taijiquan

In Tai Chi you don’t look down — or do you?

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Learning how to extend the qi

When I’m teaching my Friday class one of the things I quite often say is “don’t look down” – however, like most of the short, pithy statements you hear delivered by Tai Chi teachers… it’s not really true. Rather, it depends on the context of what you’re doing. Let me explain.

Yes, generally speaking, you want to be looking at the horizon when doing Tai Chi because you want to keep your head and neck aligned with your spine. Specifically with the head and neck we are talking about the posture principle of ‘suspending the head’. However, there are times in Tai Chi, where it is perfectly acceptable to look down – particularly on moves where the direction of the application is down towards to the ground. 

Like our White Crane Cools Wings, for example:

White Crane Spreads Wings from the ‘short short form’ I teach.

The reason I say “don’t look down” a lot when teaching is that people learning a Tai Chi form have a general tendency to look down (me included!). Generally as we age our posture seems to become more slumped forward, perhaps because we sit down a lot in modern life, but also because scanning the horizon for signs of danger has long since stopped being an evolutionary priority. We also use computers, phones and devices all the time, and they lead to a general posture of our heads being tilted forward slightly.  This can result in people doing the whole Tai Chi form while never looking up from the ground. 

Extending the qi

In Tai Chi you want to have a feeling of a slight stretch all over the exterior of the body at all times – that’s really what following the posture principles of Tai Chi gives you – things like flattening the lower back, rounding the shoulders and suspending the head. This is known as ‘extending the qi’ all over the body. When you stand in a Zhan Zhuang posture you can feel this slight stretch all over the surface of the body that the posture generates – it’s subtle, but that’s what you’re looking for.

Suspending the head is part of that extension of the qi over the head, and you can keep that extended feeling even when you glance down. What you definitely don’t want to do is break the alignment of the spine and neck, which is what typically people do when looking at their phone, or their feet:

Looking down at your phone. Photo by Thom Holmes onUnsplash

If you want a good fix for this then I find regular Zhang Zhuang (“post standing” or “standing like a tree”) practice is a good way to remedy this and retrain your head position on a subconscious level.  Master Lam has a 10-day course on the subject.

The problem with looking down is that our head is rather heavy (between 2.3 and 5kg), and when you take your neck out of alignment with your spine your body automatically compensates for the extra weight that is pulling it forward (or you’d fall) and it does that by tensing some of its posture control muscles, particularly in the middle of the body, and that can interfere with the relaxation and freedom of movement we are looking for in Tai Chi. You also aren’t creating an optimal path for sending incoming forces to the ground or for sending jin up to the head. You are also not ‘extending qi’ to the head.

If you’re going to look down then you need to do it while keeping that slight stretch up the back of the neck and over the head. 

Ward-off and martial applications

‘Ward off’ is another example of a posture where I do look down, although it’s only briefly. I look down because of the martial application I’m thinking of. My active hand in that posture is first the back hand, which I’m using to send my imaginary opponent to the floor. The front hand can then be used as a deflector, so after I’ve dispatched the first opponent to the floor, I then look up and deflect the second attack, which leads into the ‘roll back’ posture.

Here is the sequence:

In this sequence, the ‘ward off’ is the middle picture, and my focus is on my right hand pushing down from where it was in the previous picture, then in the next picture I refocus on the left hand deflecting, and getting ready to perform a ‘roll back’.

Here’s a much younger and hoplessly naive version of myself showing the marital application at around 19 seconds in this video:


As you can see, where you are looking in the Tai Chi form is dependent on what application you have in mind when doing the movement. So, while there are some useful maxims to remember in Tai Chi, such as ‘don’t look down’, it’s important that you know when it’s acceptable to bend the rules so that your Tai Chi becomes a living practice, with things done for a reason, not just blindly following the rules.

Episode 41: Teaching Tai Chi as a Martial Art with Nick Walser and Ian Kendall

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My new podcast is out.

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.

1980s Wushu, China (Bagua, Tai Chi, Northern Shaolin)

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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.

Observable benefits and skills

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A frog in a well, looking up at the sky

Something I read today was, “training material in my personal practice only includes the methods which have always consistently produced observable benefits and skills. Anything which hasn’t done so in a trial period of regular practice is eliminated and abandoned. I don’t have time for anything which doesn’t give a good return on the investment of time and effort to practice.”

That’s an interesting point of view, and seems logical and rational. It seems very in-line with modern efficiency-based exercise or martial arts thinking. I just don’t think it’s a realistic approach to studying the internal arts or qigong in any depth.

