Mixed Martial Xing Yi Fight Analysis #2: Tom Aspinall vs Sergei Pavlovich

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So, in my original post about using the Xing Yi 12 Animals to anaylse the fighting styles of modern MMA athletes (I know, it’s a small niche, but hey, I’m the only one in it!) we looked at Alex Pereira vs Jiri Prochazka and I speculated that they were good examples of the Chicken and Swallow Xings respectively.*

I left the reader with a question at the end… I asked them to take a look at another fight on the same UFC 295 card where British heavyweight Tom Aspinall took the interim heavyweight belt by defeating Sergei Pavlovich. The question was what animal style could we say that Tom Aspinall was a good example of. Take a look at the fight before reading further if, you haven’t already.

So, nobody decided to answer in my comments section but I got a few replies in private groups on Facebook, etc. One person got it half right, but they mixed two animals together in their answer, and only one was right. Interestingly most people seemed to opt for Tom being a rather large Monkey (Hu Xing). I get why, Tom is clearly bouncing in and out on his toes, despite being a massive human, but really that’s where the similarity with monkey ends. Monkey would try to attack from further out than Tom is standing, or from further in – it’s a very ‘in your face’ animal, but also a joker and a trickster. Taking pot shots, then running away. Remember the classic Monkey vs Tiger fight video? That’s Monkey. I can think of at least one modern MMA fighter who is a classic monkey – I’ll post about him in the future.

This charming man

So, let’s look at what Tom actually is. He’s 100% Snake because Snake has Yin and Yang aspects. The key feature of snake is a coiling body, which can be used for either very quick strikes (Yang snake) or wrapping and coiling actions (Yin snake) for defence and grappling/locking. You can see this defensive coil aspect (Yin snake) particularly well when Tom is defending. There’s a little section in the round where he slips punches from Sergei while he coils and winds his body as he circles off – this is classic snake behaviour – just imagine if you were stupid enough to try to grab an angry snake by the neck – it would bend and coil around your hand, particularly if it was a python.

Snake’s are very aggressive, successful predators dating back to the time of the dinosaurs, and they’re always sensing forward, flicking out their tongue, and of course, they have the famous (and sometimes) venomous bite. When a snake bites the action is incredibly fast – you’ll notice that when Tom flicks out his jab the speed catches Sergei completely by surprise. For a big man he punches very quickly. The finish is so fast it’s hard to see, but Tom punches Sergei twice before Sergei can even react, steps back, looks at him, then punches him again sending him to the canvas:

Throughout the fight, Tom is flicking out single jabs and single low kicks too, very quickly.

Snake in Xing Yi is also associated with locking and grappling actions – we didn’t see any from Tom in this fight, but that doesn’t change the character that Tom is showing. (He’s actually a very accomplished grappler as well).

But what about Sergei? Well, we didn’t see much from Sergei in this fight, but from what we saw I’d vote Bear for him. His stepping is short as are his rounded punches. He’s incredibly powerful, and he landed the first strike of the match on Tom, which was so powerful he almost finished it there and then. Luckily for Tom he managed to absorb it. In our style we always include Bear and Eagle together, so I think Sergei’s got the potential for some Eagle strikes too, but the fight simply didn’t last long enough for him to show them.

Xing Yi snake (She Xing)

If you’re talking about snake movements performed in Xing Yi then it looks something like this:

You’ll notice you can see the elements I’m talking about here – fast strikes, coiling movements and grappling applications.

Here’s a video of me doing some Xing Yi Snake. I’m showing some berehand and sword here, but you can see it’s all the same thing.

Your mileage may vary

Photo by will on Pexels.com

* I suppose this post needs to end with some sort of “this is just my opinion” type of disclaimer. But I find people tend to get offended about everything they possibly can regarding Xing Yi these days, so I’m not going to loose too much sleep over it. And obviously Tom has probably never heard of Xing Yi – I’m just using it as a tool to analyse his fighting style. And if you want to enter an MMA match then MMA training is obviously the best way to train for it, not Xing Yi.

