Author: Justin Landers

I recently wrote an article about four training mistakes often seen in Pushing Hands (Tui Shou or 推手). That article was intended to educate people so that they could strive to be better partners. But what happens when you’re the good one, but your training partner is not? Training with partners of any kind will eventually lead to being paired with someone that keeps making mistakes, has their own agenda, or is too caught up in their ego to be a good partner. What do you do then?
Obviously before you say anything to your partner, you have to make sure that you aren’t guilty of the same problem behaviours. Sometimes it’s easy to fall into a competitive cycle, which escalates because of your own involvement. So, always remind yourself that you are there to learn how to avoid falling off balance, rather than to prove you are better than someone else is.

Once you’re sure you aren’t instigating or escalating the troubling behaviours, the best solution is to talk to your partner. Tell your partner about your training goals and enlist their help in achieving them. Saying something like, “I need to go slowly today because I’m working on developing better timing,” is often all it takes to get your partner to stop and think.

However, sometimes friction between partners comes about because one of them feels threatened by the other. If you find yourself in this position, it’s important to remember that your partner may not even be consciously aware of this. They may not realize how much you bring out the competitive streak in them.

best solution to this problem is that you have to remove any threat they feel from you. In these cases, it’s helpful to say something like, “You keep pushing me over using this or that technique and I’m having real trouble defending against it. Do you have any suggestions?”

By doing this, you’ve effectively announced that you’re not competing with them, but rather trying to improve your skills. When your partner isn’t feeling threatened by you, their behaviour can and often will significantly change.

You also have to realize that you may be in a completely different place (emotionally, spiritually, and even training level) than your partner. Sometimes people are stuck at one phase of learning and aren’t ready to improve yet. It won’t help to get mad or impatient with your training partner if they keep repeatedly making the same mistakes. You have to realize that this is their challenge to overcome and they just aren’t ready yet.

If this is happening, you sometimes just have to remind yourself that you aren’t going to Pushing Hands with this person forever, and just do your best while you wait for the next partner to come along.

Sometimes you may find yourself paired regularly with a partner who just doesn’t get it, is too aggressive, or is otherwise a problem for you. If this happens, you may need to have a private word with your teacher, but don’t be accusatory or confrontational about it. Sometimes teachers pair partners together when they think that one or both can learn from the experience. Even if your partner is the one exhibiting bad habits, you may be the one who needs to learn how to deal with this without losing your temper.

Even if your teacher didn’t pair you with a frustrating partner on purpose, you can often look at your work together as a way of overcoming your own anger and frustration issues. Often anger and frustration may be a big obstacle to your own skills advancing. Once you overcome your own frustration, you may find that whatever bad habits your partner was exhibiting don’t matter anymore. You may even find that, in dealing with your frustrations, you are now capable of neutralizing the techniques that were once a problem.

I encourage all my students to learn Pushing Hands (sometimes called Pushands or Push Hands, also known as Tui Shou or 推手). Even if my students are learning Tàijíquán for health purposes and insist that they never wish to learn fighting at all, I still encourage them to learn Pushing Hands.

I have a reason for that, of course.

Over the years, I’ve seen amazing benefits for those who practice Pushing Hands—many of which go beyond martial arts benefits and enter into the realm of psychological and social benefits. I’ve been teaching for almost 25 years now and in that time, I’ve watched Pushing Hands help people with trust issues, anger issues, bad relationships, and even past traumas.

The first time I saw this phenomenon, I asked myself, “How the heck does that work?” In the years since then, I have come to understand how it can do these things. But to understand it, we’re going to have to examine some of these problems and how our bodies react to them.

Trust issues, bad relationships, anger, and even trauma caused by other people all have one thing in common: conflict. It doesn’t matter if the conflict is physical or emotional, our body’s reaction, and our resolution skills are often the same. One of the main reasons for this is that the brain does not differentiate between physical or emotional conflict. When we perceive either, our body reacts by dumping hormones and activating muscles preparing our body for one of two very primitive responses. When faced with danger our body prepares either to fight or to run. This is affectionately called the “Fight or Flight” response.

