This sounds very reasonable and I'm satisfied with that view. It figures that we sit and argue and forget the fact that taiji is all about balancing the Yin and Yang. It's all about the middle ground. Excellent post.
A very good post yet again by venerable sage VR... Balance is what its all about... yin and yang in harmony... too much of one and its not too good... Very good posts by Syd... much better than I could have put it but exactly how I feel... you have a way with words mate... KE... Zilla has a point of view that may or may not be valid and may or may not change... I find that perfectly acceptable as he isnt pushing it on me in an offensive manner and it doesnt affect me or my practicing in any way (though he is incorrect ... lol)
These definitions are tricky. Taiji definitely increases strength and power, I know that. Relaxation increases power. Weight training does not necessarily make you stronger. I've seen lots of muscular people who were not strong, or at least certainly not powerful at all. To do one rep of the full 1st Taiji form, totally properly with fa jin expressed in every move would be quite a task. To maintain the requirements of posture and relaxation without losing it, or without your legs giving out, is hard. In a fight if your legs give out, or if you drop your hands, or if you stop moving or become what is called "dead", you are finished. Someone could say that stance traing, or let's say stance training with wrist weight does not make you stronger, but in actuality it make your body way more connected as a unit, and powerful and relaxed, than weight training does. Secondly, I do not think weight training is harmful to Taiji practice. The way I see it, the more hard training you do, the better your Taiji will be. The way I see it, weight training would be a good supplement to Taiji. I have found that hard training by itself does not develop sung. But hard training with internal traing develops sung faster than just internal training. That is why IMA is both internal and external. But just lifting weights is nothing. Oh I see, someone has already mentioned hard labor vs. weight lifting. All I know is that I see alot of buff guys who are not strong at all, and can't even throw a punch hard. But hard labor will definitely help Taijiquan practice, but real Taiji is pretty hard labour in itself..
Kind of irrelevant now. He took me rattling his cradle to heart and posted obnoxious rubbish on another thread, for which we banned him. I said what I did because he posted incorrect, misleading information and did it in a way that I find obnoxious.
ONCE again! THIS is why I love this site. You guys dont put up with bashing and other *rubbish* I always leave here with a smile and have received SO much support and encouragment from many of you. Unlike other sites that tolerate -junk- Keep up the GOOD work!!!!!
Wow, great stuff guys. A little bit of everything, some science, some well thought out post and even the inevitable KE with his undies in a bunch at the mention of Chi! :cry: I agree that weight lifting and Tai Chi can work well together. They also can work against each other. It is a matter of common sense. I like to lift for a while (3 or 4 months) and then stop for a bit. Lifting can and will impede the flow of chi by creating tension. As Cheng Man Ching said "Invest in loss", spending some time strengthening the bodies connective tissues with resistance training (In gravity rather than machines) is time well spent in the long run. Stretching and relaxation with Tai Chi will help reduce this tension. I train till it starts to affect my ability to relax, then I do Tai Chi alone till I can integrate this new stronger "framework" back to the level of relaxation that I desire for my Tai Chi practice. Doing repetitive manual labor like gardening and such is IMO the best way to do them both at the same time! My solution is that I am building a stone wall 2 feet wide and 2 1/2 feet tall around 5 acers of land. I have to carry the rocks through the woods. I am two years into it and am about 1/20 th of the way there. Everything in moderation I say, this includes moderation!.............and moderators!