There are different lineages of Xing Yi, it’s been transplanted to different countries, and it’s very old, so it’s quite possible that none of my understanding of Xing Yi snake resonates with your particular lineage. It’s a sad fact that most Xing Yi animals have become just a set of techniques or moves, that have long since lost any connection to actual biological animals – successive waves of crushing political ideology, (both nationalism and communism) imposed on a marital art at the barrel of a gun will kind of do that. I will say however, that my understanding of Xing Yi snake is not really based on a particular style of Xing Yi, or a way of doing the move, but on tying to get back to what real snakes do. And I won’t say I wrote the book on Xing Yi Snake, but I did write one chapter of it.

Photo by Jan Kopu0159iva on Pexels.com

Teaching children

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I’ve been finally getting around to reading Breathe by Rickson Gracie, which I got for Christmas last year, just before Christmas, this year 🙂 I found this paragraph near the start that resonated with me.

Over on the Heretics podcast Damon frequently talks about one of his great loves, Mongolian wrestling, and how they create the same relaxed, nurturing training environment, especially for children who start learning through games and just messing around, rather than structured lessons. The child’s natural sense of curiosity and playfulness is encouraged, not shut down, which seems to be the rule in many other ‘martial’ training systems.

The results of this type of training, is that Sumo at the highest levels is dominated by Mongolian-born Sumo wrestlers. The Japanese approach to Sumo training couldn’t be more different to the Mongolian wrestling approach, it is competitive, austere and harsh. The anecdotal evidence is that a more relaxed approach is actually better.

I’m not an expert of Sumo, or even follow it, so I don’t know, but I believe the best Sumo wrestler of all time is generally believed to be Hakuho Sho. Sho was born Mönkhbatyn Davaajargal in Mongolia. If you watch a few of his matches you can see that’s he’s a master of slipping and evading:

Gentlemen, this is the ground

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I taught an ‘Intro to BJJ’ seminar for a local Bristol Tang Soo Do group recently – I thought this picture was quite funny. That’s me in blue. They don’t look too happy about joining me down there do they! In the end we had a great time and it was a pleasure to teach with such hard working and dedicated students. We covered all the basics – how to land safely, how to get up safely, how to escape from mount, how to take somebody down to the ground in the easiest way possible, how to control a person and how do a couple of submissions. Osss!

UFC 295 – Alex Pereira vs Jiri Prochazka: Chicken vs Swallow fight analysis

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One of the things I like to do when watching UFC fights is to try and analyse what the fighters are doing in terms of Xing Yi’s 12 animals. Now, I’ve got at least one friend who hates when I do this because he believes it makes people think that by practicing a few Xing Yi moves twice a week in your back yard you can somehow be on the level of professional MMA fighters. Yeah, I get that. Comparing martial arts can easily lead to delusion… however, my No. 1 one rule for The Tai Chi Notebook is this: this is my blog and I can write what I want! So, I’m going to do it anyway. But also, I genuinely think that if you’re a Xing Yi practitioner yourself, then trying to analyse MMA fighters in terms of the 12 animals is a really valuable hobby to get into. It will increase your understanding of not only the animals, but also of fighting itself.

Viewed through the modern Xing Yi lens (by modern, I mean, post Boxer Rebellion, from the early 20th century onward) it’s popular to understand the 12 Animals of Xing Yi as merely variations on the 5 Elements. This approach is indicative of the reductive, simplistic, winds of change that blew through Chinese martial arts over that century. It’s not a wrong view technically (the 5 elements are the basics, so of course they are inside the 12 animals), but it’s also a huge misunderstanding. The 12 Animals are more than just variations of the 5 Element fists, they are older and contain the essence of the art. They’re a continuation of a tradition that started back in the Song Dynasty. If you really want to understand that point of view then I’d point you towards the History of Xing Yi series we’ve been doing on the Heretics Podcast for a few years now – and is currently up to part 15, about to start the Ming Dynasty section.

