Friday, May 25, 2007

Whose Force Is It?

I have been busy with work and moving house lately, so I haven't been able to write much.

Anyway, one of the questions that came up during my taiji journey is, how do you know whether it is you using force, or is it your opponent using force? Whose force is it anyway?

What I heard from my teacher is that, sometimes, when you feel that your opponent is using a lot of force, it may not be so. It could be that you are using brute force, and because your opponent is able to relax and return your force to you, you think that he is the one using force. When in actual fact, the source of the force is from you.

So how do you know whose force is it? Well, if you are using brute force, your arms will start to tire soon. If your opponent is the one using brute force and you are relaxed, then his arms will start to tire, not yours.

Sunday, May 06, 2007

Moving Together

Recently, my teacher pointed out one of my mistakes to me, something which I had all along thought was correct. But it was actually wrong. In the past, I had thought that using my waist to move my arms meant something like swinging my arms using my waist (to put it in an extreme manner). When I turn right, my arms would then follow. Then, when I turn left, my arms continue to turn right for a while before following my body and changing direction to left.

But my teacher told me that this is wrong. When I turn my waist to the right, my arms should follow and move to the right. When I turn my body to the left, my arms should straight away follow and turn to the left. Otherwise, there will be a point in which my arms are moving right when my body starts to move left. This flattens the "balloon" formed by my arms and my body, weakening my peng and thus giving an opening to my opponent for him to move in.