All i know is taiji alone won't help my rock climbing, i do some other forms of 'strength' training, which includes some weights, plyometrics, power yoga, pushups, chin-ups, ab work, and hand/forearm work for a stronger grip. The act of actually doing rock climbing also automatically strengthens in the same way as doing a lot of chin-ups. If i was told that the muscle i'm building from other exercise was somehow ruining my taiji i'd laugh, and if they proved it i would think less of taiji! In reality anyone who is completely against muscle/strength training doesn't understand how the body works and is probably only saying this because of their own lack of strength and desire to build it and wants everyone else to come down to their level. no thanks. speaking of power and plyometrics, what's your guys' take on plyometrics and its relation to taiji? For those of you who don't know what it is: "plyometrics is one of the best ways if not the best way to improve power. To justify this answer lets first look at what is power. Power is similar to strength except you are adding the time factor. Therefore the relation of strength and speed is what we are talking about when we talk about power. A person who can perform a specific resistance movement, such as jumping, bench press etc., the fastest would be said to have more power in that movement. So what we are looking at is not just the contraction of the muscle, but how fast will it contract. It has been shown that a muscle will contract the fastest when it has been loaded. This is why you should be able to jump higher if you crouch down then immediately jump up than if you started in the crouch. So if this is the best way to perform a powerful movement lets practice these movements. This practic e is called plyometrics and has been shown in study after study to decrease the time it takes for the muscles to contract, resulting in more power."
Whatever. Maybe I was a bit forthright. On the other hand, I don't follow you around onto other threads pursuing some moronic little vendetta.
Actually KE I don't follow you, it's not about you, really. I do however follow threads that interest me and I feel worthy of discussion. This is because I enjoy threads where folks are not talking about people or things, but talking about ideas. To talk about Ideas is a difficult thing to do. Especially when there is someone who has formed an opinion and has an agenda that includes active discouragement of the discourse. When you add to that the fact that you are a moderator of the very topic that your are verbally ****ing on, you can begin to see why I respond in kind when you interject your "opinion". Your opinion is usually nothing more than plead with others to share in your contempt for anything you can't understand. Having you "Moderate" these kinds of topics is like having the fox guard the hen house.
"In reality anyone who is completely against muscle/strength training doesn't understand how the body works and is probably only saying this because of their own lack of strength and desire to build it and wants everyone else to come down to their level. no thanks." I disagree. The reason weightlifiting can be detrimental to Tai Chi is easy to explain. View the body as having a water ballon, with the water inside being chi, located in the stomach. Then imagine that there are straws, drinking straw, that run from the stomach out to the finger tips, the toe tips and the crown of the head. A healthy/strong person, in this view of the human body, would be a person for whom the water in the ballon in the stomach, the chi, can flow from the stomach to the head, fingers or toes thru the connecting straws. The straws are completely open and free to the flow of water/chi. A sick/weak person would have a blockage in the straws that prevents the flow of the water/chi. Let's agree the right hand had a problem. Then we would find that some of the straws going to from the stomach to the right arm would be crimped or squashed so the water/chi flow is reduced or stopped. The reason that weightlifting can be detrimental is common sense. When people lift weights, they are compressing the muscles or their body as the load of the weight is lifted. What happens if you compress a drinking straw? The straw gets smaller. If the straw is smaller, the amount of water flowing thru it is less. In our example that means that less chi is flowing from the stomach out to the extremeties because the straws have been compressed from weightlifting. That kind of explains why some people think lots of reps with low weights is better. If you pick up this huge weight, it probably smashes the chi conduits, "the straws", smashes them flat on the first pick up. But if you pick up a small weight and lift it lots of times, the straw is only getting smashed just a little bit so the chi flow is not interfered with.