But coming back to the present day, last week saw Alex Pereira vs Jiri Prochazka for the UFC Light Heavyweight belt at UFC 295. It was a great fight resulting in a knockout for Pereira, but honestly it could have gone either way. There was some debate about the finish being an early call from the ref, but Jiri himself said he was out cold, so it was fair. Highlights here:

Looking through my Xing Yi lens at what the fighters were doing, UFC 295 was a good one because it was very clear what animal strategy each of them was using. (Obviously, neither gentleman has probably ever heard of Xing Yi, however, like I said earlier, I’m simply using the 12 animals to analyse fighting styles.)

Swallow (yan xing)

So, on one hand we have Jiri Prochazka (red shorts) whose attacks frequently go from high to low:

He kicks high to the head, then kicks low to the ankle:


(Obviously a lot, but not all, MMA fighters kick to both heights, but it’s the alternating way he does it, as a strategy, that I’m interested in. It’s not the techniques that make something an animal style, it’s the intent and strategy behind them, but also certain styles lend themselves naturally to certain techniques – which is a subtle point)

He dummys a wrestling shot low but then comes up with an upper cut.

His preferred range is long, and when he punches he throws arcing punches that start low, go high and finish low:

To me this is clearly a Swallow strategy. Swallow is a bird you wouldn’t normally associate with fighting, but it aggressively hunts insects on the wing, and defends its nesting location by dive bombing potential intruders, including humans! Its characteristics are swooping low then going high, particularly over water and “swallow skims the water” is a name often given to a popular swallow movement in forms in Xing Yi, Bagua and Qigong. But the swallow is also famous for its absolutely beautiful aerial acrobatics that are always elegant and graceful.

A swallow defending its nest – I like this clip because you can see the speed that the swallow attacks with, and how unafraid it is of something as big as a human.
The classic “swallow skims water” in action, by the true masters of the art – the swallows themselves.

A typical “swallow skims water” movement found in Chinese martial arts. This one from Cheng style Bagua.

Chicken (ji xing)

But let’s get back to UFC 295. In contrast his opponent, Alex Pereira is famous for his minimal movement and crushing low calf kicks. There’s a great clip of him playing about with UFC commentator Daniel Cormier taking his low kick:

A native of Brazil, Pereira is also famous for his indigenous face paint he wears to the weigh in events:

(For people that like to argue that Shamanistic things have no part in MMA, I always like to point them to double UFC champion, Alex Pereira!)

You can see his famous calf kick in action in UFC 295, completely taking Jiri off his feet:

What’s remarkable about the Pereira calf kick is how little wind-up there is, which makes it hard to see coming – he just snaps it out. He does three identical kicks in a row in that part of the fight – the pictures above show the first – but all three hit home. His punches are delivered in the same way – the hand just snaps out with almost no telegraphing movement at all. You can see in the screen captures above of the kick that his body stays facing the opponent at all times. They don’t look like powerful shots, but you can see the deadly effect they have on his opponents. That very tight coil in his body around the spine that he’s using to pop his kicks and punches out is absolutely indicative of Chicken xing. “Chicken shakes its feathers” is a characteristic move of the animal found in Xing Yi links (forms) and somewhat resembles the Fa Jing expression that you see demonstrated in Tai Chi styles:

A chicken shaking its feathers.

Chicken step

When Pereira defends he is using footwork to evade rather than ducking his body – in fact, he stays very upright and his hands are kept high and defensive, just like they are in Xing Yi Chicken, which relies on footwork for evasion.

The blows which set up the finish from Pereira were so fast and minimal they were hard to see in real time, but it was a counter 1-2, again delivered with that very upright body with the hips underneath the shoulders that is so characteristic of Chicken:

The very tight techniques of Chicken in Xing Yi are very metal in nature – sharp and cutting.

A perfect example of this Chicken style applied to MMA is the standing guillotine. When somebody shoots in for a takedown, wrapping the neck and using your hips to stand tall, with a narrow base is a very chicken-like technique. In fact, Pereira almost finishes the match with Jiri earlier with one:

Standing guillotine attempt from Pereira.

Here’s a video of me doing some Xing Yi Chicken:

As I mention in the video, Chicken is an important animal in Xing Yi because it provides one of the requirements of the San Ti Shi structure – chicken leg.

