Episode 97 - On Forms (II)

As the taijiquan form is good for health, a lot of people practise it everyday as "morning exercise". However, it appears to me that not many people know how to do it in a "correct" manner and, therefore, cannot get the best out of it.

By "correct" I mean meeting the requirements as set down in various Taijiquan classics.

One such requirement is that "when you move, the whole body moves; when you stop, the whole body stops".

The purpose behind this requirement is that, you coordinate various parts of your body to do a task. For morning exercise purpose, this trains a practitioner to keep good control of his body and learn how to maintain his balance (reducing the chance of falling down due to lose of balance on slippery floor). While the muscles power of a practitioner may not be be strong, he can still be active if muscles in different parts of his body can work together in carrying out a task.

The requirement is to move different parts of your body coherently. There should be a linkage between these separate parts such that the movement of one part will enhance the movement of the other related parts.

You gain very little benefit, if, for example,:

(1) after your main action has stopped, you extend your arm / leg slowly, pretending to be artistic, relax and soft; or

(2) separate parts of your body do things separately / independently, pretending to be soft as if without bones.

In these 2 circumstances, a practitioner uses individual parts of his body separately and independently. Hence, he cannot get the benefit discussed above. You can regard this as a kind of exercise nevertheless, but this kind of exercise can not be regarded as up to standard in the taiji system, and there is no room for further development.

Taiji emphasises "softness and relaxation". Such "softness and relaxation" is a kind of "coordinated softness /relaxation" engineered by "will power". It does not equal to the misinformed concepts of "absence of strength" or "soft as if without bones" - such misconceived "softness" leads to the defect of "detach" in application techniques.

Apart from coordinating the mind and body, there are other requirements, such as: relax your shoulder, lower your elbow, sink your chest, pluck up your back, upright your tailbone and upright your head, etc.

All these requirements, like the requirement of coordination, have their respective rationale in the martial art aspect and should not be taken literally.

[Link to Part One]