Actually you dont compress the muscles you contract them just like you do when you walk or bend or pretty much any time you move... if compression happens then you are doing it wrong and will injure your self... Also building muscle will actually create more conduits (ie in the form of blood vessels and muscle fibre) for qi to flow through... wouldnt this be helpful in developing qi paths..?? When I have more time (and if I remember... hey I am getting old and forgetful ...) I will try to tackle this better... cheers
The thing about weights and "internal" arts not mixing seems to be a bit of old misinformation that's been floating around since (IRRC) Robert Smith's books (not necessarily his fault - he was a pioneer, and he may not have gotten the full story from his interlocutors). What is definitely bad is lifting heavy weights in the very early stages of learning while you are trying to get a feel for "qi" and manipulating neijin. You're trying to zero in on a different way of co-ordinating and moving your body, and it could be confusing if you try to use your nascent neijin too early, against heavy resistances, before it's coherent and developed. Very light resistance is all that's needed in the early stages. But once one is firmly "in the saddle", as it were, then one can quite happily lift weights, and if you want to develop real power weight training is absolutely required. All internal systems have various kinds of power training involving moving heavy objects. All Taiji styles have heavy pole-shaking (not just Chen). Chen Qingzhou gives a form of exercise using a heavy ball from Chen village. In Liang Shouyou's book on Bagua there are exercises using brieze blocks. There are several old photos (one or two on the Empty Flower site, IIRC) which show Xingyi old-timers lifting heavy stones with handles on them. IOW, while the way the muscles are used in "internal" MA (the overall co-ordination) is different, muscles are still being used, and if you want great power, they have to be used against resistance. Also, you have to consider (as someone said quite early on in this thread) that many of these traditional styles were developed in farming communities, where people were used to working hard, squatting a lot, etc. - so they were already as fit as their diet allowed, and it's likely that training methods developed under those circumstances took a general level of fitness for granted.
And wouldn't any "compression" from contracting the muscles be stretched back out with the muscle extension? Human tissue will not hold its shape like a bent straw either.
Functional muscle is key to fighting, evryone knows that. Tai Chi is not all Yin, that is only half of it. Need Yang as well. You need muscle to strike, the more functional muscle you have the more power you can deliver in your strikes. For completion sakes lets not forget the Yang in the Yin and the Yin in the Yang.
I agree with about 90% of that. The key point in my opinion is the "in the saddle" bit. I believe that if you took a poll of the people in martial arts who do weight lifiting AND are also "in the saddle, you would get single digit percentages. Most modern people do not have anything like the kind of conditioning that a farmer has. So all the advice and all the old time instructions do not work for modern people. The instructions need to be modified to take account of the idea of people in poor physical shape with no real understanding of hard work and patience want to be kung fu fighters in a year or two. When talking to a crowd, it is necessary to speak to the majority. Then later on seek out the people who need individual instruction. In my opinion, it is better to tell a crowd of people like here in the forums, that they need to learn body alignment, how to be "in the saddle", before they start weight training. Then if someone pops up who knows what they are doing, then you talk to them differently. It is my experience that if an unaligned person does weight training, they get strong in an unaligned or crooked way. Then when they want to go back to making themselves aligned, straight, they first have to unlearn the weight training. This usually takes exactly as long to unlearn as it did to learn. If a person weight trains for 4 years, it might take 3 1/2 years to get rid of all that muscle and loosen up enough so they can realign themselves properly. Some instructors in internal martial arts will refuse to accept students who are trained in external arts. External arts make people hard in body and mind. They are so hard that they are trouble as people and as students. These teachers do not want the hassle of escorting the external student thru the phase of losing the hardness and becoming soft, so they refuse to accept them. ----- This is going to confuse people but I simply can't stop writing without making a reference to it. I have written and erased things about 5 times so far. People have energy and energy fields around them. The energy can be said to behave like heat. We know that if we stand close to something that is hot, we feel the heat. Human energy is like this. If you stand close to another person, you can feel their energy like you can feel heat from a stove. The heat from the stove will gradually make you hotter. Standing near another person, you will gradually absorb some of the energy they put out. Internal martial artist are usually described as soft and/or sensitive. This is not sensitive like emotional sensitive. What they mean is sensitive to energy. Or sensitive to heat like in the example. Maybe a regular person can feel heat from 1 foot and an internal martial artist can feel heat from 5 feet away. There is a price to pay for the increased sensitivity though. Because you can feel the energy more, you are more susceptible to it. The regular person only feels hot if he is 1 foot away from the stove. But the sensitive person is hot if he gets even 5 feet away. The sensitive person has to be more careful because of his sensitivity. A sensitive person takes in or takes on the energy or emotions of people around them just like getting hotter from the heat of a stove. If some person who is arrogant or abrasive comes into contact with them, not only do they suffer the verbal and physical abrasiveness directed at them, they also directly absorb the abrasive energy from the person. This will make them sick if they cannot get rid of the energy. If you are a soft person, and a hard person asks you to teach them, you have to consider what will happen. Every time you get near the hard person, you will become hard. You will spend half of your energy trying to remain soft in the presence of the students hardness. Really, what person is going to want to do something like that? Put themselves in a position where they have to work every minute so they do not feel sick? This is the idea behind those old sayings about "surround yourself with happy people". Their happiness really does "rub off on you". That is why your parents told you some kids "were a bad influence". They really are. Their bad energy is getting inside of you and making you bad. Did you know that in India they have a caste system? This means that people are in different categories. Brahmins for example or untouchables are the more famous example. It is my theory that the caste system was developed based on energy and sensitivity ideas. I think the untouchable people were low or bad energy people. Since it takes awhile to learn to see energy, the people in authority passed laws making people show a physical outward sign of their caste so that others could see it plainly. This way a person of good energy, but who had not learned to see energy in others, could look for the sign of the untouchable and know to avoid them. The "better" people wanted to avoid contamination by the bad or low energy of the untouchable person.
