A few taichi tips

[Zeny]

i'm going to use this thread to share some useful taichi tips i've picked up during my taichi journey. I am not sure whether i am correct or not, so it is best that the reader critically assess my ideas and decide for themselves whether these tips are helpful in their taichi training.

Taichi is difficult to understand. There are people who trained for many years but fail to grasp the basic concepts of taichi. They may do the form and to the untrained eye their form may look like taichi, but to a taichi practitioner who has a proper understanding of the correct concepts that form may be deficient in so many ways that it looks only like a child's drawing.

Taichi is an extremely deep subject, but any discussion of taichi must start with the word 'sung'. What is 'sung'? Roughly translated to English it means 'relax', but sung is more than just relax. If i ask you to relax (untense) your arm, i'm pretty sure you can do it immediately and without much difficulty. Therefore you may have achieved 'relaxation' but yet you are not sung. To be sung it takes time. The human body is extremely amazing. If you train strength in a gym your muscles become bigger and hard over time. But if you train relaxation your muscles become soft and pliable over time. This soft and pliable muscle, achieved through years of relaxation training, is what is actually meant by 'sung'.

Therefore one must view taichi like a journey. One cannot simply 'understand' taichi and immediately becomes able to 'do' taichi. Like an artist who seeks to draw a better picture every day, the taichi practitioner trains relaxation every day in order to improve their sung. And only 'sung' can open the door for the taichi practitioner to perform advanced taichi techniques such as 'use 4 ounces to deflect a thousand pounds'. Once a sufficient level of 'sung' is achieved one will find that these so-called advanced techniques are actually not that difficult. Thus whenever a taichi practitioner begins their training session, the word 'sung' must be at the forefront of their mind.

To be continued.

 

[mograph]

You're pretty close on the meaning of "sung."

Regarding "soft and pliable" muscles, our muscles already are soft and pliable when we're not tensing them, so I think you refer to the state of muscles while resisting or applying force? I understand it this way: if force is distributed through the body and the body's structure is aligned well, then individual muscles do less work and are thus less tense. So they would feel soft to someone who tests them by squeezing: the more distribution, the less work done by each muscle, and the less tense each muscle would be in order to apply/resist force.

Sung, to me, is also being alert and open, ready to move in any direction, calm, not committing to any expected response. For example, someone expecting to step right will probably tense the left leg, expecting to push off from there: this is not sung, and other movements would require that you un-tense in order to move. So if you are not committed, you won't tense, and you can be ready to go wherever the situation dictates.

My image of sung is not "down" by gravity, but "out." It's been said that the character represents long hair that has been unbound, and that works for me. There is imagined space between the body components, nothing is tensed, nothing is tied up, nothing is bound, all is expanded ... slightly. Alert and calm.

Yes, once you are "sung," the advanced techniques feel more natural. In my experience, the reaction has been "oh, it that it? It feels too easy." But we have to overcome a few paradigms to get there.

Make sense?

 

[Zeny]

Thanks for your contribution mograph. Your description of sung is spot-on and I have no issue with it. I hope more people would contribute to this thread as i believe no one can rightfully say all his ideas are correct and thus any contradicting idea must be wrong. The most important thing is we all improve ourselves, or if not, at least what we write makes for an entertaining read.

Regarding your question, a relaxed muscle is soft and pliable, yes, but as i have said one may have achieved relaxation but yet one is still not sung. A sung muscle is a muscle quality that can only be achieved through years of training.

Let me put it in another way. Suppose today i unbind my long hair. The way my long hair flows down without any tension means i am relaxed. But what i am doing today is only the first day of relaxation training. On this day i have yet to achieve sung. Suppose that i continue to unbind my long hair every day, for another 1,000, 2,000 or 3,000 days. At each point the 'quality' of my hair changes such that at the end of the 3,000 days, my hair no longer feels the same to the touch. In other words, the hair i have now is no longer the same hair that i have 3,000 days ago. This is what is meant by sung. It is soft and pliable by training, not merely by doing.

If the first word in any taichi discussion is 'sung', then the second word must be 'chen' (sink). I will deal with this in the next post.

 

[Zeny]

The word 'chen' simply means sink. The ability to sink is a fundamental taichi skill, and sinking directly affects one's ability to perform 'fajin' (releasing skill), and indirectly assists in one's ability to perform 'huajin' (deflecting skill). Sinking is also commonly called 'rooting', and these two words actually mean the same thing. To sink means to have root.

Personally, i prefer to use the word 'sink' as it more accurately describes what is felt by the body when one acquires some level of skill in sinking. When one 'sinks' or gains 'root', the body does not actually feel like it is growing root into the ground beneath the feet (like plants). Therefore to call it 'rooting' may sometimes be misleading.