That physical changes associated with feeling threatened usually activate a hastily constructed set of conflict resolution skills, and more often than not, these techniques aren’t very helpful. They often lead to a verbal attack against the person who made us feel threatened, or emotionally distancing ourselves—or “running away”—from that person. Pushing Hands helps your body and mind deal with these situations because it retrains your physical conflict resolution habits, which in turn, helps you to change your emotional conflict resolution habits.

Let us now look at the skills taught by Pushing Hands. Traditional teachers will often mention words like “Rooting, Listening, Neutralizing, and Redirecting.”

Rooting is often called by many names. I’ve heard it called “grounding” or even “stabilizing.” No matter what its name, Rooting refers to stability of stance. When being pushed, instead of pushing back, you allow the force to pass through you and into the ground. Instead of leaning against the incoming push for stability, the practitioner sinks his or her core, driving the force harmlessly into the earth.

From a fighting standpoint, this is particularly brilliant. Often, inexperienced fighters will actually lean against one another, using their opponent to prop them up. However, if the opponent were to stop pushing quite suddenly, the prop goes away and the fighter who was leaning falls. From a psychological standpoint, this is akin to depending on someone else for your own emotional balance. When someone says, “I’m mad at you because you did . . .” Most people don’t hear anything after the words “I’m mad at you.” Instead, merely having someone mad at them is enough for them to allow themselves to become mad back, and they respond in kind no matter what reason the other person has for being mad.

When I first learned Pushing Hands, I practiced rooting training all the time. I realized it had carried over into my daily life when I suddenly realized I was going through the motions of being mad at someone who was mad at me, but when I really thought about it, I wasn’t actually angry. I was just responding as if I were, because that’s the way I’d always reacted before. Suddenly, I was faced with the choice of behaving as if I were mad, or choosing something else.

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If you have practiced Tàijíquán (太極拳) for any length of time, you are sure to have heard a teacher command you to “relax.”

Sometimes they pick on a certain body part by saying things like, “Relax your shoulders!” Other times, they just tell you to relax your whole body.

Why do they do that?

From a martial arts perspective relaxation is essential in the development of proper power. When extending your arm, you have a set of muscles responsible for the “pushing” motion of that arm. You also have a set of muscles responsible for the “pulling” or opposite motion of your arm. In exercise science, these opposing muscle groups are called agonists and antagonists.

It’s important to realize that a strong punch only uses the “pushing” muscles. Because we are extending our arm for the punch, these “pushing” muscles are called the agonists. In order for that punch to be truly powerful, the “pulling” or antagonist muscles must be in a relaxed state.
During martial arts practice a major problem arises because many students mistakenly associate muscular contraction with strength, and think that if they tighten all the muscles (both the agonist and antagonist muscles) of their arm, their punch will be very strong.

When they do that, however, their antagonist or “pulling” muscles are acting against their “pushing” muscles. The result is that heir punch is slower and significantly less powerful.

So when you train your form in slow motion, if you relax all the muscles, except for only the muscles you need to move your arm, your movement will achieve maximum efficiency. Then, when you repeat that movement quickly, you will maintain the quality of your movement and your punch will be very powerful.

The development of power, sometimes called Fā Lì (發力) or Fā Jìn (發勁) in Tàijíquán requires a very specific type of movement which begins in the legs, is given direction by the waist, and then finally expressed in the hands. This, too, requires a certain amount of relaxation to perpetuate the wave of motion.

When watching someone who is very good at Tàijíquán, the Chinese say that the performer’s movements are “liu shuǐ (流水)” or “like flowing water.” This is a direct reference to the wave of movement used in the development of Fā Jìn. Unnatural tension at any point in the chain of muscles used to create this wave will disrupt it, and further inhibit the development of power in Tàijíquán. Thus, a person practicing Tàijíquán for martial arts should relax, or they will not be able to fully realize their power.

In fact, there is actually a risk of practicing Fā Jìn while tense. When this special coordination is trained, the body moves in sequence. The interesting thing is, however, that the muscles involved in this sequence go from large to small. The leg muscles engage to begin the movement. Then the wave of activity transfers from the legs to the large postural muscles of the torso and back, and the legs are allowed to relax a bit. From there, the movement is transmitted to the smaller shoulder and arm muscles. Finally, the movement is handed off to the fingers where it is expressed.

