taijiquan

Making up your own forms – it’s not as easy as you think

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I had an interesting comment on my last post that made me think about the whole idea of making up your own forms (or Tao Lu) – in Tai Chi, Xing Yi, or whatever.

I’ve tried to do this over the course of several years and I’ve come to a few conclusions about it, which I’ll elaborate on here. Firstly, it’s hard. Making up new forms is not as easy as you think. But secondly, it depends what martial art you are making up a form in.

Author, performing Xini Yi Chicken (Ji) posture

If your martial art has forms that are constructed like lego bricks that can be slotted together in any order and still seem to work then it’s pretty simple to concoct a new form. Xing Yi is a good example of a martial art that has this quality. I was always told never to call Xing Yi tao lu by the English name “forms” because the correct term was lian huan which means “linking sequence” for this very reason.

The idea, (in our Xing Yi at any rate), is that all the links you learn are just examples, and you need to be constantly moving towards being able to spontaneously vary them as required, and then ultimately spontaneously create them. This idea has become heretical in the modern Xing Yi world to a large extent because modern Xing Yi has lost a lot of this spontaneous feel it used to (I admit that’s a subjective point) have, and things have become set in stone – forms that were once supposed to be fluid and flexible have become fixed and rigid. Forms of famous masters from the past now tend to be fixed forever. When words like “orthodox” start appearing to describe something you know it’s already dead, or on the way to dying.

But of course, anybody can make up a form, but is it any good? That’s a different matter. And it usually depends on the person doing it, not the moves themselves. With Xing Yi animals you can also ask the question – can I see the character of the animal being used coming out through the moves?

With Tai Chi I find it a lot harder to make up a form. Tai Chi’s approach to a form is quite different to Xing Yi, or other Kung Fu styles. The Tai Chi form tends to be a highly crafted piece of work that has been honed to perfection over many years. It is fixed because you need to be able to forget about the moves and concentrate more on what’s inside. It helps to do that if you don’t have to worry about what’s coming next because you’ve done it so many times that you can let go of that part of your brain and let it be aware of other things.

Tai Chi forms tend to start and finish in the same place for this reason. Usually, anyway. While long forms don’t tend to be balanced on left and right, a lot of the more modern, shorter forms make more of an effort to balance left and right movements.

If you understand Tai Chi and how to ‘pull’ or direct the limbs from the dantien movement then, sure you can make up your own Tai Chi forms, however, there is almost zero history of doing this in Tai Chi circles and it’s not really encouraged. I think this is because Tai Chi has push hands, which can be used as a kind of free-form expression of Tai Chi, completely away from the form and in contact with a partner to give you something to respond to, which is the whole strategy of Tai Chi Chuan, at least according to the Tai Chi Classics it is. To ‘give up yourself and follow the other’ you have to be spontaneous. There’s no other choice!

So, to conclude. I think that’s it’s in its application where the spirit of improvisation and spontaneity can be found in Tai Chi, not in the forms. I don’t think Tai Chi is particularly concerned with creating endless variations of forms and patterns like Xing Yi is, at all. Xing Yi, having a weapons starting point, doesn’t use this hands-on feeling and sensitivity to get started with spontaneity. Instead, it likes to create patterns, then vary them endlessly. Of course, you work with a partner when required, but it’s a different approach. Which is all quite natural, as these are two different martial arts, created by entirely different groups of people in a different locations and time periods.

You might like our Heretics history of Tai Chi and Xing Yi for more on that.


Tai Chi on the minute, every minute

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A friend shared a post recently about an interesting way of exercising called On the Minute, Every Minute. All you need to do is a number of reps of an exercise on the minute, every minute. The suggested start point in the article is 15 push ups, then 20 squats, then 20 plank jacks. That would take 3 minutes, so you just keep going 6 more times, up to 18 minutes. I quite like the idea because it’s simple, and simple is doable.

Photo by Hebert Santos on Pexels.com

Then I started to think how you could apply the same OTMEM method to Tai Chi… Here’s one suggestion: One move every minute then hold until the next minute comes around. I think a short form has around 50-60 moves, so would take roughly an hour to complete like this. It depends what you count as a move. That’s basically an hour of stance training, which would be quite challenging. One for New Year’s Day perhaps? I’m going to give it a go, so let me know in the comments if you are going to join me.

