Unfortunately I did not go to the Chen Village itself. We went to the Xulu Village, in the area of the Chen Village, of Chen Qing Zhou and there were no competitions at that time.
One of my respected Wu Tan Senior Chen teachers pointed out that push hands was far too overrated. It was simply a training technique. It is not one of my strongest areas and because of my baji training principles, I spend a lot more time training to punch and employ the kao techniques.
I saw the tape of Ren Guang Yi and can see how one could reach those conclusions. I have never seen good push hands competition because I am not sure what the competitive or ideal standard is supposed to be.
For all the talk about rooting, I have seen the Zheng Man Qing tape in Taiwan where he is doing a pretty good job except on his push, he drives his weight to the front foot and lifts up the back. This surprised me since I know a moving form of Chen’s push hands where by the front foot is closed and rooted and the back foot forms a closed cat stance.
When I attended the Taste of China tournament many years ago, the static push hands turned into a match of two cows pushing each other. It was and continues to be boring to watch.
What I have been taught is are pushing hands that reflect the applications of both Yang and Chen’s taiji. For example, my Chen’s high pat on horse is done a little different than the standard form and I am able move to a 45 degree angle with the lower hand blocking and the upper hand delivering a palm strike to the side of the opponents head. I have also been exposed to the use of eagle claw techniques within the pushing hands applications and that is probably poison to a taiji purist. Also found some of the most basic chan si jin exercises in my bagua practice have helped immensely in my rooting and turning. But again, to the purist this spells trouble so I won’t pursue this any further. (although Ben Lo’s translation of Chen Weiming’s Questions and Answers on Taijiquan cites I believe, Yang Shao Hou doing this type of exercise. I can’t remember and don’t have the text at hand. Saw it cited in a post somewhere and then I looked it up and there it was.)
I have found Ma Hong’s, Chen Qing Zhou, Feng Zhi Qiangs (push hands on his abstracted form) pushing hand tapes to very helpful. Also found Erle’s tape useful (I believe he differentiates Yang and Chen’s pushing hands on the tape. I’ve heard that Wang Pei Sheng has a tape on pushing hands and his ideas are supposed to be very good (I find a great affinity with Wang Pei Sheng’s Wu style taiji and GM Liu’s of Yang shi taiji).
I know that Master Ma Long from the Wu Tan is New York has some very excellent insights on taiji and I am not trying to plug the Count or Jason Tsou, but his two tapes were perhaps the most useful in understanding the applications. They are really well done in terms of filming and instruction. Jason Tsou really has some good insights into pushing hand’s applications and its basically the way I have learned them and would want to learn them.
Personally, I don’t think push hands should have ever been made into a competition. Its part of the training just like stance work, single moving postures, weapon training etc.. But I am open to what others theorizie.