When using Tàijíquán as a martial art, the development of Jìn is an essential part of training. Because these attacks are developed as a kind of wave, from the ground up to the hand, the power moves from the body’s larger muscle groups to the body’s smaller ones. The physics of this is similar to the use of a whip.

Figure 1

Figure 2

As you see in Figures 1 and 2, when cracking a whip, the power is first developed in the thicker portion, near the handle, and then flows as a wave down the whip to finally be expressed by the tip. The narrowing of the whip actually focuses the power of the strike into a more compact and exponentially more powerful impact.

Figure 3

It takes far more power to swing a bat than to crack a whip. In fact, if you moved a bat up and down with the force necessary to crack a whip and struck something with it, you would barely damage the surface, while the whip’s power is continually focused towards its tip, giving it a deeply penetrating strike.

Tàijíquán is performed slowly and while relaxed—even when studied as a martial art—to help the practitioner develop the proper coordination and timing as well as to keep them form injuring themselves. Once a Tàijí strike is speed up if there is any tension in the body, the energy projected from the wave motion will stop suddenly at the location of tension. Think what would happen if a person braided a stick into the middle of a whip and then cracked it with all his might (see Figure 4). The stick would most likely crack under the pressure of the whip’s motion. The same would happen to whatever structure in the body was tense, which usually constitutes of muscles, ligaments, and tendons.

Figure 4

Now we know why a person practicing Tàijíquán as a martial art should relax, but what about those who practice Tàijíquán for health? Why should they also relax?

For that, we’re going to briefly talk about the process by which Qì (氣) moves through the body. Then, we will examine how Tàijíquán specifically affects this Qì movement, and then we will examine how tension affects that.

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Diǎnxué (點穴, sometimes called Dianmai or even Dim Mak) is known as pressing or sealing the cavity and it is one of the most misunderstood techniques of Chinese martial arts. Most students of Chinese martial arts don’t bother memorizing cavities for striking for innumerable reasons. Knowledgeable teachers are hard to come by, the instruction is boring, precise, tedious, surrounded by myth, mysticism, and obscurity. Not only is finding a teacher difficult, but also finding one who is willing to part with his information is even more challenging.

Before coming to Chinese martial arts, I studied a variety of Korean and Japanese arts. It was in one of these classes that I had my first introduction to the concept of the cavity press. After looking at a poster, which outlined cavities for striking, where it hung in my teacher’s studio, I asked the teacher why he didn’t teach these techniques.

“You need a really strong grip for that,” My teacher replied.

Confused, I asked him to elaborate.

“In a fight, if you’ve grabbed an opponent, you might be able to press a cavity, but you have to be very strong or even that will not work.”

“What about hitting them?” I asked.

“You can’t,” My teacher said simply.

When I asked why you couldn’t hit them, my teacher responded by saying, “Those points are very small. You will never be able to aim with such accuracy. Missing by even a few centimeters means that you have failed to strike the cavity and your attack will be wasted. It’s better to employ more reliable techniques.”

So, from that moment on and for years afterwards, I studied martial arts confident in the knowledge that striking cavities is not a reliable method of fighting. Later, I took up Tàijíquán (太極拳) and about a decade after that, I began to study Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). While in school, learning about acupuncture I suddenly realized that cavity striking one of the greatest weapons in a Tàijíquán practitioner’s arsenal.

So, why is it that someone practicing Tàijíquán can strike a cavity with accuracy while a hard-stylist could not?

The answer is simple: external martial arts do not generate power in the same way internal arts do.

One of the most unique aspects of the internal arts is the development of explosive force (Bàofālì 爆發力) known as Fājìn (發勁). The whip-like explosion of movement often seen in Chen-style’s Cannon Fist and New Frame forms are a fine example of this Fājìn power. In pushing hands, a master can apply Fājìn and with a small jerk of his body, the master can send his opponent flying. It bodes the question: how can such a small movement send someone so very far?
Aside from the massive effect of this explosive energy, a Fājìn strike is very penetrative, sending the energy of the strike deep into the body, while an external martial arts strike which uses muscular power or Lì (力), spreads damage out on the surface. Furthermore, a person who has mastered the techniques known as Inch Jìn (Cùnjìn or 寸勁) or Centimeter Jìn (Fēnjìn or 分勁) can strike an opponent with no windup, and the damage done from striking with the fist only an inch or centimeter away from the opponent is just as devastating as punching with a windup. Probably the most famous example of this concept is Bruce Lee’s “one-inch punch,” but in the case of inch and Centimeter Jìn, the fighter will ideally be using Phoenix-eye Fist, focusing all that explosive Fājìn power into a tiny point.
This is Tàijíquán’s secret weapon.

