What is Tai Chi?

"Qi", "Ki," or "Chi" is a way of thinking about the energy in your body. From a martial arts perspective having some extra conscious awareness of what is going on with your body or your opponents could in theory be an advantage, but these advantages will not be realized without a lot of sparring. The most wrong thing you will ever hear in martial arts is something along the lines of "I don't need to spar because I do forms." It is important to understand what to look for in a good Tai Chi school:

1. Standing Mediation
2. Stationary Push Hands Drills
3. Moving Step Push Hands Sparring
4. Cross Training

Before reading on, understand that Tai Chi has 13 main principles a student should be focusing on, sometimes called the "8 Gates" and "5 Steps":

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pushing_hands#Training_pushing_hands


Standing Meditation

In a good Tai Chi school, you will see a strong focus on Standing Mediation and Push Hands. Standing meditation is the core of Tai Chi, because it specifically focuses on building two of the 13 principles: 1) "ward off", the foundation of the other 8 Gates, and 2) "center," the foundation of the other 5 Steps:

Stationary Push Hands Drills

A good Tai Chi school will have "push hands drills" that come short of sparring, designed to help you learn to sense your opponents force and intention. The most common of these drills is "stationary push hands." In stationary push hands each opponent takes a good Tai Chi stance and then tries to get the other opponent off balance enough so that he moves one of his feet. This builds on standing meditation by adding 3 more of the 8 gates: press, yield, and push. This drill allows the student to practice the most subtle and difficult to develop of the 13 principles against another opponent, resulting in the practitioner developing a very stable stance:

Moving Step Push Hands Sparring

Tai Chi sparring is called "moving step push hands." It goes from drill to sparring first by changing the goal to moving the opponent out of the ring or off of his feet, and second by adding the other 4 of the 5 steps: forward, back, left, and right. Moving step push hands varies on how many of the last 4 of the 8 Gates that it includes, depending on the school and depending on what techniques the students are working on at that time. Moving step push hands often does include the rest of the 8 Gates: pluck, split, shoulder and elbow. In contrast to Judo, no specific type of throws are needed, and any trick you can use to get your opponent on the ground or out of the ring (within the rules) is sufficient:

Tai Chi is thus itself a form of Kung Fu. Standing Meditation and Push Hands are also found in other internal martial arts such as Pa Kua, Yi Quan and Hsing-I, depending on the individual school and instructor. Even some Aikido schools have exercises nearly identical to Standing Meditation and Push Hands, so that really these two exercises are at the core of all internal martial arts. "Kata" or "forms" practice and other training practices are then the main difference between the different types of internal martial arts.

Cross Training

Every solid Tai Chi instructor I have encountered also coached some form of fighting beyond moving step push hands. In my case my first Tai Chi instructor Vern Miller (Doc Fai Wong's first student officially endorsed to start his own school) was also a boxing and kickboxing coach who trained various successful fighters, the most famous of which was Margaret Macgregor. It is very common for Tai Chi instructors to also train their students in Chinese Kickboxing. I have also heard of Tai Chi masters encouraged their students to cross train in Judo, Knock Down Karate, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, Muay Thai and many different styles of full-contact Kung Fu (Choy Li Fut, Hung Gar, Pa Kua, Hsing-I, etc.)

There were various old-fashioned types of Tai Chi with lots of deep stances and hard core Chinese Wrestling and Fencing techniques. The most common was Chen style Tai Chi. As Chen style became very popular, one branch became more popular than the others, which is Yang style - now the world's most common style of Tai Chi, known for their slow moving forms. Yang has also had a few break off variations, the most common of which is Wu style Tai Chi.  Chen (older than Yang) and Wu (newer than Yang) are still often taught as serious martial arts. This idea that "Tai Chi is just exercise" has NO historical basis, and comes from the lazy practices of many substandard Yang style Tai Chi instructors (though not all Yang style instructors are substandard.)

Tai Chi is usually taught with other martial arts. This is common of many good martial arts, because good martial arts tend to focus on a particular range of fighting techniques. Just for example, in MMA the four most common Martial Arts offer deeper understanding of Tai Chi:

1. One of my Brazilian Jiu Jitsu instructors was Wu style Tai Chi master Dmitriy Gak. He agreed with me that the one martial art that does what Tai Chi aspires to more than any other in MMA is Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Yang style Grand Master Doc Fai Wong has also made similar claims. When it comes to absorbing a larger, stronger opponent's attack and defeating them with their own energy, BJJ is where it is at.
2. Vern Miller once pointed out to me the alarming similarities between Muay Thai and Tai Chi. If you are familiar with both arts than you know what I am talking about, with the aggressive use of cat stances when fighting, the hand positioning in fighting stances, Golden Rooster, etc. However since I more recently got exposure to striking for MMA specifically, I found even more similarities, especially when it comes to weight shifting. Muay Thai is more like Tai Chi than any Chinese martial art I know of. One of the 8 Gates is "elbow," and there isn't anything more "elbow" than Muay Thai. Even the take downs in Muay Thai are similar to Tai Chi take downs.
3.  Boxing, more than any other martial art, will teach you what those five steps are all about. That ideal of being able to take on multiple opponents, the idea of being able to put an opponent at a disadvantage simply by getting out of his way, that stuff is all extremely manifested in boxing training.
4. Compared to the other internal martial arts, Tai Chi is a wrestling style. Of the 8 Gates wrestling covers splitting and plucking like no other, but wrestling also teaches some of the other 13 principles as well.

The reason why Tai Chi is so often cross trained with other martial arts is not only because other martial arts help us understand Tai Chi better, but also because training in multiple martial arts has always been a best practice for fighters and martial artists.

See also my blog posts on Tai Chi.