Exercise

Tai chi and keeping the spine aligned with the head

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“An intangible and lively energy lifts the crown of the head.”

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.

Real men do Tai Chi, apparently

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The latest way of selling tai chi is to say it gets you jacked

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.

When it comes to tai chi, buyer beware

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(FYI: Image made with ChatGPT)

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.

How to get a better tai chi push by pushing a wall

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The power of relaxation

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.

How often do I need to practice tai chi in between classes?

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You might not like the answer

Yang Cheng-Fu demonstrating a tai chi form, emphasizing the importance of daily practice for mastery.

One question that nobody I teach tai chi to ever asks me, but I think they should, is “how much do I need to practice between classes?” Perhaps they don’t want to hear the answer!

The quick answer is: every day. If you’re serious about getting better at something you need to do it every day. I don’t mean just tai chi, it’s the same with anything you want to do in life. Want to learn to play the piano? Practice every day. Want to learn to speak Spanish? Practice every day.

Here’s what I observe about myself when I practice the tai chi form everyday: you go much deeper into your practice, because you’re not taking one step forward one step backwards anymore. You’re only going forward. Your tai chi form gets much, much sharper if you do it every day and you are able to get deeper into your practice. If you take a day off, it takes you a day to get back to where you were last time. There are things you notice about the movement, or about the way you do a movement that you only get the mental space to notice in your practice if it happens every day. 

I’m not saying that if you miss one day everything will fall apart, but just try it –, make a conscious choice to practice the form every day for a week and see how it opens up your practice.

How long to practice

The next question is how much should you practice in a session?

The answer to this I like the best is, ‘do the form a minimum of 3 times’. Once because the first run through is always terrible. Second to work on something specific, and third to finish off just enjoying it and not working too hard.

If you have more time available you can do the form more times in the middle part of your practice to work on specific aspects. Or you could break out individual moves and work on them over and over. Some people really like this – I’m not such a fan because I don’t think any move in tai chi is especially better than any other, but that’s just me. Xing yi has a different approach because it emphasises the five ‘fists’, but that’s a different martial art.

Wu Jianquan practicing tai chi, demonstrating a deep stance and focused movement.

Why the same form?

You might wonder if there is value in repeating the same form each day – I mean, why not do a different one each day, or freeform something? I think the answer is that you get something unique out of doing the same form each day that makes it worth it. 

The idea of repeating a familiar sequence may not initially appear to be in keeping with ideas of spontaneity, but I think when you go deeper into a form, it can still feel spontaneous. Not to mention that once you go deeper into it and start living it from the inside you realise that a form is just a series of expressions (energy changes) and you can do those in multiple ways, so it is never the same form. 

As Heraclitus famously said, or was reported to have said, “You cannot step into the same river twice”. However, I think you need to be very familiar with the river in question (the form) to appreciate that.

Tai Chi and better-than-normal balance

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Body-lightness training

This video of a lady doing Tai Chi on a balance board popped up in my Instagram feed today and I’ve got to say – not bad at all! Her balance looks fantastic. Obviously, she’s also super flexible ( she looks like she’s adept at modern gymnastic ‘wushu’, not just tai chi, to me), but that has nothing to do with how well she’s balancing.

This balance board device looks like great fun to play with! I’ll have to find one. I like doing things like that that test my balance. My local park has a play area with a strange circular rotating… er… thing?… in it. When my kids were little I used to take them to the park to play on it, and I used to try and do tai chi on it while they jumped on it at the same time:

That thing is very hard to balance on, let alone walk around on while it’s moving. It goes surprisingly fast at times.

I was taught specific body-lightness training as part of my tai chi training, and it really helps with things like this. My teacher’s notes described it as giving you ‘better than normal balance’ and when I read that I thought it was a bit of an exaggeration, but once I got to that part of the training, I realised that this was a perfectly good description of what it gives you. The training involves a chi kung exercise (internal training) as well as doing the form with weights on your ankles (external training) then combing the two. It’s the sort of thing you have to concentrate on to have: Like a switch you can turn it on and off.

Better balance is one of the things I find that people come to tai chi for. The good news is that I think the whole process of learning the form gives you significantly better balance. The specific body-lightness I’m talking about is part of the whole training process and takes time to get to, as well as time to practice before you ‘get it’. Sadly, it’s not something I can just impart to people, because I would if I could. It’s damn useful.

Happy Year of the Snake

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What to do when your Snake Creeps Down

Hello! Happy Year of the Snake, dear reader. On an occasion such as this is would normally be customary for a tai chi blog like mine to do a little post about the influence of the snake on tai chi, kung fu and Chinese culture in general.

Snake is, after all, one of the five main Shaolin kung fu animals, one of the 12 main xing yi animals and frequently appears as a menu item in Chinese restaurants, er no, sorry, I mean, appeared in Kung Fu Panda!

But, no! I’m not going to do that; partly because it’s such an obvious thing to do that I’ve done it before, and I hate being predictable, or at least repeating being predictable, but also because I’ve just recorded an excellent conversation for my next podcast with Australian national treasure and sometimes-Chinese-martial-arts-practitioner, Simon Thakur of Ancestral movement about finding your inner, ancestral animal, including, of course, the snake, and I just need to find the time to get on with editing it so I can get it out to you lovely people.

I think that what Simon says about our human connection to snake-style movement is probably more valuable than whatever I’ve got to say on the subject of our slithering cousin. So, I’ll leave the snake talk until the podcast comes out!

Simon Thakur, trying to locate his inner snake while doing an impromptu bit of Fox Trot in The Bush.

In the meantime, while you wait for that podcast to properly percolate (all the best things take time) I’ll leave you with a thought. “Tai Chi is more than the techniques, it’s the jins that make it interesting”.

If you listened to my last podcast with the esteemed Alan Wycherley of ‘In Defence of the Traditional Arts’, you might be forgiven for thinking that I’m all about training tai chi techniques. Now, while I’ve no objection to practicing a Repulse Monkey or a Part Wild Horse’s Mane (or two), or even a Snake Creeps Down, I definitely agree with the statement that tai chi is more than the moves. In fact, I think we can probably agree that tai chi applications aren’t that great as martial techniques. There are (shock!) other martial arts that have more effective techniques. Hello, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, I’m looking at you. Hello, Choy Li Fut. Hello, Western Boxing. Hello, Muay Thai, stop hiding at the back! Yes, all these martial arts have techniques that I would probably put ahead of anything found in a tai chi form, regardless of style. They’re practical and effective. And yet, I practice tai chi. So, why is that?

What tai chi has, and emphasises over techniques, are the eight energies – the jins: Peng, lu, ji, an, etc.. What you are doing when you practice a tai chi form is emphasising energy changes using these eight over technique. Flowing from one to the other a bit like a river flowing along smoothly. Sometimes there are fast bits, sometimes there are slow bits, sometime the river turns one way or another, but its energy flow keeps going.

When I practice other martial arts, my emphasis is more on technique. When I practice tai chi I can relax and get more inside the movement and concentrate on the energy flow.

And of course, in tai chi push hands you get to interact your energy flow with the energy flow of another person in a live situation, and that’s extremely valuable for developing martial ability. Techniques are another thing.

Now, if the analogy of a river doesn’t work for you then think of something else… perhaps, a snake? Snakes can flow along smoothly, they can change direction sharply and they can be incredibly powerful or incredibly quick, as well as slow and suffocating. They’re a great example of energy changes.

Homework

In preparation for my next podcast allow me to recommend a documentary by professional paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin called Your Inner Fish. (He’s written a book of the same name, if you prefer to read about him). Snakes come out to play in episode two. Here you go:

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.

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.