It was reported that a physician has arthritis for 10 years. He went to China and learned to practice Tai Chi.
Tai Chi helped his arthritis. So he went back to his country and started a Tai Chi research center.
There is a heated debate about the physical therapist teaching Tai Chi may do more harm than good.
One poster cited that he had to do standing practices for months for Yun Shou or cloud hands before getting all the moves right. If a Tai Chi novelist or newbie teaching patients Tai Chi without knowing all the ins and outs of correct body structure may actually detriment patients’ health since they do not have the normal range of motions around all joints or spine alignment due to illness.
Even a healthy and normal or fit person may injure himself or herself when practicing Tai Chi without proper instructions from a qualified teacher.
The other related discussion is that one school of thoughts says no stretching in Tai Chi. If your tendons or ligaments are “loose”, they are too soft to produce a stronger Jing.
The health and meditative aspect of taiji is a result of the martial practice, which is to say the correct practice.
Stretching is a part of taiji tradition. In fact, most masters would not accept a student if the student could not touch his chin to his toe. This is a taiji standard. Of course today many have relaxed the standard, but in the tradition you had to have basic gongfu to be accepted as a student.
As for jing/jin or fa jing, it is not that important of a skill in taiji. It is one of the least important skills to develop. It is more important to develop skills like zhan, nian, lian, and sui. http://www.ycgf.org/Articles/Z-N-L-S/arti_znls.htm
Actually, without flexibility, one cannot truly achieve song (relaxed feeling), which is essential in taiji for sensing your opponents movements.
Actually the health benefit of tai chi is relaxation/stress relief combined with moving your joints slowly through large ranges of motion and stretching muscles. It’s pretty simple.
Hopefully a physical therapist will be familiar with how the body works and won’t feed you any of this “move with your tendons” bulls.hit that you hear from so many kung fu/tai chi guys out there.
That’s right, Jing/jin is not one of the most important skills in taijiquan. My teacher demonstrated this to a bunch of Chen stylists recently. As you know Chen stylists are big on developing jing/jin. He demonstrated to them after neutralizing an attack that with one finger he can push his opponent down. Of course he could use a large force to beat his opponent really hard at that moment, but his point was that jing/jin was not as important a skill as the ones that are used to neutralize and unbalance the attacker. If you can achieve that and lead your opponent into emptiness, you can pretty much do what you want at that time, including just push him over with one finger, as he demonstrated.
If you don’t have those skills, fa jing is pretty much useless. And for that matter, fa jing is not always a big explosive force, sometimes it is subtle and a much smaller force, like a slight push.
I can’t see how you can develop any listening skills without first developing Peng Jing.
I’ve only been practising for 3 years, so what do I know… I’m still trying to figure out Peng Jing!
Peng is an outward Jing. Since you are doing circular moves all over your body, there will be Peng in just about everything you do or not do even standing still.
Read articles under the articles section of www.ycgf.org and you will find some very interesting reading. It should enlighten you a bit. Zhang Yun is probably one of the best and most authentic Taiji teachers in north America.
you develop listening skills by making your form practice as smooth and relaxed as possible. When you practice fixed routine push-hands, you make the movement smooth and light and you learn to follow. As your body begins to relax after much practice and you become more aware of your physical contact with your partner, because you are relaxed, you will be able to feel subtle changes in muscle movement in your partner. You will begin to feel when his muscles tighten.
Only through relaxation will you develop sensitivity. Also as you relax more, you will feel the Qi in your arms, hands, and fingers. It is like a pulsing, tingly feeling. For real, I feel it often now.
Grandma or grandpa may practice 8 steps simplified Yang Tai Chi.
No Chen Tai Ji Lao Jia Er Lu cannon fist etc. There are a lot of jumps and leg sweeps.
I have injuries over the years. I had a lot of physical therapies, too.
The most recent one is on the right shoulder. I had to visit PT 3 times a week. I had warm pack, ultrasound for deep muscles, electric message for surface muscles. After a while, there are also hand massage. After 10 months, I had to start to use the muscles again by lifting weight from 1#, 5# and more.
Most people aren’t looking for jing, fighting applications, or listenning skills. They just want something that will stretch their muscles, move their joints through a ROM, and the meditative, exotic aspect of it helps. If you gave them a routine of different joint circles, stretching, and meditation, then they’d scoff at it. If you say that they can learn the mystical, eastern combat art of health, then they’d jump at it. This guy doesn’t sound like he is advertising himself as a tai chi fighting master. He just wants to help people be more healthy.
What if’s what if’s what if’s. I can find an exception to anything you say too. In general, the people that’d be interested in Tai Chi for health only benefits were obviously not motivated enough to do something else. The mysticism of tai chi helps get them motivated to do it. The same can be said for qi qong.
Also, you are going completely off topic. This PT did TC, liked it, and wants to help his patients with it. He might not even know what qi qong is. I could blather on about different ways to skin a cat too if you like, but I’d prefer to keep it on topic.
I wouldn’t recommend taiji to someone with a physical ailment. My point is that if you want to do taiji for the purpose of strengthening, balance, relaxation, and meditation - you still have to practice the correct way as if your intention was to be martial even if you never learn any applications or practice fighting skills.
The tendon thing in taiji is about muscle movement. Taiji is very detailed in it’s movements. So even small turns of the arm or the movement of certain fingers during a larger movement can change the angle or feeling on the arm. Small taiji’s within larger taiji’s.
The thread is talking about a PT teaching Tai Chi. You decided to spin in into how your qi qong could be better served in certain situations. If you want to talk about optimal methods of regaining ROM in joints and flexability of muscles, then by all means make a thread about it. This is about a PT teaching TC to his patients… not qi qong.
And yes, mysticism will help ALL people. If you truly have clinical experience, then you’ll know that many, many people skimp out of their PT homework. Making it interesting helps them stay motivated to do the exercise.