Fājìn actually allows a Tàijí practitioner to find a cavity through touch, and then, without withdrawing one’s hand, the Tàijí practitioner can use Inch or Centimeter Jìn to strike the cavity with amazing force.
As soon as I discovered cavity striking is a viable technique, and I began to examine the recommended striking points found in Chinese martial arts. I quickly discovered that these were the same points I was studying in TCM school.

Of course, not all acupuncture points can be struck effectively, but all the Diǎnxué points were acupuncture points. At that point, I began seeking out colleagues who practiced both Tàijí and TCM with whom I could compare notes. I did this in hopes of finding a way to de-mystify Diǎnxué and to discover why this knowledge was couched in such secrecy.

I found myself asking questions like: “What happens when I strike a cavity? How does that affect the Qì of the human body?”

In order to understand this, we must first understand some basic concepts of TCM. First, it’s important to realize that Qì (氣) is not some mystical and unexplainable energy that wisps around like magic inside the Human body.
The word Qì itself offers a fantastic understanding into its meaning. The character for Qì, 氣, is actually made up of two different Chinese characters. The upper portion of the character, 气 means “air” or “gas.” And there is also the word mǐ (米) meaning “rice.” A saying in Chinese Medicine helps us to further unlock the meaning behind the idea of Qì.

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If you train Tàijíquán (太極拳) as a martial art, you will, at some point, come across Tui Shou (推手). Also known as Pushing Hands, (Pushands, Push Hands), this type of training is an incremental step in the direction of Tàijí sparring. This training usually progresses from fixed-step training drills, to fixed-step pushing, to moving step training drills, to moving-step pushing, and then finally to Tàijí sparring drills, two-person fighting set, and Tàijí sparring.

The problem is that many of us who train in Pushing Hands find ourselves focused on the wrong things, leading to bad training habits that can stunt our growth along the path from fixed-step drills to Tàijí sparring. To develop true skill in this training, we must always measure techniques we use now against how well they will help later in training. Some of the most common mistakes I see in both beginners and advances Pushing Hands students are:

• Using techniques not common to Pushing Hands

  Have you ever been Pushing Hands and suddenly your training partner put into a painful joint lock, or actually attempted an eye-jab or throat strike? I have. As a beginner to Pushing Hands, I had no idea what to do to counter these techniques. When I complained to my partner that these were not the point or focus of this training, his response was, “You’re learning self-defense. These are the kinds of things that people will try to use on you on the street.”

  The problem with this is that for the rest of that Pushing Hands session, the aggressor stoked his ego, while I flailed around uselessly because he was training fixed-step Tàijí sparring, while I was still trying to do fixed-step Pushing hands. Training in Pushing Hands happens between partners. This means that ultimately you should be working with your friend to bring both your skill levels higher. Tearing your training partner down may make you feel good in the short run, but it makes you a bad partner. Eventually nobody’s going to work with you!

• Relying on speed, not skill, to get out of a jam

  I have lost count of the hundreds of times I’ve seen this happen. I will be training with a partner and we start slowly, pushing and neutralizing until suddenly my training partner finds him or herself in a bad position. They are about to fall, so suddenly they speed up, effectively countering the push that would have toppled them.

  This works great when you’re training slowly, but what happens after you speed up and find yourself in the same jam? Once you are going as fast as you can go, you can’t go any faster. Then what? Usually you will fall, and it’s much harder to undo a bad habit when you’ve already graduated to moving swiftly. So my advice is, if you’re about to get pushed over . . . let it happen. It sucks, but you will learn from it.

• Using a technique that works well for only one type/style of Pushing Hands training 

  In intermediate and advanced stationery (fixed-step) Pushing Hands, I will often see students who are pu
  lled off balance throw their bodyweight into their opponent as they fall. The unexpected movement knocks their training partner off balance while simultaneously propping himself or herself up.

