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Kung Fu – World Tai Chi Day

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world tai chi day The crew from Enter Shaolin participated at a local World Tai Chi Day event yesterday. It’s nice to see the Tai Chi community coming together for a day to promote Tai Chi.

Like many when I first learned about Tai Chi I wasn’t very interested in it.

It seemed slow and pretty pointless. That was when I was looking at Tai Chi through the eyes of a person who didn’t understand exactly what it was.

The first 4 years of my training with Sifu Phu he kept suggesting that I start training in Tai Chi Chuan. I tried but I kept loosing interest in doing it.

Finally, after several years of training I hit a plateau in my training. It seemed like no matter what I did, I wasn’t able to stop using force in my martial art training. This really frustrated me because I was practicing all the time. Though, it was like the harder I trained the more difficult it was to soften up. [Read more…]

To Chi Or Not To Chi, That Is The Question

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EMEISHAN, CHINA - AUGUST 4: A man pratises Em...

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Okay the title sucks! but I really couldn’t think of any other title for this post. Today I am going to talk about Chi or at least how I perceive it to be. Often I find that when I start teaching someone the concepts of Chi there eyes start to glaze over and they have no idea what I am talking about.

People make fun of things they don’t understand.  What people don’t realize is that all of us have Chi, but most of us don’t understand the language of Chi.

In Wing Chun  you understand it as “Talking Hands” or Sensing Hands. Believe it or not your body talks. The moment you make contact with your opponent the conversation begins. Did you know that just a small little insignificant thought can change the entire conversation in a blink of an eye?

There is a saying “The Mind Moves The Chi”

Try This: Tell someone to just grab your arm. All that I want you to do is look straight ahead, every time your arm is grabbed don’t think about anything simply get your eyes to go to the spot that was just grabbed and just let your body move. Again it is important that you do not think about it, rather as soon as your eyes make contact with it, just let go and feel.

It helps to have a training partner who is not trying to beat the snot out of you. This drill won’t make you kick people’s butt better or anything like that. This drill is to simply help you let go of yourself. So that you can hear what your opponent is saying to you.

Chi doesn’t exist for you until you actually feel energy. Before you can do that you need to imagine Chi  first. The drill I shared with you will help you connect your imagination to your Chi. It is through imagination that you will learn to develop a deeper level of feeling.

 

 

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The Hidden Treasure Of Tai Chi

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BEIJING - JULY 31: Beijing residents practice...
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Tai Chi is well known for helping to reverse the aging process.  Since the main focus of many Tai Chi school around the world focus on health and wellness. The Fighting techniques are vanishing and this writer feels that they need to be preserved.

While you can start gaining benefits from practicing Tai Chi right away, it could very well be years before you could use it in a combative sense and that is assuming the person teaching you is trained in combat.

Video On Tai Chi Health Benefits:

What has been lost seems to be the fighting applications of  Tai Chi, I believe a lot of that has to do with the fact that it really can take years to become proficient enough to apply them in actual combat.  But Tai Chi isn’t called the Grand Ultimate Fist for nothing. Hidden beneath the layers of form and energy lies a effective fighting art.

I started my training in Wing Chun and have always felt that it is great fighting art in it’s own right. However once I started diving into Tai Chi Chuan, I started to realize that Wing Chun barely scratches the surface when it comes to energy control.

This video demonstrates some of the possibilities applying Tai Chi to combat

As you can see from this video, that the techniques are choreographed and may not exactly work like that in real life. However it gives you an idea of what is possible using this art for self defense purposes.

Generally speaking, if you are looking for a place to train and want to start learning the combat side of the Grand Ultimate Fist, make sure you find a place that focus’s much of their training on push hands. Just like Wing Chun’s (Chi Sao) bridges the gap between sparring and fighting.  Tai Chi’s push hands training has a similar effect.