taijiquan

Why Tai Chi has got an AI problem

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So many Tai Chi books look the same.

I write about technology, specifically AI, for my day job, so I’d consider myself as somebody who is fairly knowledgeable about the subject. And that’s why I think I know what I’m talking about when I say that right now, Tai Chi has got an AI problem.

I got an email recently asking me to review a book about “Seated Tai Chi”. The ‘author’ advised me that the book had been created using AI, so I responded by saying that I didn’t think I’d be able to review it in that case.

They didn’t reply, but I’m glad they were upfront about how the book had been created; really, I only had to look at the front cover to see that it had clearly been made with AI. It was obvious because they’d gone for the most generic “AI Slop” version of an image possible.

It’s that same “AI slop” style that you see everywhere these days – an uncanny-valley sheen to the images, usually a marker-felt style font, and a cover design where there’s no real hierarchy to the different elements. There’s been no real thought into where the eye is supposed to travel around the page. AI Slop designs tend to be like that — overwhelming to look at — they throw everything at you all at once, with an equal emphasis everywhere all the time. It’s exactly the sort of thing human designers are trained not to do.

I went to Amazon and looked up Tai Chi books and immediately saw how large the problem is. There’s an absolute deluge of AI slop-style Tai Chi books on there, and curiously, a lot of them seem to be aimed at the seated Tai Chi market. Why, I don’t know, apart from the fact that seniors have always been the most profitable part of the Tai Chi demographic. You’ll also find a bevy of “Tai Chi for seniors” and “Tai Chi over 60” books on Amazon.

Here’s an image I took of the first results shown when you search for “Seated Tai Chi” on Amazon so you can see what I mean:

Can you see how the covers all have that horrible “slop” style to them?

Look.

I think AI is a tool that can be used for good or evil, just like any other tool. I just don’t understand why people are using it so badly. As an example of a positive use of AI, I wrote an article recently about how AI was being used to get Conn Iggulden’s books about Genghis Khan turned into a TV series, a series that would simply remain unmade forever without using AI.

But equally, I absolutely hate the way AI slop has taken over so many event posters I see either online or in real life — especially posters for Tai Chi events —  and even made its way into posters in cafes or barbers that all have the same generic AI slop look to them. Walking down the street in my city on my lunch break, I can see that AI slop is everywhere and I find it very depressing. A simple poster made in Canva, with two fonts, a photograph and some carefully arranged text, could look far better than 99% of AI-generated posters.

Seeing AI slop designs actively puts me off your brand. I’ll actively avoid you, and I bet I’m not the only one.

In the Conn Iggulden example, AI is potentially enabling something that couldn’t otherwise exist. With the posters, it’s replacing something that people have been perfectly capable of making for decades, often with better results.

I’m not a knee-jerk anti-AI person.  I’ve used AI images on this blog (which I write for free) in the past – just scroll down and I’m sure you’ll find some. I’ve used them when I couldn’t find a suitable image to use from a free photo library. But I’ve tried to make them look as good as possible. It’s been an experiment, but I’ll probably stop doing that in the future and stick to non-AI images simply because AI slop is starting to take over everything.

I get why people do it. It’s very easy to make a poster for something in AI in seconds. I just typed in:

“make me a poster for a tai chi seminar, October 9th at West Hampton Village Hall, 2.00pm, no experience necessary, wear loose clothing, see you there!”

And it made this:


I told it that this looked like a generic AI-generated poster, and asked it to make one that looked like it was designed by a human, and it produced this:

Ok, you could argue that there’s a better hierarchy on this one, with your eye starting on the main heading now, but there’s no real improvement to the AI aesthetic. It just changed one set of visual conventions it was imitating for another, and the legs on the man look completely out of proportion.

