i have to admit i see very little problem with it.
yeah, it's silly to think that johnny MBA can get the benefits you, xue, have gained from years of study and training in just 3 minutes a day.
on the other hand, johnny MBA doesn't want the benefits you've gained. at worst, johnny MBA wants to get his yoda on and impress the redhead account executive down the hall with his eastern mystic hobby. at best, johnny MBA wants to drop his blood pressure, lower his stress, bump his flexibility a wee bit.
and yeah, 3 minutes (which is probably how long it takes to run the form -- not unlike the approved Yang in 8 form, nor too different from the Yang tournament form) will accomplish those goals a little.
certainly more than if he hadn't done it at all. and who knows? maybe the taste will get him hooked and he'll go on to study something more serious.
for my money, anything -- literally anything -- that gets more people involved even peripherally in the martial arts is a good thing. or at least has a good outcome.
I would agree with you but it doesn’t work that way when it comes to Tai Chi, and it is rarely a good outcome. And it is not the practitioner I am upset with it is the teacher making false claims like in 3 minutes a day you can get all the benefits of the ancients (to be honest the term ancients me too). It is plain stealing from the public in the name of Tai Chi that is all.
And you are right there are going to be some people that are going just to impress others at how cool and sheikh they are because they do Tai Chi and then there will be others, very few others, that will say hay this is crap and go look for the real thing but there will be more that will use it as ammo to go off and say Tai Chi is no good or go off and show off there new found tai chi when it is certainly NOT tai chi and chip away a little more at the already tarnished reputation of Tai Chi that has gotten that way because of Charlatans such as this claiming you do not need to do anything but Tai Chi for 3 minutes and will have ALL the same benefits as those silly folk that study for years. But the truth is in 3 minutes day they don't get the same benefit they don't feel better and they don't get healtier from this and they then have another reason to say tai chi is no good. They would be better off going for a 3 minute brisk walk, but there is no money in that so call it Tai Chi.
Try that with Kenpo. Jujitsu, Xingyi, Bagua, Muay Thai, MMA, Judo, Wing Chun, JKD, TKD and you will get laughed out of business but with Tai chi it ok isn’t it, because it is easy and slow moving and it is just a moving meditation, it isn’t a martial art so its ok, no big deal, who cares if he calls it Tai chi… it’s not a real martial art anyway…. WRONG.
There is a TKD school near me that is a black belt factory and I have little problem with it for the very reasons you state, it gets people interested and they learn something and they move on to other styles, it gets kids interested in MA, which is very good, but it is still for all intensive purposes TKD. There is a CMA school near me that teaches multiple forms, use to be a good Wushu school before the Sifu decided he liked money more than correct forms but I have less problem with that because they are still at least getting a little reality in training. The sifu actually knows the forms he is teaching, he just is not making his students do it right if they don’t want to, and many don’t want to. And some, with the help of this Sifu go to Wushu colleges in China, generally his younger students, but he is at least getting them to a area they want to go to.. Is it a real martial art like the much smaller Wing Chun School down the street? No, but it is at least based on the real forms and the Sifu has real training, I will be honest, many of his students annoy the living daylights out of me because they make statements like “I don’t do martial arts I do Tai Chi” or I am a master of “Yang, Chen, Wu and Sun styles”, but at least they are doing the forms or a close facsimile there of in the time necessary. I did have a real problem with him when he designed 2 shortened very badly done forms and forced all to train them, but he has since stopped that practice.
But calling this stuff Tai Chi, just to try and ride the wave to make money is bilking the public and that is all. Calling it Tai Chi and saying it takes only 3 minutes is marketing at best but in reality it is false advertising.
I have a REAL problem with this. I also had a real problem with the Wing Chun school that use to be here that claimed Wing Chun lineages that it did not have nor did it really teach Wing Chun. It finally degenerated into a police tactics fighting school (which by the way was completely void of police) and then it vanished. BUT it gave a lot of people the ability to go out and say Wing Chun sucks because they trained it, when in fact they didn’t.
Tai Chi has so many people out there claiming mastery or false lineages or calling what they do Tai chi when it most decidedly is not you can’t let this stuff slide. Tai Chi as a martial art is a dieing art because of guys like this.
And for the record I do not do the Yang in 8 form, my line comes from Yang Chengfu via Tung Ying Cheih and the Beijing 24 form (Yang tournament form) takes longer than 3 minutes, but I no longer do that and the last time I did it looked incredibly traditional.
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opcorn:
verkill: 
