By Tu-Ky Lam
With millions of people all over the world practicing and learning Taijiquan, its popularity is undeniable. However, maintaining this trend and improving our Taiji skill is an area of concern. I notice many Taiji students as well as practitioners have some misconceptions about Taijiquan, which are hindering the progress of their learning.
One of the misconceptions is: to learn Taijiquan is to learn the routines and the more routines you learn, the better you are. Because of this misconception, students try to learn as many routines as they can and try to learn as many styles as they can. One of my teachers can do the routines of four different styles: Chen, Yang, Wu and Hao. Once I talked to him on the phone, he told me four of his senior students were learning Hao style Taijiquan from him. Each of them was paying him forty Australian dollars an hour. He made $120 an hour. I told him the Chen routines that he taught me were excellent and I would not learn Hao style even if he taught it to me free of charge.
This teacher also told me that to learn Taijiquan is to work on the torso methods. The routines are just a means for us to do this. We have to train at least an hour a day on our routines so that our body alignment will get better and better and we can follow our opponents and strike back at will. To achieve this goal, we have to go through a stage where our joints and tendons are loosened, and our jing or internal strength develops.
Learning many routines will not improve your skill. On the contrary it is a handicap to your progress. You are bogged down by the many routines that you try to remember. Each time you learn a new routine, you are right back at the beginner's stage. Although you can learn the new routine faster, it may not improve your Taiji skill.
It takes about sixty hours with your teacher to learn the first routine, and another sixty hours to learn the second. There are over ten routines in the five major Taiji styles. This means it will take about six hundred hours to learn them all. You may think yourself to be very good as you have learned the Taiji routines of the five major styles. However, you may still only at the doorstep of the palace of Taijiquan - the beginner's level.
If you concentrate only on the one or two routines, work on your body alignment and do a lot of standing practice, the results of your effort will be ten times better than learning as many routines as you can.
I only teach the two Chen routines to my students. I will not teach them the weapons routines until I am satisfied that their body alignment is satisfactory and they train well over one hour a day. The routines I teach my students are only a means for me to teach the body alignment. I want my students to do each move perfectly well. If they do not practice diligently, they will not learn.
How do I teach the torso methods? The main points are in my article entitled '"Practice Guide." In each session, I require my students always sit properly on their legs and lift their head top up when they practice the form. This is only the beginning. I already come across problems. Some students have no intention to lift their head top up at all. My insistence make some of them lift up their head top. Then they do not want to sit on their legs - I call this 'lazy sitting'. After they have learned how to lift up the top of their head and sit properly, another problem arises: they do not train hard enough to make their buttocks set in their sockets. They have not been able to build up the strength of central equilibrium.
Traditional Taiji training methods require students to practice the routines 20 reps a day. This is an impossible task for us today. There is a way around this. Practice Yiquan and/or Xingyi standing practice an hour a day plus 4 reps of routine practice a day will bring the same result. Standing practice can speed up our learning process many times faster than practicing the form alone. (If you train hard with standing practice and the form like I have just said and make little progress, then the problem lies with your body alignment. You need to seek the help of a teacher who has this expertise.)
After I teach the torso methods and standing practice, (which is the main part of my teaching,) I teach push-hands, martial art's application, stepping, and power discharge. All these aim at improving our health, increase our internal strength and make preparation for the final test - sparring and self-defence. There is so much to learn in Taijiquan. You need to dig deep and not shallow.
If you are still not convinced that learning many routines can pose problems, then learn all the routines in your style. For example, in Chen style, you learn Lao jia (or Xin jia, or Xiao jia) Yi lu (first routine) and Er Lu (second routine), but not all of these (six all together. A big waste of time and you gain nothing. Concentrating on two is much better than learning all six.) Then you learn the weapons routines such as broad word, straight sword, spear, long staff, maces, Spring and Autumn halberd, etc. These weapons routines can make you look good though you may not be good.
So what is the function of the Taiji routines? Taiji routines are only empty shells. They are a means for us to train on the torso methods to bring out the substance. The more we train on the torso methods the better we will be. So we need to practice 4 or 5 reps of the routines a day, paying special attention on our body alignment as to bring about the result we want.