HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR PUSH HANDS

Many of us know push hands is for us to acquire tingjin (hearing) skill and gradually progress to tungjin (understanding). But even after many years of practice many still fail to have any real success, why?

Of course there are many reasons for this lack of success and one of them is the lack of focus to understand the oncoming force. Very often we would ask how to neutralize this push and that push, what should we do if he does this or that...all these are focusing on techniques, and will never bring us closer to tungjin. We should pay more attention feeling the point of contact and 'listen' where the force is focus on. Initially, you will feel the pushing force is very widely spread on you but when your concentration improve and your feeling becomes more acute, the 'spread' will become smaller and smaller. It will reach a stage where you can clearly discern the contact point as small as a dot. At this stage, you will be able to neutralize big force by just a slight movement. Impossible? Picture this, a gladiator is pushing at you full force but using a pencil. The contact point is only the tip of the pencil. You don't need to turn the whole body to neutralise this big force through a small contact point, i.e. a pencil right? Just a slight turn to neutralize the touching point will do.

The next time you do push hands, focus on the touching point and try to find its center. If you focus attentive enough you may just find the dot.

THE SECRET OF AN

In so many tai chi chuan players I have met, only a handful are able to use short force (duanjin). This is understandable considering the fact that short force is indeed harder to manifest than long force as it requires the issuer to have high level of song and body coordination. However, the main stumbling block is not that many people are not competent enough. Regrettably, it is because many people today do not emphasize the training of short force.

Many people take tai chi chuan and push hands as recreation activities. They are complacent just to be able to easily neutralize a fellow practitioner attack and push him away. They do not look at tai chi chuan from the perspective of self defense. Most of the time, these people will have a rude awakening when they match their artificial push hands skills against a non-cooperative outsider.

In his writing Yang Ban Hou admonished us to train our jin from one inch to tenth of an inch to hundredth of an inch. We should refine our force (jin) to become shorter and shorter until it appears like power coming from stillness. When we can do this, outsiders will find it very difficult to match our skill because they will be sent flying upon the slightest touching. If you consciously train to shorten your fajin, you will find your push hands ability improve correspondingly.

Stillness is better than short. Short is better than long. Long is better than broken.