Another thing Chicken (done by humans) is famous for are the knee strikes, which in real chickens are enhanced by the spurs it has on the back of its legs, and elbow strikes. You see this with fighting chickens especially. My teacher always said that the martial art that most resembles Xing Yi Chicken is Muay Thai, which is famous for knees and elbows.

The finish in UFC 295 was delivered by downward elbows from Alex Pereira and he has finished UFC fights with his famous flying knee before, delivered here in a way that looks very similar to the knee strikes in the Xing Yi link I do above:

Hopefully I’ve made my case.

To repeat: I’m not saying something simplistic like, “UFC fighters are doing Xing Yi”, but that as a tool for analysing fighting styles, I find Xing Yi really useful and the 12 Animals remain really fascinating.

A bit of homework for you…

Finally, I want to leave you with a bit of homework – also on that card that night at UFC 295 was British heavyweight Tom Aspinall. He managed to secure the interim heavy weight championship belt that evening. To me he’s a clear example of another one of Xing Yi’s 12 animals. The question is which one? You have 10 to choose from! Post your answers, compete with your reasoning, in the comments section below and I’ll give a prize for the correct answer (correct according to me, anyway, and I am the final word in this 😉 ).

Have a watch here:

Swallow Photo by Rajesh S Balouria: https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-of-swallow-17484064/

Chicken Photo by Luke Barky: https://www.pexels.com/photo/white-chicken-on-a-concrete-pavement-2886001/

REVIEW: Dragon Body, Tiger Spirit: A translation and explanation of the classic texts of Xingyi Quan, by Byron Jacobs

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Xing Yi is one of the oldest Chinese martial arts that is still practised today, and so naturally it has attracted a large variety of writings over the hundreds of years of its existence. These various writings can be found scattered about in different lineages and books, but now Byron Jacobs has collected them together in one weighty tome – Dragon Body, Tiger Spirit – and included not only the original Chinese texts, but also his own English translation and commentary on them.

Originally from South Africa, Byron is a student of Di Guoyong of the Hebei lineage of Xing Yi, and lives and trains in Beijing.  At one time he was a member of the technical committee of the International WuShu Federation, so he has been able to meet and talk to practitioners of other martial arts and Xing Yi lineages. He runs the Mushin Martial Culture website that offers online tuition, as well as provides excellent YouTube videos on all aspects of Chinese martial culture, history and practice.

(Full disclaimer for this review: I’ve known Byron for years, and while we’ve never met in person I’d consider him a friend. He’s been a guest on my podcast and I’ve been on his.)

The cover

Being interested in design, I always like to spend a bit of time talking about the cover of a book in my reviews, but in this case it’s not really an indulgence because discussion of the cover is properly warranted. Not only is it well designed but it contains a fully colourised reproduction of the famous black and white photo of Xing Yi masters Guo Yunshen and Che Yizhai, taken when Guo visited Che’s martial arts school. Now, since this is the only picture that can reliably be said to exist of Guo Yunshen, it has always been treasured by practitioners in the Hebei lineage of Xing Yi, of which I would count myself as one. Colourising the famous photo is an audacious and brilliant idea. The colours and shading on the faces in particular all look natural and really bring Xing Yi to life as a living breathing art practised by real people, rather than an ancient art lost to history. Did Guo Yunshen actually wear blue robes? I don’t know, but he looks great in them.

Incidentally, the photo is misleading, because the martial arts display Che and Guo are watching is definitely not Xing Yi. Che and Guo are the seated older gentlemen in the centre, watching two performers of what looks like a more Shaolin-derived art, or even a theatrical performance. The stage they are sitting on, complete with performers doing martial arts, and a painted city background behind them makes the whole thing look very much like a Chinese theatre.

