Operation Try Anything

My t’ai chi pals from Moseley School Health and Fitness Centre!

I’ve tried a fair few martial arts to a greater or lesser degree – Muay Thai, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, MMA, Kali and Shorinji Kempo – but I’ll be honest, I have never really been tempted to try t’ai chi ch’uan. When I think of martial arts I do kind of belong, if I’m honest, to the ‘WHAAAA, Jump Through The Air Screaming And Kick The Other Guy’s Head In Half!’ School and t’ai chi seems… well… a bit slow. But then, I’d never tried it, and am always ready to have my opinions changed, so when I heard that there was a class not 20 minutes’ walk from my parents’ house at Moseley School Health and Fitness Centre, I jumped at the opportunity.

T’ai chi is what’s known as a Chinese ‘internal’ martial art – one which is focussed on spiritual, mental and qi-related aspects as opposed to mainly physical, ‘external’ ones. Some people are surprised to learn that it is a martial art at all, but the forms taught in t’ai chi do have martial and defense applications. However, they are generally performed slowly and carefully to focus attention on the correct form of the body and the feeling as you do them. Meditation and health are also big aspects of t’ai chi, though the guys at the class told me that the form we were using was the more martial one than the specifically health-focussed one (Bagua). I found out that t’ai chi ch’uan actually translates as ‘supreme ultimate fist’ or ‘great extremes boxing’. Eh?! This didn’t sound like the t’ai chi I thought I knew! I suppose my expectation on going to the class was that I’d be standing round doing something like this:

Instead, for the first ten minutes I followed a young guy called Les who demonstrated how to relax the shoulders and arms through various different exercises. I have to say, I was rubbish at them. It felt like I was just throwing my arms about, and though that’s what it looked like I was supposed to do I was clearly not getting it as Les and other members of the group kept on correcting me. I couldn’t even relax my arms right, how on earth was I going to get good at the rest of this!

The next thing we did was walk. We walked a lot. A smashing Glaswegian chap called Ronnie showed me how to walk properly in t’ai chi: it’s a slow process of shifting your weight around in a special way that looks like this:

Ronnie was a lot less annoying than that dude. He patiently walked along with me, correcting my movements and explaining why certain movements were done as they were. I felt very left-footed at first but I think I began to get the hang of it after a while.

Next I was doing ‘sensitivity’ work with Ronnie. For this I had to push my palm against his outstretched palms and to kind of use my legs as the force to overbalance him. It was a lot harder than it seemed. I had to try and disrupt his balance with tiny movements of my body, but when I got it right I was never terribly sure how I had done so!  The most interesting part to me was when we simply stood palm-to-palm and tried to feel where each other’s bodies were moving to. I thought I wasn’t moving at all, but in the exercise I could feel that Ronnie was making tiny movements which compensated for what I was doing. I didn’t think I was doing anything, but apparently in t’ai chi terms I might as well have been flinging my arms all over the place and jumping around! It was a very werid feeling indeed.

Lastly Les taught me very patiently the first few forms of a sequence called the ‘first 50′. I think we got up to about number 6 or 7. It’s the first 38-odd seconds of the first video on this page. It was challenging, particularly because you move so slowly that the form is very exposed and easy to criticise. In other martial arts I’ve done they’ve been very fast-paced: we might have gone over the forms slowly for 5 minutes or so, but in the end the majority of the practise that you do is high-speed. Practising the t’ai chi forms, it was very clear to me that there is a lot more to the art than simply doing ‘flowy arms’ or whatever I’d thought t’ai chi was about previously! Les explained to me as we went on why the movements had to be as they were – how doing them differently left you open to the possibility of overbalancing, and this was not good in a combat situation, and that the movements used the natural weight and mechanics of the body to achieve the aims of the art, rather than brute force.

I asked the lady who ran the class, Peta, why she’d originally started t’ai chi. ‘I started in aikido,’ she told me, ‘and then wanted to learn kung fu. My master told me that I had too much anger in me to learn kung fu, and I had to learn t’ai chi instead. I told him, “But I don’t want to wave my arms about, I want to learn to kill people!” and he replied, “And that is why you must learn t’ai chi”.’

Going to the class was a really eye-opening experience. The group were really kind and welcoming, very informative and I’d definitely go again if I got the opportunity. Excellent stuff!