It is fascinating to think that even though it is such a fundamental skill in taichi (i treat it as second in importance, after sung), very little if at all attention is paid to sinking in many other martial arts. It is common for non-taichi practitioners to think that to sink means to have a low and stable stance. In fact sinking has nothing to do with the height of one's stance. A taichi practitioner is perfectly capable of sinking when standing upright. Sinking also has nothing to do with one's weight either, one can be fat and not sink and also thin and sink.

Sinking is an internal skill (what happens inside our body), and we cannot tell how good a person is at sinking only by looking. The only way to tell is by actual skin to skin contact. My next post will go deeper into this subject.

 

[Zeny]

Mograph, thanks for all the likes, your encouragement is really driving me to post regularly!

 

[mograph]

Mograph, thanks for all the likes, your encouragement is really driving me to post regularly!

No worries!

It is common for non-taichi practitioners to think that to sink means to have a low and stable stance. In fact sinking has nothing to do with the height of one's stance. A taichi practitioner is perfectly capable of sinking when standing upright.

Agreed.

 

[23rdwave]

In my yi quan practice we describe "sinking" as the elevator going down. The building stays the same but the elevator goes up and down. I also think of it like dropping an alka seltzer in a glass of water. The tablet sinks while the bubbles rise.

 

[Zeny]

Once the word 'sink' is not misunderstood, the next step is to figure out how to train it. On this point there are good news and bad news. The good news is that sinking can be trained easily, but the bad news is that it takes a long time. To give you some idea, 3,000 days of training probably gets you around intermediate level. You can train a very long time in sinking but you still will not 'max out' your ability. You will find that even after 30 years of training there is still room for improvement (though not many people would have presevered with their training enough to reach this level).

Sinking is not trained directly, but indirectly. To sung is to chen. In other words, a sung muscle will automatically chen. Like in my previous long hair example, hair which is unbound will automatically flow down. Therefore one need not worry about training chen, it is only necessary to train sung (unbind the hair). The better you sung, the better you chen. Let's say you can quantify your progress in sung with numbers. If you achieve 1,000 points of sung, you will get 1,000 points of chen, for free. Basically it is buy one free one.

When training sung, one must view the human body as separate components. We have eyes, mouth, neck, shoulders, chest, back, arms, hands, fingers, etc. In normal human beings, these components will have different levels of sung. For example, your arms can be quite sung but your neck can be hard and tense. Suppose after you add up the points of sung in each component, you reach a total of 200 points of sung. Then you started relaxing your neck and after some time (note i keep emphasing the time element), your neck improves in sung. This will add further points to your overall sung (let's say 10 points) so you now have 210 points of sung (and also 210 points of chen, remember what i said above). You now have better root than before.

I agree with what was said by 23rdwave above, but i would describe it differently. Let's say the human body is a 5 storey building. A piece of muscle in the 5th (highest) storey is trained and becomes sung, so it sinks into the 4th storey. It is common for people who achieve this to say, 'see? I am sung, my muscle has that sinking feeling' and stop progressing. They thought that by reaching the 4th storey they have already reached the destination. The reality is that they have only seen the tip of the iceberg. To put it in another way, that particular piece of muscle has only reached 20 percent of its full potential.

Merely sinking to the 4th storey is not enough. One should practise until the same piece of muscle could sink from the 5th storey all the way down to the 1st storey and (this is not yet the end) sink further down until the muscle felt like it has disappeared into a hole in the ground underneath the feet. That is the true final point we must reach. Now imagine the human body has 1,000 pieces of muscle, all of which must be trained until they sink and disappear into that hole. This gives you an idea why taichi is a long journey and training sung seems like walking along a neverending path.

So if you need only train sung to achieve chen, what is the best way to train sung? This will come next.

 

[Xue Sheng]

This was all be summed up (by a Aikido Sensei) very easily and in few words by Koichi Tohei, student of Morihei Ueshiba. Or at least it summed it up for me.

"all weight is underside"

You will find sinking and sung in Taijiquan, Baguazhang, Xingyiquan and Yiquan and I would not be surprised if you found it in Liuhebafa too

 

[Zeny]

How to sung? That is the million dollar question, and the question that every taichi practitioner will ask at some point during their training. Today I will give you the answer.

Given that it takes many years to achieve sufficient sung, it is in our best interests to find out exactly how we should practise sung in order to maximise the benefit that each minute of our practice time brings. There is no shortcut, but instead of 3,000 days, if we can achieve the same level in 2,700 days, we would have saved 300 days which could then be spent on other beneficial activities, like family time or ice cream.

Sung can be trained by simply ‘moving’ in a ‘correct' way. ‘Moving’ means literally moving (that is, not staying still). A muscle that is not moving will tense and become hard over time. A muscle that is constantly moving will become relaxed and sung over time. This should be quite easy to understand.