And of course, if you want to push it further you could always up it to every two minutes!

A quick Tai Chi fix anybody can try: Tracking with the eyes

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FYI: Owls can rotate their necks up to 270 degrees! 

To some Tai Chi people it’s important to know where the eyes are looking when doing a Tai Chi form for slightly esoteric reasons: “your eyes lead your intention and your intention leads your chi.” But I think we can come up with reasons for using the eyes in Tai Chi that require no mention of intention (yi) or chi.

Try this: Sit comfortably. Turn your head slowly to the side, back to the middle then the other side. It’s a typical neck stretching exercise that you’ll find done at the start of your typical Kung Fu, Tai Chi, or Yoga class. It’s good for your neck, but there’s nothing particularly special about it.

Now try this: Instead of just turning your head to the side, actively look to the side. Lead the movement with your eyes looking to the side. Now compare the feeling of doing that to the feeling of just turning your head to the side.

If you’re anything like me you’ll find the experience quite different. When you are looking to the side for a reason your whole body co-ordinates better, not to mention, I think you can turn your head a bit further too. I’m sure there is a scientific word for this purpose driven movement, but I don’t know it.

Think of an owl, when it turns its head to look at something interesting that might potentially be prey – the eyes are always locked in.

When doing the Tai Chi form, try actively looking with your eyes and turning your head in the direction you are going. Hopefully you’ll notice the different in the quality and coordination of your overall movement.

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

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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. “

The crucial detail of using the kua and hips in Needle at Sea Bottom

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There’s a lot of talk in the internal arts about the “kua”, and how using the kua (as opposed to the hip joints) is central to getting the idea of internal movement in Tai Chi.

So, what is the kua?

A definition from Crane Tiger Tai Chi reads:

“Kua refers to the area that extends from the inguinal folds (front of the hip where the leg and body meet) to the crest of the pelvis. It includes the hip joints, the iliopsoas, and adductor muscles as well as the sacrum and the perineum.”

I’ve written about the kua several times myself, but I think Ken Gullette’s book (my review is here) does a great job of describing it. To me, moving the kua is about opening and closing the body in the space inside the hip joints. Integrating the opening and closing of the kua into your movement facilitates power moving smoothly from the legs and feet up through the body, or receiving force in the opposite direction and directing it down towards the ground.

Moving “inside” the hip joints allows for very detailed movement and enables you to create and remove space when interacting with an opponent, which has martial application.

However, I think that the focus on the kua in internal arts often risks people ignoring the pivotal (ha!) role of the hip joints. I think the hip joints are actually more important to get right – if you focus on the kua but never think about your hip joints it’s a bit like building the walls of your house without a firm foundation.

I’ve been reading a great little book called Lighten Up by Mark Josefsberg, which is a humorous description of the Alexander Technique, and only costs £2.50 for the Kindle edition.

It starts off making the great point about the pivotal (ha!) role the hip joint play in actions like sitting, standing, running, walking, bending, etc.. A good point it makes about your hip joints is that they probably aren’t where you think they are. People tend to think that you put your ‘hands on your hips’ that’s where you bend from, when in fact, your hips attach to your legs via a ball and socket joint that is much lower down.

This has real consequences for Tai Chi postures such as “Needle at Sea Bottom”, where you bend forward. If you bend from too high up then you are compromising your spine, and bending from your hip joints is always a bit lower down than you think it is.

Wu Jianquan, Needle at sea bottom

The way I do Need at Sea Bottom is to try and keep my head going “up” away from the spine and bend from the hip joints (where the legs attach to the body) keeping my spine in a straight line. In theory, at least.

I don’t know who this is, but look at this guy doing it:

To me there are all sorts of problems here – he’s rounding his spine, and the head is kinked at an unnatural angle that isn’t an extension of the spine, in an effort to go too low. I’d rather not go as low as he is, and not compromise my spine like that.