And things get worse if you ask to put too much information in. A designer would probably stop you and say you’re putting too much into the poster, but sycophantic AI just accommodates your request:

“make me a poster for a tai chi seminar, October 9th at West Hampton Village Hall, 2.00pm, no experience necessary, wear loose clothing, say “see you there!” – talk about the benefits of tai chi and why you might want to attend.”make me a poster for a tai chi seminar, October 9th at West Hampton Village Hall, 2.00pm, no experience necessary, wear loose clothing, say “see you there!” – talk about the benefits of tai chi and why you might want to attend. Tell them they can sign up to the website for membership at www.taichiwesthamptom.com and say there’s a 15% discount for your first 3 classes.”


You can see it just lets you overcrowd the poster with information. There’s WAY too much on here now for it to function effectively as a poster.

But despite design considerations, what I don’t get is why people don’t see that it all looks like AI slop?

There’s a parallel here with the martial art itself: somebody who doesn’t understand Tai Chi can imitate the external movements and produce something that looks superficially convincing. But the underlying principles are missing. AI-generated Tai Chi imagery can suffer the same fate – it looks like Tai Chi without actually being Tai Chi.

Tai Chi and your fluid connection to the ground

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In some ways, the Tai Chi form is a necessary evil.

Because of all the form work involved in Tai Chi it’s easy to think that if you are ‘doing’ Tai Chi — either as two-person work or as a solo exercise — that you are assuming a particular type of posture – wide, open, upright, etc. We all know what graceful Tai Chi postures look like, but I don’t think of Tai Chi as a posture. I don’t think of it that way at all.  

If you can’t respond to an immediate situation without first sinking into your posture or ‘sitting in your kwa’ or whatever else is required in a Tai Chi form then there’s not much point to what you’re doing. You’ll be fine for practice and for drills, but too slow for real life.

The Tai Chi form is a set of what I’d call ‘ideal circumstances’ that are repeated one after the other and blended into a long sequence. Ideal circumstances rarely exist in real life.

Photo by class SSS on Pexels.com

Instead, I prefer to focus on the qualities that are really important to the art, starting with your connection to the ground. That’s the fundamental, non-negotiable quality of Tai Chi for me. Whether I’m sitting at my desk, lounging on the sofa, doing a Tai Chi form or trying to perform an Uchi Mata on somebody in BJJ, the quality I’d value first and foremost is being connected to the ground. 

Without my solid connection to the ground, everything I do is slightly tense.

But what does it mean to say “connection to the ground”? Aren’t we always connected to the ground in some way, unless we’re floating in space? Well, I guess we are, but in Tai Chi terms it means the feeling of sinking your weight to your feet. The bottom half of your body feels heavy, and as a result, the upper half can feel deliciously light and relaxed.

You’re like one of those toys called Weebles, which had the catchphrase “Weebles wobble, but they don’t fall down”. Remember them?

Again, it’s not a quality that only springs into action when you’re in a Tai Chi posture – in fact you don’t need any particular posture to embody it. It needs to be fluid to fit into daily life. You just need the ability to settle down inside your own body. Let your weight sink, while at the same time embodying the feeling of being pulled up by a thread from your crown. The gentle upward expression is really important to stop you from slumping down.

Over time, you learn to recognise the quality I’m talking about. If you practice it in your Tai Chi form regularly, then you become able to slip into that state much more quickly than you could before, until eventually you can almost do it without thinking. It just becomes a feeling.

You can test this state too by getting somebody to push you and seeing if you can learn to accept the force with the structure of your body without tensing and directing their weight to the soles of your feet. Don’t let them push you suddenly while you’re learning. You need slow, purposeful pushes to get the hang of it. 

Once we’ve got that quality down, then we can talk about others, but until then, I don’t think they’ll make much difference. I cover this important quality and many others in my upcoming book.

In other news, I’ve recently appeared at no.2 in the Top 45 Tai Blogs from Feedspot.

Feedspot is an RSS Reader that lets you subscribe to blogs, news sites, and any website you want to keep up with.