What’s inside

The meat of Dragon Body, Tiger Spirit is the collection of all the classic writings on Xing Yi, including a lot of the stuff that came out during the Republican-era martial arts manual-writing craze, as well as older material. Everything is provided in original Chinese characters first, then as a translation into English and finally there is a commentary by Byron which explains what the classic is about. For me the most important classics in the Xing Yi corpus are Yue Fei’s 10 Thesis, since these are amongst the earliest writings on Xing Yi, and a lot of the other writings are based on these, but rest assured they’re included here. In fact, there’s everything you could want, including the Five Elements Poems, Cao Jiwu’s Key extracts of the 10 methods, the 12 animals poems and more. There’s also a section called “Nei Gong Four Classics”, which is a supplementary text included from the Song style lineage of Xing Yi. The classics are bookended with two different sections – the book starts with a short article about the history of Xing Yiquan, written by Jarek Szymanski, which aims to dispel some of the myths that have built up around the art, and ends with some well-researched biographies of famous Xing Yi masters written by Byron. As a practitioner of Xing Yi you’ll find these biographies useful because the names of old masters often crop up in Xing Yi discussion.

I can’t speak for the quality or accuracy of the translations themselves since I’m not a Chinese writer or speaker, however my impression through comparing Byron’s translation here to others is that Byron has used his martial arts knowledge, and specific Xing Yi knowledge to present what he thinks the real message that the classics are trying to be convey is, rather than go for a literal translation each time. This is the best way to approach martial arts texts, as often a literal translation will sound nonsensical, and  just make an English speaker scratch his or her head.

Having the actual text of the classics all gathered together in one place is an invaluable resource for any Xingyi Quan practitioner. That alone makes the book worth getting, but what really tips the balance is Byron’s commentary. He’s always clear, down-to-earth and practical. He does his best to interpret old texts that can often be esoteric and difficult to understand into something that makes sense to practitioners living in this day and age. Apparently, this book took him 10 years to complete, and you can see why. He must have spent a long time agonising over his translations and commentary before committing to a final version – nothing here seems rushed, hurried or half-baked. Everything has been carefully considered.

The casual reader, or beginner in Xing Yiquan, needs to be aware that this is not a “how to” manual – a lot of the Xing Yi classic are about things like endlessly dividing the body into sections and saying how one part works with another, which is not much use to you if you just want to learn how to do a Bengquan. They are full of things like “the eyes connect to the liver, the nose connects to the lungs” – i.e. things that aren’t that much use for practical application. There is a lot of this stuff to wade through if you are going to read the book from start to finish in full. However, having said that, Byron’s commentary on the 5 Element poems (the section of the book that deals with the Xing Yi 5 Element Fists – Pi, Beng, Zuan, Pao and Heng) is so detailed and practical that it does almost function as a bit of a How To. If you are in the process of learning Xing Yi you’ll find this section invaluable. You’ll learn where to put your elbow, fist, feet and how to move your body. And there’s a picture of Byron performing each fist, too. 

I did find myself having small differences of opinion with Byron’s commentary on occasion, but it’s always over very small details or emphasis, and it feels like nit-picking to list them all, but I think it highlights an important point, which is that translation relies on interpretation and because we come from different lineages of Xing Yi I think it’s only to be expected that we’d have slightly different ways of looking at the odd thing. And you too, dear reader, will probably have small differences too, if you are already a Xing Yi practitioner. If there weren’t small differences between lineages, then there wouldn’t be different styles of Xing Yi in the first place. 

My favourite part

For me the best part of this book is the 12 animals section. I’ve always found the 12 animals to be the most fun part of Xing Yi, and if you’re a fellow 12 animals fanatic like me then you’ll love this section. It’s also the largest section of the book, and is illustrated with pictures of the animals being described. For each animal there is a poem written by Byron’s own teacher Di Guoyong, followed by a discourse on the animal written by Xue Dian, taken from his 1929 Republican-era manual “Discourse on Xing Yi Quan” (which was written at a time when it had become popular to include aspects of Chinese philosophy and medicine in martial arts writings). Byron translates both and provides his own commentary. There’s such limited writing about Xing Yi animals available that it’s fantastic to hit such a rich vein of Xing Yi animal discussion. My experience has been that every lineage of Xing Yi has slightly different ideas about what a few of the 12 animals are, particularly “Tai” (which gets called everything from hawk to ostrich and phoenix) and “Water lizard” which gets called a turtle, an insect or a crocodile by some. The view presented here is Di Guoyong and Xue Dian’s (amongst many others), that Tai is a small hawk and Water lizard is a mythical creature being one of the 9 sons of the dragon that had a turtle’s shell.

