Yang Family Tai Chi Discussion Board

Greetings All, Gu Rou Chen makes a sound observation. High level instructors, at least in our system, leave the teaching of beginners to junior instructors as a matter of course. My Sifu simply doesn't teach beginners, and I only very rarely work with them anymore. In regards to the issue Audi raise...

Greetings Audi, In my school, the generic usage of "an" refers to any strike with the hand, be it a fist, palm, wrist or fingertip. Our "classic an" strike is one where we tilt the opponent slightly by lifting with the fingertips and then cutting their centre with a palm shot, as...

Well, I'd say the FIRST thing to ask is: "How much do you charge for classes?" THEN "Who did you learn from?" If I am to be paying good money for the classes, I want to know their provenance. If the guy gets offended, then I can only conclude that he is hiding something. Cheers, P.

Yeah, one hopes that people can become more interested when they start noticing some health, balance and flexibility benefits from the training. The people whom I personally don't want to teach are the tattooed nutjobs who subscribe to "Ninja Monthly" and drink blood from human skulls to t...

I should say that our weeding out process is to identify undesirables, violent people who want to learn martial arts for "bragging rights" or to hurt people. The long form is only the first layer in that process.

Cheers,
P.

No, it is not offensive to ask a legitimate teacher who they learned from. If you go to their school asking after classes, they should tell you up front. Their references should also be traceable. There are some "T'ai Chi schools" out there who claim that their style was learned from Immor...

Greetings All, A propos Gu Rou Chen's observation, I spent some time in Wuhan over ten years ago where I witnessed dozens of people lined up in parks along the river every morning repeatedly making the same "commencement" motion in time with their breathing, apparently as a form of qigong....

Cheers Audi, I am of the opinion that such postures should always have definite practical foci. "Flowery" metaphors loaded with symbolic philosophical meanings were, I believe, originally mnemonics drawn from the vast repertoire of classical Chinese allusion, mnemonics so used because the ...

Maybe this will help. Modern Wu style and modern Yang style are two different things. There has been enough water under the bridge to make the distinction worthwhile. 100 years ago, when the Yang bros., the Hao family, Wu and Sun were all training, the differences weren't as systematic. Each instruc...

I am always suspicious when a school has to insult another school to promote themelves. I had a discussion once with a guy claiming to be from a "secret" lineage that was promoting itself like crazy, he was saying that the Yang family doesn't teach this and they don't teach that and I aske...

"To and fro" is a good way to demonstrate the plasticity of yin and yang for new students, too. The demonstration that I talk about above is very commonly demonstrated to newbies in Wu family schools, as it is from the very first "Raise Hands Step Up" motion in the form, sometime...

I'm told that "rulers" were sometimes used by the families in the old days, but mostly for stimulating acupoints for health purposes, not for forms training. My teachers say weapons do a better job at teaching the geometry of T'ai Chi anyway. Although, there are drills that we do using eve...

It involves identifying the extreme backward point of the opponent's heel as the centre of a circle. P'eng describes by moving along, either forward or backward, the top part of the circumference of the circle that is centred on the tip of the opponent's heel in this case. You may assign the centre ...

Greetings, That sounds like the same demonstration of the first motion of the form that I like to make for new students, very interesting. I have them grab my wrists, I listen to where their centre is and then send some p'eng through my wrists using their heels as the centre of a circle to launch th...

What I have seen on sabres in old pre-Republican photos and paintings is a sort of lanyard through the handle of some of their sabres. Whatever works, indeed! I have heard of the distraction element spoken of in regard to the fringe of horsehair on a Chinese spear (which fringe is used by Wu stylist...