Every move in Tai Chi is a circle

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Here’s the thing: Every movement in Tai Chi is part of a circle, either clockwise or anti-clockwise, and sometimes parts of the Tai Chi yin/yang diagram (like a figure eight infinity symbol), but they are always circular, even the moves that look linear on the surface. If it looks linear it’s because the circle has become so small as to be invisible (or at least that should be the reason).

I find that to really understand this you need to go through the whole form until you understand how each movement is circular, and how to generate that circle from your feet, legs and middle, not the arms. Of course, that’s easier said than done!

Go through each movement of the form and break down how it is composed of circles and learn how to generate them from the turn of the middle of the body, using the legs to help, and not from the shoulders.

Where the circle begins

The important thing is not to draw imaginary circles with your hands. That is just arm waving.

The real work is to feel where the circle begins. Does it start in the shoulder, or does it come up from the foot, through the leg, into the middle of the body, and only then express itself through the arm?

That is the difference between making a circular shape and moving in a circular way.

So, when you practice, pick one movement and ask yourself: where is the circle? Is it turning horizontally, vertically, diagonally, or through the body like a spiral? Can you make it bigger? Can you make it smaller? Can you still feel it when it becomes almost invisible?

Over time, this changes how the form feels. The postures stop being separate positions joined together by transitions. They become circles turning into circles, opening and closing, rising and sinking, appearing and disappearing.

And that, really, is Tai Chi: not a sequence of poses, but a body learning how to move without corners.

The split happening inside modern tai chi — and why the World Taijiquan Championships are suddenly huge

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Competitive tai chi is growing fast around the world — but not everyone in the traditional community is happy about what that means

There’s a version of tai chi that most people think they know. It happens slowly in parks. It’s mostly associated with retirees, stress reduction, gentle movement, and the occasional vague mention of “energy”. In the Western imagination, tai chi often exists somewhere between meditation, physiotherapy and soft exercise.

But another version of tai chi has also been growing in parallel. One involving national teams, international judges, choreographed routines, competition scoring systems, and athletes performing explosive movements in brightly lit arenas. And it’s getting big.

The recent World Taijiquan Championships in Bulgaria drew competitors from more than 40 countries, with hundreds of athletes taking part in solo forms, weapon routines although I didn’t see any evidence of push hands events, or anything approaching sparring. For many outsiders, the sheer scale of the competition may come as a surprise. But for people inside the martial arts world, it highlights something that’s been developing for years: tai chi is splitting into several very different cultures.

Take a look:

One culture sees tai chi primarily as an internal martial art rooted in body mechanics, structure, pressure, balance and cultivated force. Another treats it as a performance discipline, one judged visually, packaged for audiences, and optimised for competition. Another sees it as the aforementioned health version done by older people in parks as a kind of meditatve exercise.

That tension between these different versions of taijiquan has existed for a long time, but events like the World Taijiquan Championships make it impossible to ignore.

When tai chi becomes a spectator sport

Competitive tai chi performance changes things. The moment movements are judged publicly, practitioners begin optimising for what judges and audiences can easily see. Stances become lower. Movements become larger. Expressions become sharper and more theatrical. Routines drift toward athletic spectacle.

That doesn’t automatically make them bad, but you’ll notice that the event also seemed to incorporate dance troupes, cheerleaders and gymnasts.

The fact is, competitive athletes are phenomenally skilled. The flexibility, balance, coordination and body control required at elite level are extraordinary. Some modern taiji competitors move with a degree of precision that most traditional practitioners could only dream of.

But critics argue that something important can get lost in the process.

Traditional tai chi training often focuses on subtle internal qualities that don’t necessarily look impressive from the outside: relaxation under pressure, whole-body connection, efficient force transfer, breath regulation, sensitivity, and structural integrity. Those things are difficult to score visually. A judge can easily reward height, speed and extension. It’s much harder to reward sung — the relaxed but connected quality that many internal stylists consider central to the art.