The other point that Mark continually makes in the Lighten Up book I mentioned is to be aware of the AO joint – the atlanto-occipital joint. This is where the head meets the neck, and again, it’s not exactly where you think it will be. Put your fingers in your ears and imagine they are touching. Rotate the head up and down from something on a level with that point – that’s roughly where it is. What you’ll find is that you can look up and down without your fingers moving up or down because you are rotating the head around this point. Now apply that principle to Needle at Sea Bottom and you can see how your head position is meant to be.

Here’s a video of my Sifu Raymond Rand doing the movement correctly, with martial application:

Small circles and loops

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I read something interesting in this interview with Chen Xiaowang, originally published in the October 1996 (vol 20 no. 5) issue of T’ai Chi Magazine.

He’s talking about silk reeling and he says:

Chen commented that many people practice the Chen style in an overly exaggerated fashion making very big movements. He said these kinds of excessively large movements lead to a separation of one part of the body from other parts of the body and is incorrect. A common mistake, he said, especially among those who do the Xin-jia or new frame is to do movements in an exaggerated manner and make a lot of small circles and loops. “That shows that they don’t understand the principles of chan si jing.”

Tai Chi Magazine


I’m not sure what to think about that. It’s pretty well understood in Chinese martial arts that you often practice big and use small. The best way to practice a movement is to start with it in a large, exaggerated way, but then over time you do it in a more refined way and it becomes smaller.

A quote from my teacher I’ve always remembered is:

“In the beginning my circles encompass the whole universe but at the end I roll them up and put them in my sleeves.”

However I think perhaps Chen is not talking about this. I’ve seen a lot of people who do Tai Chi (and particularly Chen style) in a very bendy, rubbery, gyrating way. I think he’s saying that too much of that can often lead people onto the wrong track. And more specifically, he’s saying that if they’re doing this then it’s because they don’t understand the basics of silk reeling.

Now silk reeling is quite a Chen style-specific practice. I don’t think you even need to do it to practice Yang or Wu style, but if you are doing it, I bet it’s very easy to get sidetracked into doing lots of small loops and circles. But really the process should be about being minimalist. Cutting out the inessentials until the movement is pure and simple, while still being effective.

Sinking the Qi and rooting in the foot

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How does rooting work in Tai Chi?

In the Tai Chi Classic it says:

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


This does present something of a dilemma – how can we both be rooted in the feet but also controlled by the waist, let alone also generated by the legs?

In the Treatise on Tai Chi Chuan, the classic says “Sink the chi to the dantien.”

This sinking is related to the pulling in action of the muscle tendon channels that are usually associated with the contraction (closing) phase of opening and closing – usually while breathing in. The breath sinks to the dantien area, and combined with correct mental focus, this should make the dantien area feel full as you breathe in.

This pressurised feeling in the dantien is also the pressurised feeling at soul of the foot. You could think of it as squeezing the pressure from the dantien down to the foot, but you really don’t need to do that, as it should be instantaneous, since they are the same thing.

With the exhale, the pressure pushes up, through the legs, up the back and out to the extremities including the head. It’s a continual cycle of store and release.

You could call this the internal side of Tai Chi, but really, it’s just the way Tai Chi works, rather than a particular side of it.

NEW PODCAST Simon Cox on Zhang Sanfeng and the Wudang connection to Tai Chi

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New podcast! My guest today is Simon Cox, who co runs the Okanagan Valley Wudang with his wife Brandi in Penticton, British Columbia.

Simon and Brandi spent six years living and training in China under master Yuan Xiu Gang at the Wudang Daoist Traditional Kung Fu Academy. While there they studied Kung Fu, Tai Chi, Qi Gong, meditation, herbal medicine, Daoist music, and ancient and modern Chinese language.

After returning to the West, they started a Kung Fu school and community group in Houston Texas, where Simon was working on his PhD in Chinese and Tibetan mysticism at Rice University. At the end of 2019, they moved up to the Okanagan Valley and began sharing Wudang teachings with the local community.

What I really wanted to get at with Simon was an elucidation on his article about Zhang Sanfeng – exactly who was this mysterious Taoist immortal who is often credited as the founder of Tai Chi Chuan? I also wanted to find out more about Wudang mountain, and where its martial arts really come from. I hope you enjoy are conversation!

Is Tai Chi really about relaxation (fangsong)?

