one style of Tai Chi only does things one way. Most styles contain some moves that lean and some that don’t. Wu style, for example: 

If you compare late Yang Cheng Fu to early Chen Man Ching postures, you can see that they are very similar, and are both trying to keep the head over the shoulders, over the hips:

While doing the tai chi form, take a moment to think: ‘where is my head in relation to my hips?’ You don’t want to be sticking your bottom out and destroying your alignment, which often happens in transition movements between postures:

A picture paints a thousand words, especially in Tai Chi. I recently found an incredible source of Tai Chi images drawn (I think) by Anthony of Brisbane Tai Chi.

Just scroll down the main page and look at the images – they’re great! Full of tips on alignment and posture for Tai Chi and Zhan Zhuang (standing practice).

One of Anthony’s best images for thinking about how alignment relates to the tai chi form is this one:

Anthony/Brisbane Tai Chi

I think that image very clearly shows head over shoulder over hip over ankle, and how easy it is to mess that alignment up once you start moving in Tai Chi. You basically want to keep the blocks aligned over each other.

Why?

As it says in the picture, if you align yourself correctly with gravity then your legs become the primary weight holders in the body. That means you can be more relaxed (Sung) in the upper body, so that you can use it to transfer force, instead of tensing up to hold weight that is misaligned. Plus, it just feels better.

Tai Chi and the art of occupying the other’s space

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You can think of the Tai Chi form as an exercise in claiming your space. We rarely think of the space we occupy or move around in as part of ourselves, but it is. We often let others take our space, or give it away needlessly. We move out of the way when people walk towards us in the street. Rarely do we stand our ground and own the part of the earth that is directly underneath us.

In tai chi push hands we learn to claim our space, to gently redirect people that want to come into it and also to take away other people’s space if we need to, and not let them get it back. In the tai chi form we learn to round out our movements, so that (as the classics say) there are “no hollows or projections” in tai chi. Your goal is to create a kind of sphere with your body, as if you were inside a giant beach ball. Your hands extend to the limits of the ball, and no further.

Finding your centre

In tai chi there is ‘finding your centre’ within yourself, but there is also ‘finding your centre’ when in contact with another person. When two people are in contact, especially if engaged in some form of conflict, they are rarely both in balance, usually the advantage lies with one person or the other. The one in control is usually the person who has made both people part of their ‘centre’. Viewed from above, they become the centre of the circle, around which the other person is orbiting.

In class today I was working on the ward-off posture. I think by far the best way to think about ward off, as a martial posture, is to think about having just slipped a straight punch over your right shoulder by moving your head and turning your body to your left, you then step diagonally into the space occupied by the other person, right under their armpit using the familiar ‘ward off’ posture to keep them off balance. You need to keep that full, rounded, ‘peng’ aspect to your arms here, and once you have them off balance, you never retreat or give up the ground you’ve taken. If you do then you’re simply giving them their balance back. You need to keep them off balance continually, so that they can’t recover and they end up open to strikes or to being knocked over.

That ability is one reason why, while strikes exist in Tai Chi, they’re not really emphasised in the form. Instead, in the form you’re continually learning how to take ground from the opponent and occupying it while remaining in balance. As a means of self defence, it is highly effective, but not easy to understand without feeling it, which is another reason why so many people are confused about how Tai Chi works as a martial art.

You can train Tai Chi with me in Bath/Bristol, and get better at standing on one leg, twice a week.

Listen to a podcast about this blog post.

Thank you for supporting The Tai Chi Notebook. If you are reading this on a website that isn’t thetaichinotebook.com, then it’s highly likely it’s been stolen. Please let me know so I can issue their webhost a DMCA takedown notice for copyright breach. Thanks. And if you have the great idea of starting a tai chi website by stealing other people’s work to fill it with content for clicks then take a good hard look at yourself, and do better.

Episode 34: The five points of control in Tai Chi

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The latest episode of my Tai Chi Notebook podcast is slightly different to a regular episode. There isn’t a guest, but that doesn’t mean I’m entirely alone…

This episode is brought to you using the power of artificial intelligence. I fed a recent blog post about the Five Points of Control into Google’s NotebookLM, an AI that produces a podcast based on your article, just to see what would happen and the result was so good that I decided to put it out as a real episode!

See what you think:

Tai Chi basics: Rounding the kwa to make your tai chi form better

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Paying attention to your inner thighs can bring better structure and a feeling of power to your tai chi form

If you’ve read my last post about keeping the knees bent during tai chi practice, and most importantly can do your whole tai chi form without violating this principle, then the kwa (inner thigh) is a good thing to focus on next.

Quite often in Zhan Zhuang chi kung standing practice we use the imagery of balloons supporting various parts of the body. You can imagine balloons supporting your arms, under your armpits and that you’re sitting on an imaginary beach ball. Balloons are soft but strong when pressured, so they’re a good image to help with the idea of staying relaxed and that feeling of springy peng (‘bounce’) energy that needs to be in the body during tai chi.

We don’t tend to use the supportive balloons imagery when explaining tai chi because it’s a moving practice, so the imaginary balloons would inevitably float off at some point! But you can still use the imagery in a couple of places – imaging balloons under the armpits and one held between your thighs that is gently pressing the knees outwards is a good place to start.

The kwa needs to be kept open at all times in tai chi practice.

One of the things beginners often fail at in Tai Chi is sufficiently rounding the kwa. By kwa I mean the area of the inner thigh and groin. I’ve been told that this area is more correctly called the dang in Chinese, but kwa/dang/whatever, I mean the arch formed by the inside of the thighs and containing the pelvic floor. As I’ve discussed before, beginners tend to want to straighten their legs, rising everything up in their stance, which has the effect of collapsing this kwa area, so that it effectively closes as the thighs move together.

In tai chi we always want to maintain the feeling that we’re holding a small balloon between the thighs so that this area is always rounded. Of course, there is opening and closing going on in tai chi all the time. As you progress through a move, one side of the kwa is opening and the other is closing, but regardless of any opening and closing movement that is going on, you need to keep a general feeling of openness in the whole area throughout the form. Even in postures where the feet are together. If you stand with your legs together, then that is considered a closed kwa, but in tai chi that area always has the feeling of being open – even when the legs are together.

You might find that last statement confusing, but it’s helpful to remember that in tai chi we are not performing an exact science, but we are dealing with feelings. The feeling of being open is what I’m talking about.

The last thing to mention is the why. Why do you need to do this? That’s where you need a teacher to give a demonstration of the application of tai chi against a simple push. With the kwa rounded you create a good base from which you can receive and launch attacks. When pushed, you can use that base the rounded kwa gives you to receive and then bounce away an attacker. If your kwa collapses when your upper body is pressured then you can’t do this without using a lot of effort and strength in the upper body. In tai chi this is wrong. Using your legs is always a better way.

Thank you for supporting The Tai Chi Notebook. If you are reading this on a website that isn’t thetaichinotebook.com, then it’s highly likely it’s been stolen. Please let me know so I can issue their webhost a DMCA takedown notice for copyright breach. Thanks. And if you have the great idea of starting a tai chi website by stealing other people’s work to fill it with content for clicks then take a good hard look at yourself, and do better.