I have just read an article saying that spear/pole shaking is essential to develop the famous feeling of your arms being “steel wrapped in cotton” in taiji. This suggests that anyone not teaching something similar to this is not teaching complete taijiquan, surely? (The reason I am worried about this is, as far as I know, my current teacher does not teach this). Any help or comments would be much appreciated.
Pole Shaking
It’s just another excercise to strengthen the dantien and to practice fajing. A substitute for it is training with the medicine balls. Anyway, I believe pole shaking is not really needed if one’s a beginner.
Pole/Spear shaking was actualy a method of stabbing and slashing with a a pole/spear to cause greater injury to an enemy, what I know is that it strated in Xingyiquan battle field practice and as a secondary benefit seemed to help increase the 5 jins(Splitting, Pounding, crossing/shrearing, drilling, brusting) already trained.
While the spear or pole does help as a focus point it’s not really needed.. but its still fun to learn.
pole is important imho
if you watch the movements in the pole form you see a lot of ‘waist against the hips’ movement which is vital - you don’t have to do the pole to be able to do it but it makes it a lot easier to focus on it
it definitely improves the spiralling though