It’s the spirits of these animals that infuse all Xing Yi practice – even if you’re doing the 5 elements or SanTi, you are still admonished to observe ‘bear shoulders’, ‘tiger head embrace’, ‘dragon body’, ‘eagle claw’, and ‘chicken leg.’ So, it’s great to see such a large section of the book, which gets its name from the dragon and the tiger, devoted to them. Di Guoyong’s poems and Byron’s commentary here are especially valuable, particularly in regard to the intent and particular features of each animal.

Should you buy?

As always with Chinese martial arts classics, these are not writings you read through once and put on the shelf, having absorbed all their insights. Instead, you need to return to them again and again over the course of your life and dip in and out. You’ll find this reinvigorates your Xing Yi practice and each time you re-read the same section you’ll discover new insights. Picking the book up and turning to any page, it’s not hard to find something to be inspired by and to get you motivated to go outside and practice.

If you are a Xing Yi practitioner then having everything here in a single book will prove invaluable to you and Byron Jacobs has done every practitioner a great service by completing his magnum opus. Even if you are a Tai Chi practitioner, I’d still say you should get this book, as many of the ideas contained in all internal arts found their first flourshings of life in Xing Yi and the Xing Yi classics. Highly recommended.

Rating: 5/5

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Where to buy::

Amazon UK

Amazon US

Direct from Mushin Martial Culture

If you want to find out more about the book then I’d recommend listening to Byron’s interview about this book on Ken Gullette’s podcast. 

You can also buy a reproduction of the cover photograph from Byron’s Mushin Martial Culture website.

Zuckerberg blows out his ACL doing martial arts

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Get well soon, Zuck! (Image credit: Mark Zuckerberg).

Meta (nee Facebook) founder Mark Zuckerberg has undergone ACL surgery thanks to an injury sustained during his preparation for his first MMA fight.

“Tore my ACL sparring and just got out of surgery to replace it. Grateful for the doctors and team taking care of me. I was training for a competitive MMA fight early next year, but now that’s delayed a bit. Still looking forward to doing it after I recover. Thanks to everyone for the love and support.”


He wrote that on his Facebook and Instagram account along with pictures of him punching the air from his hospital bed, and also a strange one of his wife mopping his brow and tending to him as he lays there. What is that telling us about his psyche? He’s clearly a little bit proud of his injury, since it adds to his macho credentials. Especially the shot of his woman tending to his wounds! 🙂

Like many previously unathletic or “nerdy” men who discover Brazilian jiujitsu or MMA training in their middle years, it looks like Zuckerberg has been utterly consumed by his new hobby. I understand – I got consumed by a passion for BJJ when I discovered it around the time I was due a mid-life crisis. It is the perfect salve for so many things that happen to people around that time of their life. But when you combine a billionaire’s bank account with a new found passion you get the ability to take your new obsession to stratospheric levels. Zuck has done exactly what I would have done if I was a billionaire – reorganise my entire life around my new hobby and pay for the very best people in the world to train me.

For example, there’s video of him sparring with two of the UFC’s current champions on a matted training area presumably on one of his many private yachts… That’s a ridiculous level of privilege.

However, even billionaires are human and an ACL surgery is no joke. Like most people who came to BJJ later in life, I had no idea what an ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) was before I took up BJJ. But once you do start BJJ you hear it mentioned so often you pick up knowledge of knee injuries by osmosis, or just go and google it to find out. Of the four main ligaments in the knee, it’s the one that snaps most often due to twisting injuries. That can happen in BJJ and MMA mainly due to takedowns/wresting or leg locks, some of which, (like the heel hook), are designed to specifically target ligaments in the knee. The idea is that you tap before injury occurs, but life is full of little accidents. Clearly Zuck has either had a takedown gone wrong or been on the wrong end of a leg lock and not tapped in time.