This is where the divide starts because it leads to the question, “is this still tai chi?” And then to the almost inevitable, “what is tai chi anyway?”

The gymnastics problem

The problem isn’t unique to tai chi. Almost every martial art changes when competition becomes the dominant measuring stick. Brazilian jiu-jitsu drifted toward increasingly sport-specific positions once tournaments became central to the culture. Judo changed dramatically after leg grabs were restricted. Olympic taekwondo evolved into something many traditional practitioners barely recognize.

The tai chi world is fractured, but for some this can be positive. Competitive formats bring structure, international exposure, younger athletes and a clearer pathway for progression. Without competition, tai chi risks becoming culturally invisible outside wellness circles.

But others worry the art slowly transforms into a kind of martial gymnastics — technically difficult, visually impressive, but increasingly detached from the body method and martial function that originally gave the movements meaning.

The tai chi world is made even more complicated by the fact that as well as the wushu performers, and the traditionalists, there’s another group — the martial artists who want to use tai chi as a real martial art.

You might imagine they’d be naturally aligned with the traditionalists, however, in my experience the traditionalists hate any attempt to put on gloves and ‘prove tai chi works’ and refer to it as ‘just kickboxing’. 

The irony is that all three, or even four, sides often genuinely love tai chi. They just value different things.

The global expansion of tai chi

What the World Taijiquan Championships really demonstrate is that tai chi is no longer a niche cultural practice confined to China or small traditional schools.

Competitors are emerging from Europe, South America, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and the United States. Universities teach it. Health systems study it. Sports organizations organize around it. Younger athletes are entering through competition pathways rather than traditional lineage structures.

That changes the art whether people want it to or not.

World Tai Chi Day is 10.00am on Saturday.

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It’s World Tai Chi Day this Saturday. So what’s it all about?

World Tai Chi & Qigong Day is held each year in over 80 nations on “the last Saturday of April” each year. April 25th, 2026 … at 10 am local time all over the world. It begins with mass Tai Chi, Chi Kung, and Mind Body events in the earliest time zones of New Zealand, and then spreads at the world turns, 10 am local time worldwide, ending with final events in Hawaii (USA).

To be honest, a lot of the websites I’ve found about it seem outdated and unloved. It doesn’t really feel like there’s much of an organisation behind it these days, however, you might like to practice at 10.00am on Saturday. There could be an event in your local area, so have a search.

Photo by Alexander Schimmeck on Unsplash

What if tai chi posture is about class, not biomechanics?

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The debate over leaning vs upright posture may have less to do with force and more to do with identity

Sun Lu Tang performing tai chi


Does your tai chi style lean forward or stay upright? The debate over which is “correct” has been raging for decades now. Well, maybe “raging” isn’t quite the right word for a group of tai chi practitioners, but at the very least there’s been some polite disagreement.

The usual way of looking at this issue is biomechanical. Which structure delivers force—jin—more efficiently? Which alignment is stronger, more stable, more effective?

But what if we’ve been looking at this the wrong way?

What if the difference isn’t really about efficiency at all, but about who the posture was for?

I’ve just been watching a lecture by Sander L. Gilman called Stand up Straight! Cultural Perspectives on Posture, and it adds an angle to this debate that feels like it’s been missing.

Gilman’s core idea is simple, but powerful: the body isn’t just biological—it’s cultural. The way we stand, move, and hold ourselves isn’t neutral. It’s shaped by what society thinks is healthy, respectable, or even fully human.

Historically, posture has been loaded with meaning. Standing upright has been associated with discipline, control, and refinement. Slouching, or anything that deviates from that ideal, has often been framed as a lack of those qualities.

Crucially, those ideas have often been tied to class.

In one example Gilman highlights, early 20th-century medical writing didn’t just describe posture, it judged it. Working-class bodies and rural populations were sometimes compared unfavorably to “primitive” forms, while upright posture was framed as something closer to a civilized ideal. (source).

