Revisited an interesting thread titled, Softness and Hardness in Tai Chi that I felt was worth sharing. It mainly deals with people’s background and whether they are too “hard” or too soft while doing the taiji form. A lot of ppl with external kungfu backgrounds tend to be hard whereas those with ‘new-age’ philosophies tend to be really soft. Basically, to me, it’s a difference of interpretation with the concept of Song.

This reminded me of an very nice comparative article I ran across a while back when I was training in yang taiji. It pretty had to do with the “openess” of the form. In fact, I brought up this issue on a dicussion thread in which I pretty much brought up examples and comparisons in a comparative study. Due to my wushu background, I am much more partial to the postures of YCF. To me, it was amazing that their could be such variation within Yang style, but then again, I am told the CMC way is so different that it could be considered it’s own style.

Perhaps this could be the same difference in interpretation between traditional xingyi/bagua versus wushu xingyi bagua as brought up on this thread. Whatever it is, I worry about the longevity of the martial art and not the dance.

Now.. for a while, I’ve made a distinction between wushu-taiji and taijiquan. I usually refer to wushu-taiji as the standardized competition sets and are usually judged on how low stances are, how pretty moves look, pretty much aestethic appeal. I practiced these sets for a long time and I still think that some of the sets are good for health and general fitness but a lot of those who teach these sets don’t come from traditional training where things such as rooting, structural integrity, internal energy development, and martial applications are taught. Taijiquan started out as a martial art and without the martial aspect/training, it might as well be a dance, or what has been referred to as taijiwu (taiji-dance).

Not all forms are bad, I just think the emphasis in training certain forms may be off. But if you’re training for health, then do any form that you want, but if you’re training for martial development, look for a good training program that will cover, health/martial/mind aspect of taijiquan. In light of this, I think of taijiquan as a martial art and it contains the previous listed aspects.

I guess I started to think about this after running across a thread where someone was mentioning how the wushu version of the form was missing a lot of the internal components and principles of the form. After posting my thoughts on the topic, I decided to dig up some other dicussion threads that contained similar information:

24 Simplified Set: A good thread that discusses whether or not the 24 form has martial elements

Simplified Yang 24 Form: Another good discussion that compares the yang 24 with other traditional sets

Taijiquan Competition Routines: Takes a look at the various competition forms out there

Competition Good for taijiquan?: Just as the titles describes.

Just to add a little flair, I’m gonna include a post on someone who is interested in learning chen from a video. The reason why I added it was due to a comment by a board member named GLW, who has tons of good posts!

After that, the big problem with learning Chen style after practicing another style of Taijiquan is what I sometimes refer to as “Chen infection”By that I mean that you SHOULD do Yang style like Yang style, Sun like Sun, Wu like Wu, Chen like Chen…unless you are making up your own thing.

I too have started to notice a bit of my chen creeping into the 24 form, which I had a chance to practice with another group a couple of days ago. But what’s even more interesting is that my wushu-taiji 24 is getting mixed with some of the TT Liang style yang! Whew.. talk about a stylistic blender I think I’m gonna go back to doing the 24 the way that I had originally learned it. It just sometimes feels better that way