But people destroy their ACLs doing other things too – football is a classic example, and so is skiing. Pretty much any sport you decide to do has the potential to injure you, so you might as well pick something you love. In fact, I remember a few years ago when people used to talk about Tai Chi being really bad for your knees, however that craze seems to have died down recently.

Zuck will be back, but recovery from ACL surgery is a painful, slow and frustrating business. We’re talking months of physio-type movements just to get a normal range of movement back into the knee. He might be pumping his fist in pride in his photos at the moment, but this injury will change him. Hopefully it will give him a wider perspective on life.

If you’re going to train in combat sports then it is almost inevitable that at some point you will be injured. Especially if you go in with too much enthusiasm and passion. I too have been injured doing the sport I love, and sometimes there’s nothing you can do about it, but quite often it happens in moments where you’re being just a little bit reckless. The lesson for us all is that massive enthusiasm and passion for something new often needs to be tempered with a bit of restraint. Remember, look after your training partners and tap early and often.

Get well soon, Zuck!

If you liked this article then you’ll like these:

Investing in your neck can be a great way to get better at Tai Chi

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Photo by Todd Trapani on Pexels.com

The Tai Chi classics talk a lot about keeping your head “as if suspended from above“, and “Head upright to let the shen [spirit of vitality] rise to the top of the head”, but they don’t mention the neck a lot.

Yang Chengfu gives it a brief mention to the neck in his 10 Important Points, but it’s not the focus of his writing: “Don’t use li, or the neck will be stiff and the chi and blood cannot flow through.”

As such, Tai Chi students don’t spend that long paying attention to their neck. I bet if you just started moving your head in a circle right now you’d hear all sorts of crunching and popping noises, right?

For the past few days I’ve been making an effort to work my neck with mobility exercises every morning, and the results have been quite astounding. Now, when I move my head around in a circle there are way less crunching and popping noises than their used to be. In fact, sometimes there are none at all. Secondly, the space between my neck and shoulders is really opening up. I can feel more room there and as such, my Tai Chi form feels quite different, in a good way. There are all sorts of nerve fibres in the brachial plexus, and having them cramped up all the time is not ideal.

I’ve talked about the importance of how you hold your head in a recent post, but I’m learning that correct head placement on its own can only get you so far – you need to invest in some neck exercises if you want to get the most out of your Tai Chi practice.

There are hundreds of different neck exercises, and I think you’re best off finding the ones that feel good to you, because they’re probably the ones you need. The three I’ve settled on are as follows, and should all be done gently *:

  1. Stir the soup – imagine there is a spoon hanging off your chin and resting in a bowl of soup. Move your chin in a circle one way so that the imaginary spoon stirs the soup, then move the other way.
  2. Diagonal Neck stretch – look forward and down to one side towards your armpit. Hang your same side arm over on the other side of your head to add a bit of weight to the stretch. Don’t pull hard downward, just add the weight of the arm. Do both sides.
  3. Reach both hands behind you against your lower back and pull down on the wrist of one arm with the other hand. Turn your head to one side, looking away from the arm you are stretching. Repeat on the other side.

You can, of course, add in others, like circling the head in the vertical plane. Try some neck exercises every morning and feel the difference it makes to your Tai Chi, and life in general.

  • * N.B. This is not medical advice – please consult a doctor before exercising.

Three more articles of mine you might like:

New podcast! Richard Johnson on Chen Style Practical Method

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This month’s podcast guest is Richard Johnson a long-time student of Joseph Chen of Chen Style Practical Method.

As well as a Tai Chi practitioner and teacher, Richard is a full time movement coach working with athletes, so he brings an appreciation of athletic movement to his views on Tai Chi.

In our discussion Richard delves deeply into the internal workings of the Chen Style Practical Method and we talk a lot some interesting movement principles based around rotation. We also talk about how the Practical Method is different to the Chen Village style of Tai Chi.