  It’s a great technique to save you from falling, but it only works in fixed-step Pushing Hands. The moment you add stepping into the mix and try that technique, you are likely to find yourself doing a face-plant on the floor. Once again, if you’re about to fall, check your ego, and let yourself fall. Relying on this or other, similar, techniques to get you out of trouble just develops a bad habit you’ll have to contend with when you graduate to moving-step Pushing Hands.

• Only training with competition in mind

  Sometimes when training in class, you might find yourself paired with a partner who is much better than you are. It’s not fun—and often not helpful to your training—when this person pushes you down repeatedly just because they can.

  Training in class is different from training for competition (or pushing in actual competition for that matter). Once again, you are partners. Pushing someone down feels like a sense of accomplishment, but it’s no good if they aren’t learning something from it. It’s not always helpful to a training partner if you take advantage of every opening they offer you. It’s sometimes more helpful in training to let your partner to get in close, past your defenses, testing one another’s ability to get out of a precarious situation.

  It’s different if you’re training for a competition, at that point, you don’t ever let them in, and you take advantage of any opening they leave you, but your partner should know before you start your practice session that this is what you have in mind. This ensures you both get something out of the training session.

At this point, you can easily see that ego comes into play in every one of these instances. That’s a trap, however, which will lead to bad training habits. Being good in Pushing Hands isn’t the ability to push someone else over whenever you want. It’s the ability to keep yourself from falling! The only way to get there, though, is by getting pushed over. The famous master, Jou Tsung Hwa, was once asked how he got so good at Pushing Hands. His answer was, “I fell a lot.”

One of the most interesting concepts in Chinese martial arts is the theory of tī dǎ shuāi ná (踢打摔拿). Tàijíquán (太極拳) teachers often overlook this and many times it is only taught by traditional Gōngfu (Kung fu or 功夫) instructors. Few Tàijíquán practitioners have heard this, and fewer still know the true depth of meaning behind the theory.

First, let us examine the meaning of the words. “Tī” refers to leg techniques or kicking, while “dǎ” refers to striking (either open hand or closed). “Shuāi” is the same word found in Shuāi Jiǎo (摔角) or Chinese wrestling, and refers to all wrestling techniques. While “ná” refers to the same word in Qín Ná (擒拿) and refers to grappling and joint locking techniques.

On the surface, this appears to be a way of categorizing the multitude of techniques and application found in Chinese martial arts. While it is true that these categories cover every possible technique employed in hand-to-hand fighting, there is more to this than simply labeling categories. These groupings are arranged to teach a basic and profound logic in how fighting works.

To put it simply, these are the scissors, rock, paper of Chinese martial arts.

To explain this, we will first lump kicking and punching into a single category, which we will call “kickboxing.” Then, we will compare the techniques of three fighters each skilled in a single category of tī and dǎ, shuāi, ná.

The first of our imaginary fighters is only trained kickboxing techniques. Our second martial artist specializes in wrestling, while the third warrior is a master of grappling and joint lock techniques.

For the kickboxer to be effective (barring the use of fā jìn or 發勁 which we will discuss in another article), he must keep his opponent at arm or leg length distance. This range allows each of the kickboxer’s punches or kicks to fully extend and achieve maximum power. If the kickboxer’s opponent is either too close or too far away, our kickboxer’s techniques are useless.

This is where our wrestler comes in.

Wrestlers must get close to their opponents to employ a takedown. Once the opponent is on the ground, the wrestler can employ a hold or submission. Therefore, when our wrestler steps in close to the kickboxer to throw him down, the kickboxer will suddenly discover that his punches and kicks have no power. He will also quickly discover it’s hard to kick or punch your way out of a takedown. Then, once on the ground, the kickboxer’s techniques are useless, while the wrestler has a whole arsenal of techniques with which to hurt or maim the kickboxer. We have seen many real-life examples of this in MMA fighting, when a skilled ground-fighter gets a kickboxer onto the ground.

When the wrestler tries this on the grappler, however, he will quickly find himself in some trouble. The moment the wrestler reaches out to grab our grappler, the wrestler has given both his arms over to his opponent who can then very easily twist a wrist, elbow, or shoulder into a painful grapple.

