Taijiquan and Cross Training

Over at Thoughts on Tai Chi was an article on Taijiquan and Cross Training. An excerpt is below. The full post may be read here.

I have already written down my thoughts about cross-training and combining different styles in Tai Chi Chuan. One of my conclusions was that you need to be a bit careful and make sure that that the different things you practice compliment each other instead of obstructing each other.

But there are also other reasons to practice different styles and for cross-training that I didn’t address there. And this isn’t really limited to other martial arts styles, but to different kinds of practice and body movement in general. You see, exploring different ways of using your body is mostly good and there are very few exceptions when it’s not.

There are so many ways you can explore your own body movement. You really don’t need to practice different martial arts styles to do this. Many Tai Chi Chuan practitioners try Yoga, meditation, and of course different types of Qigong comes close to what we do in Tai Chi. Different forms of dance and other types of body movement arts are good in order to reach a better understanding of your own body. A better understand of your body always means better body awareness which is something that can greatly enhance and deepen your tai chi practice.

You will find similar principles used in Tai Chi body movement also in fine arts, as in Chinese calligraphy and painting, ceramics and in different types of music and handicraft. Many Tai Chi practitioners practice things as juggling, learning balance tricks and magic with cards and coins. Many sports where you coordinate different tools and objects are great to learn from. The first sports I myself come to think about are Bowling and Pool games, sports where you coordinate an object in very specific ways.

From all of these things you can better understand different ways of coordinating your own body, different ways of using hand movement, using leverage handling tools etc. etc. Some things that you can practice and combine with your tai chi with, will deepen your understanding of your own body, so it will enhance your solo practice. Other forms of training that teaches you how to use tools in different ways, can help you to better understand things as angles and leverage for push hands and applications training.

You might not believe that you need something “extra” or that your own body movement is limited in different ways. But the truth is that we are all limited in different ways, and that it is very hard to look at ourselves from the outside. Sometimes, teachers try to tell us things and correct what we do. But still many people have a hard time to listen and accept what a teacher or others tell them. We do have a hard time to understand where we lack or need improvement. Often, we just don’t want to accept them.

Teachers are good, preferably teachers who are very tough and not afraid to tell you right in your face that you suck, and in details explain why. But still better is often to understand by trial and error. Here we can learn from ourselves without having the ego standing between us and a teacher. This is why trying different body methods and developing different body skills is good. Your own body will not lie or try to be kind to you.

I remember when I was about 19 years old. It was in the last year in high school and I participated in a theatre class. We had a weekend course, I don’t know the english name, but it was an old physical theatre and comedy tradition with an origin from medieval times. We did things as acrobatics and juggling.

I really thought that I would be the best to learn juggling fastest in the group. After all, I had already studied Tai Chi for a long time, many years. And Tai Chi body movement is based on coordination skills. Oh, so wrong I was. In fact, I was the worst and had most trouble in the whole group learning it. Why? How was this possible? I just couldn’t separate my arm movements from my feet, hip and waist. When I throw up the balls, I would use whole body movement. My waist and hip turned, so that the juggling balls would go too far to the left and to the right, making it very hard to catch them.

I tried many times, I sucked. And it took a long time for me to understand what I did wrong. Moving with my whole body together was the most natural way to move. But now I found that I had even lost the ability to separate my arm movements from the rest of the body!

There are many ways to understand your own limitations and to learn better what you need to improve. One of the best ways is to find types of body movement which are completely opposite to how you are used to move your body. You can practice things you know that you are bad at. But still, where you don’t know you lack, it might be very hard to realise the limitation. If you have never seen the color red, you would not know that it exists.

If you don’t know about a limitation, you don’t know that it exists. So to test different types of exercises, and ways to use your body to come to a better understanding of your own limitations, often needs an approach with a certain kind of randomness. So learning and testing different things with an open mind randomly, just because “you can”, is a very good approach.

The things you explore can either be larger sets of exercises, or isolated skill sets for specific body parts. It doesn’t matter much what you practice as long as you learn and study your body in a way you feel rewarding. And here comes the part of cross-training, or practicing different martial arts styles.

You don’t need to become good in different styles, or learn much from them at all. But you can take out different things from different arts, exercises, sets, methods, and treat those things just the way you would treat an isolated skill set as juggling, or any other isolated skill sets for a specific type of body movement.