Tai Chi Chuan – The Push NOT!
Part I
I’ve been having fun with the push in push hands. I may be deluding myself – it has happened before – but I have a really solid feeling for what I think goes into a push. I owe this to many teachers, but the two that come to mind are Lenzie Williams and Wei Ming. Each has a very different approach. Recently Wei Ming has put forth what feels like a diagram for pushing, and as I go through the motions, Lenzie exercises come to mind. Something has been clarified.
Not that I can execute a perfect push and certainly when it comes to the “game” of challenging and being challenged, there are many more elements at play.
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Three elements that grab my attention today go like this:
1. Once you have discovered your partner is stuck in some way, you lighten your touch and sit down a bit. Let me clarify this tiny moment. The main error here is that in the sitting down, you let your knee move forward. It shouldn’t. It should remain stable and your pelvis will go back slightly. It feels like you are sitting down, but you sit down to the back of the foot. If your knee was to be placed against a hard surface, and you sat down a bit, your pelvis would be forced to go away from the knee. Your knee would not go forward because it can’t.
2. That being accomplished, your partner has been fooled into thinking that you are no longer going towards her. In that “sitting down”, your elbows would elongate just a tiny bit. Your hands lighten at the point of contact with your partner, but they don’t leave the partner. They maintain this as a reference point. This all took place with point number one above. Now your body moves forward and your hands go into your partner’s body. Your body moves your arms forward. Your arms do nothing but let their body melt into your hands. Melt is a good way to feel this because you don’t want your arms to jut out ahead of the body. Your body is doing the pushing, as if there is someone behind you pushing your back forward.
As an experiment, simply be still and let your partner fall into your hands. Your arms don’t move, or bend, and there is a pressure that builds up because you are now holding them up. More accurately, your FEET are holding them up. They are going through your arms into your feet. You have to let your body do the work. Not your arms. Your arms have just enough strength to maintain the proper shape. So whether your partner falls into you, or you press into the partner, from the perspective of the arms, it is exactly the same: minimum use of muscles so that the shape of the arms is stable, but no more. Certainly the goal is NOT to push them. The goal is to move your body forward. Some have a tendency to want to flex at the elbows. But at this point, you don’t flex your elbows!
One of my partners was confused. He was looking to “release” at this point. This usually meant he added some arm strength to move the partner. He didn’t like the pressure that was building up between the two of us. It seemed wrong.
But isolating this small section of the push is not a real push. It is only aimed at feeling the sensation that the arms have when you push. This sensation is one of having the body move forward and not collapsing the arms, nor gripping the arms. Lenzie’s short push exercise focuses on this.
I see a variation like this from Professor Cheng in the films. He finds the place (he is on his front foot.) He then shifts to the back foot and his arms elongate to accommodate this change. He keeps this space and the shape of the arms and moves the body forward, pushing the partner.
In what I am describing, I begin on the front foot and remain there. The coming forward with the body is actually a very small movement. Now the knee moves forward as the body moves forward.
3. I’ve talked about arms, sitting down in the legs and a movement forward. You might have the sense that this is all about the upper body. But as you move forward, that empty buttock and tailbone is relaxing very very deeply to the bitter end. That “end” is in the full foot. So as the buttocks and tailbone relax relax relax relax into the front foot, the body moves forward. This is the engine that drives the final section of the push, the forward movement of the body. The direction of the hands is slightly upward to balance the downward of the backside.
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These are three basic mechanical aspects. Words here are very confusing, but give it a try.
Each part has its own sensation and its own function.
Continue, Part II
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