Strip that down, and you get a striking idea: “respectability” is something performed through the body. Posture becomes part of that performance.

So what happens if we apply that lens to tai chi?

Most histories trace tai chi back to Chen Village in Henan province, but its spread through Beijing brought it into very different social contexts. Some styles developed in courtly or intellectual circles, others among martial artists, soldiers, and working practitioners. And when you look at the postures, a pattern starts to emerge.

Styles associated with more scholarly or “refined” figures, like Wu (Hao) style or Sun style, developed by the famously intellectual Sun Lutang, tend to emphasise a more upright frame.

By contrast, versions of Yang style and Wu style, shaped by professional martial artists and military figures, often include a noticeable forward lean.

Of course, these systems evolved over time and weren’t defined purely by class. But the contrast is hard to ignore.

Even Cheng Man-Ch’ing, often described as a scholar and artist as much as a martial artist, modified what he learned from Yang Chengfu into a distinctly upright form. His idea of the “five excellences” — calligraphy, painting, poetry, tai chi, and medicine — paints a clear picture of the kind of cultivated identity he was expressing.

Seen through Gilman’s lens, this looks like a cultural divergence, rather than one based on pure technique.

Maybe upright posture isn’t just about alignment. It’s about signaling control, refinement, and education. And maybe the forward-leaning versions reflect a different set of priorities: function, application, and practicality over presentation.

The latest issue of Tai Chi and Internal Arts is out!

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Magazines are still a thing in the digital age


I haven to admit, I wasn’t aware that Tai Chi magazines still existed, but it turns out that they do! In fact, there’s one called ‘Tai Chi and internal arts’, which is up to issue 76.

I can’t work out how you buy a physical copy, or where it is sold, but it’s made by the Tai Chi Union for Great Britain, and it looks like you can read it for free online.

If you are a regular listener to my podcast you might recognize the cover star – that’s Tina Faulkner Elders who I interviewed back in episode 33:

And inside you’ll find an article about Chen style Cannon fist by Nabil Ranné who I interviewed in issue 30:

Why are there so few group pictures in tai chi?

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It occurred to me the other day that I’ve been running a tai chi class for a couple of years now but never taken a single group picture. In jiu-jitsu you’re lucky you get out of the door without somebody taking your picture at least once — it’s a totally different culture and it’s interesting to reflect on the reason why.

In a martial arts class you expect your picture to be taken and shared on social media, or maybe you’ll even be captured briefly in a video of the class. I suppose it’s because you’re doing something exciting and worth bragging about. As an activity it’s ‘loud’ – there’s loud music playing a lot of the time.

The instagram for my jiu-jitsu academy is full of pictures of students, for example.

Tai chi is a different sort of activity — it’s quieter, softer and less about showing off. Taking a picture in that sort of environment feels a bit like going against the grain. It’s a shame because pictures can act as markers for when you started tai chi and how long you’ve been doing it, and a reminder of who was in the class then.

But anyway, I did take a group picture of the Tai Chi class last Friday, and I’m glad we’ve got at least one. I won’t post it here because it was just for the group’s Whatsapp. I’ll probably wait a year before I take another one.

The Tai Chi salute looks polite — its real meaning is much deeper

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Behind the gesture is a code about power, respect, and control

I always finish my Tai Chi class, which takes place in the UK and is taught by me, a British person with no connection to Chinese culture outside of martial arts, with a small Chinese-style salute.

Often called the “sun and moon” salute, it’s a traditional greeting in Chinese martial arts circles. It’s the same one you see Bruce Lee do to his student at the start of Enter the Dragon. But like most things in Chinese martial arts, it has both an obvious meaning and a hidden one. Of course, you don’t need to know the hidden meaning to use it.

In Chinese, the salute is called bàoquán lǐ, which roughly translates as “fist-wrapping rite.” Your right hand forms a fist — the “sun” — and your left hand presses flat against it — the “moon.” You stand straight, feet together. It’s accompanied by a short, respectful nod of the head rather than a deep formal bow, while maintaining eye contact.