Enjoy the podcast. You can get in touch with Richard using his email address ⁠trukinetix at gmail.com⁠

The number 1 mistake people make in Tai Chi push hands and how to fix it

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I got to meet up with a local Tai Chi instructor recently, and it was a good chance for me to do some hands-on work in push hands. One of the things working with somebody else at Tai Chi, as opposed to the endless solo practice that mainly makes up the art, brings up is the question of range.

Range is an interesting one in Tai Chi. You actually need to be in really close for Tai Chi to work. I think this is one of the things that has been forgotten along with the martial aspects of the art. I very rarely find another Tai Chi person who is comfortable working at the correct range.

How to fix your range

To get the correct range your front foot should be one fists-width apart from your opponents foot on the horizontal axis and your front toes should be roughly matching the back of heel. His front toes are then roughly matching your heel. (Look at the foot position in the photo).

This distance feels uncomfortably close to do any sort of combat actions to most people, however, this is where Tai Chi lives. At this range you will need to use subtle movements of the kua and rotation of the body to neutralise your opponent’s force, and it takes some practice. You also need to make use of Ting – or “listening” because you are definitely within punching range here, but from here you can go even closer (body to body) and turn it into wrestling if so desired, which will protect you from punches.

At the correct distance the Tai Chi techniques will work. When you are further out, they won’t work so well at all. So, this is where you should be when practicing push hands.

When it comes to actually fighting, I’m not suggesting you should “hand around” in this range, because that will just get you clipped. However, you do need to move into this range to do all the good stuff that the Tai Chi Classics talk about – controlling your opponent, knowing him before he knows you, etc. I think a lot of the time that Tai Chi fighting is described as “bad kick boxing” it’s because of the range being used. People stay too far out and pot shots at each other. Kick boxing is perfect for this range.

More of my writing on push hands:

Key details for a good riding horse stance by connecting the upper and lower

/ Tai Chi Notebook / 3 Comments

Chen Man Ching once famously said that he only understood Tai Chi after having a dream in which he had no arms.

It’s a good indication of what you’re looking for in Tai Chi  – which is to “do” everything with the actions of the legs and waist, not the arms. The idea of moving the arms without moving the arms is, of course, contradictory, but that’s the challenge you undertake when you practice Tai Chi.

I found that I didn’t “get” this concept of “no arms” until I really relaxed my lower back and learned to sit correctly in the form. The lower back is the bridge between the upper body and the lower body. If that bridge is not open then goods and services cannot flow between the two different countries.

So, how do we do this in the correct way? I think the key is to be found in how you get into a riding horse posture properly. 

We’re all familiar with the wide-legged riding horse posture. When you start a Tai Chi form you are essentially sitting down into a narrower version of it, but it’s the same kind of stance. 

Let’s formalise what I mean by Riding Horse stance a bit more.

1. Toes point forward. 

2. Knees bent, but not further forward than the toes. 

3. Feet two shoulder widths apart. 

As aways we make sure that our upper body is relaxed (not collapsed) and upright. Just take a moment to focus not he AO joint that I mentioned in my last post, to ensure that your head is in the correct position. Your neck should feel long at the back and the chin slightly tucked at the front, crown going in the upward direction.

Now straighten your legs. This brings you out of a riding horse stance and into a leg triangle stance with straight legs.

We’re going to lower back down into a riding horse, but rather than doing what you normally do, I want you to focus on two things.

1. The knees go forward as they bend.

2. The butt does not move backward as it would if you were going to sit in a chair, but instead you open/relax your lower back so that it sinks downward.

There you go. This should feel like a different sort of riding horse stance to what you’ve normally experienced. That elongated and open feeling in the lower back is what you need to maintain during your Tai Chi form. Without that feeling you cannot connect the upper and lower parts of the body.

Play with it, experiment with it a bit, and then when you’re ready, start your Tai Chi form and as the hands come down and you sink, try and achieve the same feeling.

Then try and keep it for the whole form. If you can do that, then you’ll start to notice that Tai Chi is all about the leg movements, not the arm movements. Your arm movements can start to be directed by the leg and waist movements. 

As it says in the classics:

It is “rooted in the feet,

generated from the legs,

controlled by the waist, and

expressed through the fingers. “