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I noticed a person on Facebook recently who was trying to make the point that the term Fangsong (放松 relax, unwind, loosen, ease, release, slacken) doesn’t appear in writings about Tai Chi until about 1930, and is therefore a modern idea that we are retrofitting to suit our modern ideas of Tai Chi being all about relaxing. That’s not his argument word for word, but that was the gist of it, anyway.

I’ve heard similar things from other people about how ‘back in the day’ Tai Chi was practiced hard, like a real marital art, until you were exhausted, and that modern training has gone soft in comparison. To those people I would point out that intensity and duration of practice have nothing to do with how you practice. Ask anybody who has practiced ‘standing still and relaxing’ for half a hour in a Zhan Zhuang posture and you’ll find out that practicing relaxing for half an hour in a stressful position is an exhausting, sweaty, business.

But to return to the original point, I would point out that even if you look at one of the oldest writings we have on Tai Chi – the handwritten manuscript of Li Yiyu from 1881 (which is available to read on Brennan Translation) you’ll find the word “relax” appears in the English translation 9 times. That’s not an insignificant amount. (I’ll leave it to the Chinese language experts to search the original Chinese).

You find it in phrases like:

I relax my power, but I do not allow it to collapse. (This has to do with “calm”.)

and

Every movement is a technique of first putting forth strength and then immediately relaxing, yet always there must be continuity from one to other, and there is never to be a departure from the four stages of “begin, develop, transmit, and finish”.

However, if you check out the even earlier 1875 text Explaining Tai Chi Principles, written by Yang BanHou, son of the famous Yang LuChan, you’ll find that he’s right – the phrase “relax” doesn’t appear, even once!

However, just look at one of the things written in the text:

“Power comes from the sinews. Strength comes from the bones. Looking at it purely physically, one who has great strength is able to carry many hundreds of pounds, but this is an externally showy action of bones and joints, a stiff strength. If on the other hand the power of your whole body is used, it may appear you are unable to lift hardly any weight at all, yet there is an internal robustness of essence and energy, and once you have achieved skill, you will seem to have something more wonderful than one who has the stiff sort of strength. Thus runs the method of physical training for self-cultivation.”

It seems pretty clear that he’s talking about relaxation being required for whole body strength.

But getting away from the nitpicking about facts (sorry!) I do think he has a point – there has been a modern re-framing of everything to do with Taoist arts as a kind of therapy for stress and dealing with the pressures of modern living that wasn’t necessarily there in the original arts – especially with Tai Chi.

Chinese Short Sword, from the Arms of All Nations series (N3) for Allen & Ginter Cigarettes Brands by Allen & Ginter is licensed under CC-CC0 1.0

Tai Chi was created in pretty stressful times, when wars were being fought, the concepts of law and order and justice were malleable depending on how important you were and life could be brutal and short. Taoism emerged at a time that was probably even more dangerous to be alive in! Frankly, I don’t think you expected to live long enough to have to worry about getting stressed! You were probably too busy trying to stay alive and earn a living. Being stressed is something of a modern disease because we live lives of relative comfort and we’ve got nothing truly life threatening to worry about on a daily basis.

The same thing has already happened to yoga.

But, I think we’ll have to live with it, because the hippies who have taken over Tai Chi Chuan do have a very good point – the first step in Tai Chi is to relax, whether you like it or not! You cannot move your body as a unit if parts of it are tense.

In Tai Chi Chuan the body is required to move as a whole unit, connected by fascia, tendons, muscles, etc, with all the joints allowed to move freely during exercise. All the joints are involved to some degree in all movement, so need to be relaxed. The ball-and-socket joints of the shoulders and hips are allowed to move freely. The gliding joints of the ankles and wrists move freely, and the hinge joints at elbows and knees are all allowed to move freely. Finally, the dantian moves freely and controls everything. Tensing the muscles around a joint separates it off from the rest of the organism, meaning that whole body movement is not possible.

And being mentally ‘tense’ is just as much of a problem as being physically tense, since the mind and the body are intimately connected.

Perhaps the emphasis in the original writings on Tai Chi was focused on more lofty philosophical principles, yes, but you will find plenty of admonitions to relax in there, and for good reason. That’s just how Tai Chi works.