Sometimes the fingers are folded instead. This seems to be a softer, less formal greeting (and it’s the one I usually use). This variation is often called gōngshǒu lǐ (“cupped hands greeting”) and is traditionally gendered — the closed fist is the right fist for men and the left fist for women.

It’s worth noting that this is far from the only hand position used for greeting across China’s long history, particularly within religious traditions.

Why do it?

The bàoquán lǐ isn’t a tradition added to Chinese martial arts — it’s a remnant of a moral code that existed before they were formally named.

At a basic level, the fist represents martial skill or strength, while the palm represents civility, restraint, and wisdom. The palm covering the fist symbolizes martial power governed by virtue or, put simply: I can fight, but I choose respect and control.

When I do it at the end of class, it’s quick and almost reflexive, sometimes even a little embarrassed. I don’t expect my students to do it back. It’s a brief gesture with a clear purpose: it marks the end of the session and acts as a quiet “thank you” for the work they’ve just done.

When I do it to my kung fu teacher, it carries a different weight. My teacher (who is not Chinese) still greets his own teacher (who was Chinese) with this salute every time they meet, and that tradition was passed on to me. I still greet my teacher this way whenever I see him. Even though it isn’t part of my culture, the meaning is clear when I do it.

In that sense, I suppose I’ve passed on a “light” version of the tradition to my own students by using the salute at the end of class. Even if they don’t return it, it’s something they now recognize. The tradition has softened over time, we don’t use it to greet each other, and honestly, I think it would feel strange if we did.

I’d describe my teacher’s period of training with his teacher as serious, and my own training as semi-serious by comparison. People in modern Tai Chi classes aren’t devoting their lives to this with the all-or-nothing commitment that might have been expected in 1860s China. For most people, it’s a hobby. A social activity. Ideally, people leave class feeling better than when they arrived, or at least like they’ve worked hard and learned something.

Hidden meanings

As with most things in a culture that has existed continuously for thousands of years, meanings tend to come in layers.

The sun and moon are obvious representations of yin and yang, shown here as equal forces held in harmony, suggesting balance rather than dominance.

There’s also a practical dimension. A level of formality in martial arts is useful. What we’re engaging in is potentially dangerous, and maintaining respectful ritual helps reinforce that fact.

(Incidentally, that’s one reason I don’t mind bowing in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu training too. We routinely put our training partners in potentially life-changing situations, and a moment of ritual respect is a good reminder that what we’re doing carries real consequences.)

One of my favorite hidden interpretations, though, comes from Chinese history, specifically the Ming–Qing dynasty transition.

The Ming were the last ethnically Han Chinese ruling dynasty. The Qing were Manchu invaders from the north, and they were deeply unpopular with large parts of the population. Resistance movements emerged almost immediately.

The slogan “Overthrow the Qing, restore the Ming” (反清復明, Fǎn Qīng fù Míng) became a rallying cry for secret societies and rebel groups from the fall of the Ming in 1644 well into the early 20th century.

The bàoquán lǐ salute was reportedly adopted by some of these movements as a covert signal of allegiance. The closed fist was said to represent the character for sun (日), while the open palm represented moon (月). Together, these two characters form 明 (Míng), meaning “bright” or “to illuminate,” and also the name of the fallen dynasty.

Which means that, technically speaking, every time I’ve used this greeting, I’ve been quietly expressing support for the overthrow of the Qing dynasty.

But no, my Tai Chi class isn’t secretly plotting the restoration of a long-collapsed Chinese dynasty. But I do like the idea that a small, slightly awkward gesture at the end of a community hall class carries echoes of philosophy, rebellion, and restraint. Even if most of the time, it’s really just a polite way of saying: thanks for showing up — see you next week.

Source: an article I once found on bàoquán lǐ.