I remember talking to Simon Cox who trained for years at Wudang mountain in one of my podcasts and (I’m going by my failing memory here) he said something like his teacher asking them to do meditation for a few years, with barely minimal instructions, then just leaving them to it. Forget “a good return on investment”, you were just expected to do it, without any hope of a result.

I’ve often heard people say things like, “A year is not a long time in qigong practice”.

And from my own experience, I can say with confidence that you do need to practice without “observable benefits and skills” for a long, long time.

Most people simply stop, and therefore never get anywhere. They stay scratching the surface, thinking that they are deep into their practice.

Once again, I’m reminded about Zhuāng Zǐ’s Frog in a Well story.

But what do you think? Let me know in the comments below.

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.

Tai Chi fighting applications

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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.

The use of force in tai chi (taijiquan)

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Let’s see if we can explain this without getting lost in too much theory…

(N.B. I’m writing this, to help my own thought process, rather than producing a tidy finished article, so let’s see where we go.)

Yi is one of those confusing terms in taijiquan. I don’t think you can talk about it without reference to jin and fangsong (probably qi too, but let’s try to leave that for now).

Amongst the taijiquan community there are a lot of varied ideas about jin, the “refined strength” or “trained strength” that you find mentioned in the Chinese marital arts, particularly taijiquan.

Many people seem to think that jin is about generating force maximally for whatever movement you’re doing, so a swimmer has ’swimmer jin’ or a weightlifter has ‘weightlifting jin‘.

It’s a tempting idea – after all who wouldn’t want to move with the grace, power and agility of an athlete, but I don’t think that practicing taijiquan should be looked at as some sort of shortcut to those abilities.

Athletic abilities are hard won, don’t last forever and require an awful lot of maintenance to keep a hold of. You can’t just short-cut them.

In taijiquan that is not what’s really meant by the word jin anyway, or there wouldn’t be anything different, at a fundamental level, between the training a boxer does and the training a taijiquan player does (and at this point you may actually be standing on the sidelines shouting, “No, there isn’t and difference!”, however, that’s your choice, but let me try and change your mind…)

In taijiquan we are specifically talking about ground force when we talk about jin. By ground force I mean the solidity of the ground manifested to our fingers. As the saying in the taiji classic says

The jin should be
rooted in the feet,
generated from the legs,
controlled by the waist,
and expressed through the fingers.

This is achieved by letting whatever forces we’re working with find their way to your foot to rest on the ground. This ground force can be bounced back from where it comes, turning it into something that can be used actively as well as passively.

When people talk about jin the next word out of their mouth is usual fangsong, to relax. There’s a reason for this.

The only way to let the forces you’re working with rest on the ground as directly as possible is by relaxing your upper body. (Relaxing your legs doesn’t really help much, since the weight of the body is sinking down into them). It’s getting the tension out of your upper body, by letting it dissolve down, that works the magic.

So what does it mean to ‘let forces rest on the ground’, and how do you do it?

Let’s make this a practical example.

If you’re sitting at a desk right now reading this on a laptop, I want you to pick up your laptop with your hands.

Got it? Good. (If you haven’t got a laptop, grab something of equal weight)

Now, you might think you’re fairly relaxed as you sit there holding your laptop off the desk, but what happens if you say to yourself “let the weight of this laptop go to the ground, through my chair”.

Now, if you’re anything like me you’ll notice that something invisible subtly changes inside yourself when you do this. There’s a noticeable switch of the internal musculature of your body (the qi) that is rearranging things for the weight you are holding to be supported by the ground.

I don’t know what exactly changes, because subconsciously your body just does it, and that subconscious switching is a function of your yi, which is usually translated as “intent”.

You can put your laptop back down now.

What I notice when I do this is that when direct forces to the ground my neck feels freer, my shoulders looser and space seems to open up. Mentally I also feel clearer. These are a lot of the benefits that you get from practicing taijiquan.

Your yi is activated when you imagine a direction that you want to send a force into. It does all the hard work of plotting the path through your body on a subconscious level that you aren’t usually aware of. In fact, trying to work out how it’s doing it is a sure way to mess up actually doing it.

If you see people practicing taijiquan, or other internal arts, with that kind of faraway focus that’s about halfway between open awareness and fixed attention, that’s what they’re doing. They’re not communing with the angles, they’re imagining directions for the jin to ‘flow’ in. They are using their yi while doing the form.

Now that was quite a lot of concepts to throw at you in a short while, and probably enough for now, so let’s stop there.

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.

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.