What then is the ‘correct’ way to move? Let me try my best to describe. You can move your arm (and other parts of the body) in two main ways. The first way is this. Try clenching a fist, and do a fast punch. Here your hand and arms are moved in a ‘positive’ (yang) manner in that one direction. The other way is this. Suppose your hand is holding a cup of coffee filled to the brim. Slowly lower the cup onto the table. Notice that this second manner is movement is more ‘negative’ (yin) and is different from the first manner of movement. This second manner of movement is the correct way to practise sung in taichi.

Taichi practitioners should be familiar with moving in that ‘negative’ manner. They may already be doing this ‘negative’ movement in their forms without realising what it is and what they are actually doing. Because of this, their forms would usually be a mixture of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ movements. A certain posture may start with a ‘negative’ movement, but end with a ‘positive’ movement. Or it could be that the upper half of the body is moved in a ‘negative’ manner, but the lower half (legs and feet) are moved in a ‘positive’ manner. It is important for taichi practitioners to differentiate between these two manners of movement, and try to practise their form using 100% ‘negative’ movement (that is, move 'negatively' at all times and at all parts of the body).

A side effect of the above theory is likely to be controversial. Because sung is trained and achieved through actual movement, it is not necessary for a taichi practitioner to practise ‘zhan zhuang’ (standing meditation).

Next I will give you a very simple exercise that anyone can do to practise sung at their neck muscles.

 

[mograph]

"all weight is underside"

Indeed.

Ki Principles by Koichi Tohei - ki-aikido.de

 

[ChenAn]

"Sung" simply means not stagnant.



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[Zeny]

I like to use the neck as an example because it is an often neglected component of the human body in taichi practice. Anyone can do this simple exercise to sung the neck. When doing the following exercise, ensure that the movement is (1) relaxed (2) slow and (3) negative (yin).

1) first stand upright in a relaxed manner

2) tilt the head forwards and downwards (at this point the eyes would be looking at the floor)

3) turn the head to the left

4) turn the head to the back (at this point the eyes would be looking upwards at the ceiling)

5) turn the head to the right

6) turn the head to the front (coming back to the same position at (2) above)

7) reverse the motion

As with the taichi form and other exercises, this exercise should be done daily. After a long period of time, the tense muscles at the neck will slowly become sung and sink down from the 5th storey to the 4th storey, and so on.

So once we achieve some sung (and chen), how do we use our chen in push hands or to defeat our opponent? this will come in the next post. But before that, would anyone like to describe how they use their chen in push hands practice?

 

[ChenAn]

I'm not sure Zeny what do you define as "tai chi". There several main taiji methods and different less known variations.
Relaxed state of the body is very popular term; however, in many traditional taiji methods it's not even mentioned. What mentioned; however, is different relationships between yin and yang. One of the most fundamental taiji principles is a "peng jin". If you fully relax you won't have it. So there are certain ratio of yin and yang involved in order to maintain "peng jin". And it consist not only of relaxation.

Traditional Yang and Chen families of taijiquan are very similar in this respect. Unfortunately most of traditional knowledge was "washed" out which left us with very confusing definitions of so called "tai chi classic " which everyone interpret own way.


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[Xue Sheng]

Zeny. if I may ask, what style of taijiquan do you train?

 

[Zeny]

ChenAn, would you like to give a more detailed description of this 'peng jin' and how does one perform this 'peng jin'?

Xue, i don't like to get into discussions of one style vs another, but simply to answer your question, my taichi is the southeast asian huang style, which is descended from cheng man ming style, which in turn is descended from the yang style. Wee kee jin is a senior practitioner of this style. What about yours?

The views and ideas i express in this thread are my own and do not necessarily represent the views and ideas of my teacher, my style or other practitioners of my style. As i have said above, these views and ideas are not necessarily correct and should be assessed critically.

 

[ChenAn]

Zeny, the best way to describe "peng jin" is to show it. Peng jin is not performed it exists within body structure .



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[Zeny]

How does one use or manifest this 'peng jin' and how does some measure of tension assist to create 'peng jin'?

 

[mograph]

Zeny, please consider these descriptions of peng (pronounced "pung"):

The Five Most Important Taijiquan Skills for Beginners: Peng Jin and Ding Jin
8 Energies (Ba Jin) of Taijiquan

Personally, I relate to the idea of an inflated rubber ball, and believe that Zhan Zhuang practice can help develop peng.
The other followers of the thread may be able to offer better explanations.

 

[ChenAn]

Well really easy you either have peng jin or don't Prerequisites to develop peng jin usually comes with special exercises/drills. I can't tell for other methods only for one introduced to me.


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