The New Year begins on February 16 this year and is the Year of the Earth Dog. The Earth element always brings with it a sense of stability and groundedness, which is a relief after the last two Fire years. The Fire years can be a time of great opportunity but decisions need to be made quickly. This year is a time where you can settle down, consolidate and concentrate on what you managed to grab on to in the ...  read more

Concluding part of a lecture at the Wuhan International Taijiquan and Taijijian Display and Exchange Meeting, Wuhan, China, April 1984 by Distinguished Taijiquan expert Li Tianji Taiji Sword is one of the forms of Wushu loved best by the public, and was created and developed on the basis of Taijiquan. Its movements are gentle and harmonious, and its sword strokes clear, and it differs from other sword styles in its sequence and structure and in the degree of strenuousness.   ...  read more

A lot of Taiji practitioners in their early learning find it extremely difficult to understand or utilize the concept of fluidity of movement. This is especially so when faced with the transition from one movement to the next and how to give the movement finality, while still appearing to be in motion. From a mathematical perspective, if something is moving at a constant rate we refer to this as a steady velocity. This is what a cruise control on a ...  read more

Text of a lecture at the Wuhan International Taijiquan and Taijijian Display and Exchange Meeting, Wuhan, China, April 1984 by Distinguished Taijiquan expert Li Tianji “Regardless of whether one is learning traditional Taijiquan sequences, or studying the newly-compiled materials, Taijiquan's characteristic features should be maintained and expression given to its basic essentials. The Wushu competition rules incorporate five points concerning the characteristic features of Taijiquan. I will give them some introduction merely from my own personal understanding. 1. Body relaxed ...  read more

When Professor Zeng performs taijiquan, it looks textbook perfect. There's a simple reason for this. Professor Zeng wrote the book. He was one of the editors of China's 1988 taiji compilation, an influential treatise for the development of modern taijiquan. Professor Zeng Nailiang (曾乃梁) is one of the founding fathers of modern taijiquan. But what is modern taijiquan? It's almost oxymoronic as taiji is an ancient art. When "modern" is bandied about in Chinese martial arts, one can't help but ...  read more

In applying this piece of advice to our form practice we have to be selective in choosing which attributes of these two animals we wish to emulate. In the case of the tiger we are concerned with the relaxed, padding movements which contain the potential for swift and terrible action should it be required. If you study the way a tiger moves you will notice how once its leg touches the ground the whole of the bodyweight follows, yet without ...  read more

“… A tai chi master would tell you that you’re doing nothing wrong but you just don’t have it yet. It takes years and years to fully discover tai chi. You cannot just learn life instantly. Life is to be lived. You might think “If I find a good teacher, if I read a good book, I will eventually become very wise, and I will have conquered all the difficulties in life.” If you do that, then what’s next? Boredom. ...  read more

The Chinese Wushu Duanwei System is a hierarchical system which the Chinese Wushu Association formulated to evaluate the professional level of wushu practitioners. Based on this system, a series of Textbooks was compiled to ensure a unified standard of education and evaluation. In order to promote the popularization of Wushu and develop different schools, every effort was made to establish an agreed set of standards in the hope of guiding wushu practitioners to master wushu and its empty hand and ...  read more

An elderly Chinese woman had two large water pots hung on either end of a pole, which she carried across her neck. One of the pots had a crack in it and at the end of the long walks from the river to the house, the cracked pot always arrived only half full.   Every day the woman continued to bring home only one and a half pots of water. Of course, the perfect pot was proud of its accomplishments. ...  read more