First of all we have gone wayyyy off topic with this discussion by now. Secondly while I agree that we are all entitled to our opinions I agree with about 5% of the above post. The aspects I do agree with are the issues of energy but towards the end your getting into the realms of speculation which are simply not true. My partner is Indian and I have studied quite a bit about Indian philosophy, culture and it's history long before I met her. When we talk about the Caste system this was simply a system of heirachy and organisation and control; in short an elaborate pecking order in kingdoms that were equally mirrored in Europe during the middle ages with serfs and peasants, lords and landowners etc, and which carries through to modern times with class systems in western society ... working class, blue collar, middle class, upper class, white collar etc, etc, etc. Even in western society we have our untouchables ... prostitutes, drug addicts, homeless people, musicians, artists etc Where I object to your speculative assessment of the caste system is when you suggest that the lower castes were of lower energy values and had bad energy. This is 'pop sociology/anthropology' at it's worst. The fact of the matter is that, many, if not all of the lower caste and untouchables in Indian society are musicians, artists, Sadhus, creative types! These people are the most sensitive, energy-wise, of possibly all the people in any culture no matter what their class, grade or level! Many of the people who developed and created the unique Indian sculpture, writings and ancient carvings, their music, artistic and philosophical teachings, were in their time lower caste; apart from Siddhartha. I don't see Ravi Shankar as having bad or low energy, personally. I submit the quote below as adjunct to my comments. In other words patronize your audience? I believe when talking to anybody, crowd or otherwise, you should speak your truth. I see no point in modifying facts for the benefit of an audience who could use the truth more than anything else. You don't tell somebody to remain mediocre when you can help them to achieve their potential. Additionally how can you presuppose when people are and are not ready to hear the facts regarding correct practice of weight training and or Taijiquan? This would require mind reading skills. I have spoken to complete laymen about Taijiquan and Qigong who have come to these arts with a skewed perspective. With some time and effort and a little friendly and honest guidance that person has managed to walk away better informed and able to make stronger choices as a result. If I had sat back and said 'this guy really isn't ready to hear that breathing like that is wrong', then they would remain ignorant of the facts and may walk away from their practice dissillusioned. All I can say is that I weight train regularly and it benefits my Taijiquan 100%. My ability to remain sung, relaxed and supple - opening the joints etc is greater than when I was not training. My core strength is solid as a result of my system of training and I stronly believe that core strength is something all Taijiquan practitioners require since we move from the centre. Did you ever see an Olympic male Gymnast? You see those guys do floor routines, pommel horse and rings etc? Do those people lack suppleness and softness when those attributes are applied or required in their performances? No ... I believe that the Taijiquan practitioner needs to understand the kind of weight training they require but it's not rocket science to research and put together a set list of routines that dove tail into those requirements. The problem comes when people don't understand that there are many different methods of weight training and ways to achieve your particular goal. A Taijiquan practitioner should not be training like a pro power lifter for instance.
