When Push Comes To Shove!

It has been nearly 40 years since people started traveling freely between China and the West. And in that time, the martial arts world has seen the other side of Asia’s ultimate health exercise - tai chi chuan.

Long thought by Westerners to be merely a health regimen, tai chi has emerged as powerful martial art, where force is never used directly against force. It’s a fighting art that develops martial artists from an unlikely and often misunderstood training technique called tui shou or push hands.

Originally considered as important as tai chi form practice, push hands training time was equal to the time put into forms practice. If a tai chi stylist spent two hours a day practicing the tai chi hand form, he also spend two hours a day developing his push hands experience.

DE-EMPHASIZING PUSH HANDS

Push hands lost some of its importance during the early part of this century, when the style’s best masters began teaching the Chinese public. Many emphasized only forms practice, reasoning that most people had time and interest only for the health aspect. Since many of these early public students became teachers themselves, not knowing or understanding push hands, they continued teaching only the tai chi form.

Occasionally, a student might ask about tai chi tui shou. Not wanting to show ignorance or, in some cases, not realizing the importance or push hands training, these instructors claimed tai chi existed only as a health art. Many went even further, declaring that tai chi never was a martial art.

The many Westerners who have visited China and the large number of Chinese tai chi instructors who have come here in the past 40 years have changed the tune of those teachers who refuse to acknowledge ta chi tui shou.

San Francisco tai chi grandmaster Doc-Fai Wong is one who always understood and taught push hands in conjunction with tai chi forms. Wong’s lineage goes directly back to Yang Cheng-Fu tai chi’s most prolific and famous teacher. Yang is also credited with being the first to actively teach tai chi publicly in China. However, while he taught tai chi for health to his public students, his privates were all martial artists who took advantage of Tang’s push hands expertise.

Doc-Fai Wong’s own teacher, professor Hu Yuen-Chou, was a private student of Yang-Cheng-Fu. He often mentioned Yang Cheng-Fu’s emphasis on push hands training being as important to well-rounded tai chi stylists as the tai chi form.

GREATEST TRIUMPHS

Wong proved his expertise twice when he coached American push hands teams in the largest Taiwan international push hands tournament. Wong’s team achieved the greatest triumphs ever by American contestants, winning many individual championships and placing second both times to the Taiwan championship team.

According to Wong, “There’s an old tai chi saying that you practice the solo form to know yourself, while you practice push hands to know the opponent.

Through form practice you learn body positioning, such as balance, mobility, power connection, focus and intention. These are then applied to tai chi’s fighting principles.

Correct push hands practice teaches you to read an opponent’s intentions and act against them, before the opponent has a chance to use them against you. Push hands also teaches you basic self-defense tactics, which many times involve grappling techniques. With enough practice, you will have developed the sensitivity to feel the opponent’s strong and weak points - whether he is relaxed or tense - as soon as you make physical contact.

Push hands training starts with a few basic patterns, using one or both hands. These patterns help tai chi stylists learn to adhere or stick to the opponents, sensing his weaknesses and controlling him by taking advantage of those weaknesses. Wong calls this push hands ability ting jing (listening energy). Ting jing helps you use what the Chinese call wise force, when you no longer need to use brute force against.

FINDING HIS WEAKNESS

Wise force means that you actually use very little of your physical strength. You control the opponent instead by using his own force and momentum against him. Ting jing ability lets you instantly take advantage of an opponent’s weakness, pushing him off balance during the push hands workout or quickly ending a street self-defense confrontation.

Unlike the full power-only strikes of kick - and punch-orientated martial arts, tai chi techniques range in intensity from a simple off-balance push to bone-breaking blows - all within the same movement. A good example is the press movement from the sequence called grasp bird’s tail.

Grasp bird’s tail is an essential part of the two-handed push hands pattern. The press technique can be either a sudden, off balancing push to the chest or shoulder, or a deadly strike with the [back] of the wrist to the assailant’s sternum. Of course, no one uses sudden, explosive power (called fa jing in Chinese) during push hands practice: it’s too dangerous.

Unlike ting jin, which is a detecting type of energy, fa jing is the explosive power that occurs with each blow in external martial arts - when done correctly. Wong adds the “When done correctly” part because all martial artists know how to unleash the whip-like power that gives fa jing its penetrating force.

Because of its excessive power, fa jing techniques can be dangerous, and are not often used in push hands practice. However, there are times when fa jing can be safely administered, usually against an experienced push hands partner, who knows how to keep his defensive (ward off) arm well away from his body.

There are several levels of push hands patterns and practice. Doc-Fai Wong advocates starting students with the most basic level- single hand, using only one arm for contact. This is a simple pattern. Two people face each other with their bodies turned slightly, sideways. Each person is in a forward or bow stance, with the same foot forward (right foot to right foot or left foot to the left foot). The same hand as the forward foot is the pushing hand. In other words, if the right foot is forward, the right hand is the pushing hand. The partners then make counterclockwise circles with their right arms, always maintaining contact. The idea is to adhere to the partner’s arm or wrist. As one person attacks, he shifts his weight forward. The other person defends by shifting the body weight backward and turns the waist away from the push.