- Tai Chi is obsessed with balance - as in BOTH you having good balance AND you unbalancing your opponent until they fall over. Of course when you train a physical attribute you strengthen that attribute, and Tai Chi intentionally develops PHYSICAL balance.
- Ergonomics - as a Tai Chi guy, I found it curious how much more comfortable Tai Chi was than the other martial arts I had done including Aikido. Likewise when I dabbled in Pa Kua and Hsing-I later, I was surprised by how uncomfortable they were by Tai Chi standards.
I have become obsessed with 2 above, because of twin injuries I have had over the last few years. In 2019 I was drilling take downs on a mat, and when I was being thrown my right arm got isolated and I landed on my right shoulder and head from a double leg take down. This resulted in what felt like a broken collar bone but was actually a shoulder impingement. This took about a year off what I could do with training (and why there are sparring videos of me from that time weapon fighting or dirty boxing left handed.) This shoulder impingement made it so painful to use my right arm that it would cause me to fall to my knees in pain, far more pain than it would take for me to tap from a submission. This forced me to realize that martial arts training could have the exact opposite of the intended effect of improving your ability to protect yourself, to instead impairing your ability to protect yourself, and even worse be a source of danger to your own safety... But this was just the tip of the iceberg...
Earlier in 2021 I was on a trip to Detroit and was rear ended on the freeway. From this accident I got ANOTHER shoulder impingement, this time on my left arm! Last time physical therapy had helped me recover faster, but over all I hadn't taken it very seriously. This time I know better, and I have questioned my physical therapists on this coincidence and what made me so vulnerable to shoulder impingement in the first place:
- A tight chest.
- Weak lats.
- An inflexible chest.
- A shoulder and neck posture that has become slouched since 2019.
In other words a part of the problem was not enough pull ups and too many push ups, typical of martial arts training... and reportedly weight training as well. But disturbingly, beyond that when doing deep squats I ended up experiencing a significant hip flexor problem which impaired my ability to move around. About a month ago I hit my low point, having to stop going up a fight of stairs because of simultaneous left shoulder and right hip flexor pain. This made me question my macho routine of dive bombers and deep squats. Notice what these physical therapists have to say about the military press (similar to dive bombers) and deep squats:
Bad, right? But some of the stuff we do in martial arts all the time is actually much, much worse...
Ironically the one thing that was helping me tremendously was my Tai Chi. I noticed that one of the Tai Chi exercises miraculously worked as first aid so I could keep moving even when my hip flexors were acting up...
And working on getting my Tai Chi forms back to what they should be improved my over all mobility. Inspired by this I replaced my deep squats with sprinters lunges (which focuses more on hip flexors,) and now a few weeks later I no longer have a hip flexor pain mobility issue. But we martial artists are experts on fighting technique, not conditioning technique. It turns out that if I had been doing push ups 100% correctly (instead of 80% correctly,) it would have probably helped to prevent shoulder impingement instead of being a contributing factor to it...
All martial arts are continuously evolving for the better or for the worse, from generation to generation. It seems to me that making sure our conditioning techniques are promoting good health over the course of decades, and not only enhanced performance over the course of months, is a huge opportunity for improvement with this generation of martial artists. This effort in the past in the development of Tai Chi is what has made this ancient art continue to be relevant today.