However, anyone who has studied grappling quickly notices that almost all grapplers have to use both hands on an opponent’s single arm or leg. Therefore, if our grappler tries to put the kickboxer in a painful joint lock, the kickboxer will simply attack the grappler with a free hand (or foot).

Just like scissors, rock, paper, each of these techniques is effective against one of the three, but not the other two. Rock can’t defeat rock, just as it cannot defeat paper. But put rock up against scissors, and it will win every time.

So if the kickboxer is like our metaphorical scissors, our wrestler is the rock (no pun intended), and our grappler is the paper.

Therefore, when you train applications of your Tàijíquán techniques, it’s important to pay attention to each of these categories, developing skills from all three: kickboxing, takedowns, and grappling.

The best way to employ is training is to begin developing applications all three categories for each movement in a Tàijí form. Let us take a traditional long form from Yang-style Tàijíquán (Yángshì Tàijíquán or 楊氏太極拳) as an example. If we remove all the repeated techniques from the form, a list of 108 (give or take depending on who is doing to the counting) the number of unique movements from the form is suddenly whittled down to 37.

This means that Yang-style practitioners should be working on all three of those categories with each of the 37 movements. This same math can be used for any other style of Tàijíquán.

Then, to integrate this concept of training into your own practice, start with one or two of your favorite Tàijíquán movement and practice an application from each category until it becomes second nature.

Once you have developed a handful of these, take it to the next level. In a safe pushing hands (tuī shǒu or 推手) environment, practice moving from one technique to the other. Remember to be sure to talk to your training partner so that they are aware of what you wish to emphasize in training (it’s really quite rude to punch someone who’s pushing hands with you if they’re not expecting it). Then, when you can do this effectively while practicing stationary pushing hands, it’s time to integrate these concepts into moving pushing hands training.

It’s important to remember at this point that other basic fighting theories not covered by of tī dǎ shuāi ná must be integrated into training at this level also (perhaps from a Two-person Fighting Set). However, when those basic fighting theories are combined with those of tī dǎ shuāi ná and the principles of moving pushing hands, the result is the highest level of combat training in Tàijíquán, known as “Tàijí sparring.”

In one of his continuing education seminars, Bob Flaws (acupuncturist, Chinese herbalist, author, and expert in Traditional Chinese Medicine) said, “Mastery of anything is simply mastery of the basics.”

It is an extremely accurate statement, and very simple. In many ways, this statement is like watching an expert practice Tàijíquán. The movements appear slow and simple, but are far more profound than what you see at first glance. This statement is the same. It hints at the true dedication and enormous effort it means to “master” anything.

Take traditional education, for example. Grade school, middle school, high school, and even undergraduate are all designed to hammer home basic information about various topics. It’s is not until grad school or post graduate work that a person might take the information from several basic sources and mold it into something new and exciting.

In many ways, the study of Tàijíquán is the same. Mastery of Tàijíquán basics leads to the ability to synthesize new ideas from remedial material that we know like the back of our hands. Look at masters who have taken what they know and transformed it, such as Cheng Man Ching, who took traditional Yang style and made it into a new style entirely.

Sadly, and particularly here in the United States, I have noticed a huge obstacle to this type of mastery.

Education of the 21st century, particularly in the United States has moved away from dogged memorization of facts. Instead, it emphasizes the big picture, concepts, and relationships. Many schools allow counting on fingers or calculator use, which has replaced basic arithmetic skills or rote memorization of times tables. This new concept of education, however, is a danger to “mastering” Tàijíquán.

In the early days of my own Tàijí education, I went through countless stretches, warm-ups, movement drills, and stance work. All this was designed to give me a firm foundation in the later movements of the form.

My teachers, who were very traditional, often had me freeze in place, holding a position as they walked around class and moved everyone’s body into the correct alignment. The idea being that long periods of maintaining the correct pose would lead to muscle memory, which in turn would mean that improper movements would suddenly feel “wrong.”

Sadly, I have seen countless modern teachers abandon this method of teaching only to offer a class wherein the student simply follows along with the form until they can produce the same movements with somewhat reasonable accuracy. I have even seen teachers who barely understand Tàijíquán basics change the form they teach, adding or subtracting movements at a whim, or combining Tàijíquán with yoga or dance.

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