Tai Chi – The Best Exercise to Make Friends

While Tai Chi can certainly be practiced in solitude, it also contains a special exercise performed in pairs called “pushing hands.”  This routine involves two people, each with unique movements in a circle while interacting with another person at the same time. Tai Chi practitioners use pushing hands to work on their form and improve their overall understanding of Tai Chi. Here are some benefits:

1. Pushing hands promotes a healthier lifestyle because it encourages people to go out and enjoy this natural exercise with friends.  They breathe, stretch, and enjoy the sequence and rhythm of the movements. Afterwards, they feel satisfied and build stronger friendships through mutual help.

2. People who do pushing hands have a positive attitude because they know they will improve and grow every day within the form. As I tell my students, “Even the slightest improvement should be a motivation to continue your Tai Chi.”

3. They are also better team players because they work in pairs and enjoy helping each other to understand the form and movements.

4. Pushing hands promotes moving with careful consideration and sensitivity. With slow and light movements, participants improve their listening power as they tune in to their partners’ movements.

5. This exercise helps improve balance and encourages interaction with others. Someone may have good balance individually, but it can be thrown off when that person is suddenly pushed by someone else.  Pushing hands teaches us to relax in this situation rather than panic. It’s a great way to root our feet to the ground and strengthen our posture in order to keep our balance.

6. People who do pushing hands build trust and form stronger friendships. A person who has mastered this exercise won’t want to be alone all the time or be a couch potato. With time, the partners will practice more and more, thus building trust. 

No wonder Tai Chi is called the “supreme ultimate” exercise (literal translation from Chinese.)

2014 Copyright by Huan's Tai Chi

Tai Chi Improves human body by applying The Law of Use and Disuse

The French scientist Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck (1744-1829) is famous for one of his laws which summarizes his evolutionary thought. It’s called the The Law of Use and Disuse - The parts of an organism's body that are used become more developed; parts that are not used become smaller and may disappear. Charles Darwin (1809-1882) made extensive use of this special Lamarck's law.

I found many things I benefited from Tai Chi may not happen to any regular person. I used them often. I gain it to let it become part of my life. With people who never do it, they may lose the ability to do so. Here are some examples:

1. Walk backwards and sideways
Without learning the movements repulse monkey and waving hands like moving clouds, you will probably never walk backward and sideways as easily. You will also lose this ability as you grow older. When you need it in a sudden situation, you could easily fall.

2. Open and relax your shoulder
Regular exercise such as lifting weights won't train you to open shoulder joints such as “Jian Jin”( The well of shoulder) acupuncture point. With Jian Jin opened, you will have less shoulder pain and less tight shoulders as you get older.

3. Quiet down at the beginning
In modern lifestyle, people tend to catch one thing after another and have a “Go, go, go” lifestyle. Tai Chi teaches you to quiet down and relax at first before you take a task. This is one thing I benefit most from Tai Chi.

4. Elbow and Knee move together
With your elbow and knee moving together, your body parts are supporting each other. It makes you move with ease. Without doing Tai Chi, it's hard for you to understand how body parts coordinate with each other.

5. Take a deep breathe
Herbert Benson MD from Mass General Hospital mentioned that when you breathe deeply, the air coming in through your nose fully fills your lungs, and you will notice that your lower belly rises. The ability to breathe so deeply and powerfully is not limited to a select few. This skill is inborn but often lies dormant. Reawakening it allows you to tap one of your body’s strongest self-healing mechanisms.(Harvard Health Publications in consultation with Herbert Benson, M.D.)

If you are always in hurry, your breathe are not deep enough. While doing slow movements in Tai Chi , it will enhance your breathe to a better deep breathe. A deep  breathe involves relaxation, quietness, with slow and gentle approach, and continues with concentration and many other techniques while doing Tai Chi. 

Use or disuse? They are all in Tai Chi.


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If you like this article, you may also want to read Lao Tzu's Secret to Extend your Life
 
Copyright Huan's Tai Chi 2014

8 More Benefits of Practicing Tai Chi in Slow Speed

1. Gain Tranquility
“The Solid is the root of the light;
The Quiescent is the master of the Hasty."

These are the words of the Taoist philosopher Lao Tzu in the famous Tao Te Ching. Tai Chi also emphasizes slowing down to stay relaxed. When you practice Tai Chi at a slower speed, you will defeat haste and gain quiescence, or tranquility at rest.

2. Become More Relaxed
If you move too quickly through the sets, you don’t know if you are relaxed or not because you don’t stay in each movement long enough. It’s easier to achieve relaxation when you slow down your movements.

3. Improve Stretching
You can stretch better and really open your joints when you move slower.

4. Challenge Yourself
You are challenging yourself when you go through each movement slower. For example, it’s easier to do a quick kick, but it’s harder to raise a leg slowly into the air and then slowly put it down.

5. Exercise Longer
You will exercise longer when you move slower. When you do movements faster, it’s easier to get tired. For example, if you run fast, you will get tired more quickly. Jogging slower will allow you to keep going longer. Exercising longer also means you can build more strength and endurance. That’s why Tai Chi is especially good for the elderly.

6. Reduce the Chance of Injury
Beginners often complain about hurting their knees when they do Tai Chi. Usually this situation happens because they move their knees over their toes when they form a bow stance (which means they have the wrong stance). If you are moving too fast, it’s easier to let your knee move over too far. But if you move slowly, you will move more carefully, and will be able to notice and readjust your position so as not to hurt yourself.

7. Fully Accomplish Each Movement
When people move quickly, they often don’t pay attention to details and sometimes don’t even complete the move. When you do it slowly, it will help you complete each individual move rather than hurrying to go to the next move.

8. Better Understand Yin & Yang
When Tai Chi master Yang Yu Ting was teaching students Tai Chi, he required them to pay attention to their relaxation, softness, roundness, and speed, and asked them to do it slower. He thought that slow speed would help students better experience and understand the changes of yin and yang, often understood as empty and solid the complimentary energies that work together to create balance.


If you like this article, you might want check out:
8 Benefits of Practicing Tai Chi in Slow Speed

Copyright Huan's Tai Chi 2012

Tai Chi may increase your EQ

Photo: wired.com

What is more important to you, having a high IQ or a high EQ? I think it’s nice to have a high IQ but having a higher EQ is more important. It not only affects your life but also other people in your family, work, church and community.

People who have higher EQ’s tend to have more positive emotions and less negative emotions or they are able to control their negative emotions easily and transform them to positive emotions. Negative emotions such as anger, fear and shame can cause conflicts. Positive emotions such as joy, hope and enthusiasm can bring progress.

Tai Chi is like a Swiss knife. Practicing Tai Chi not only benefits our physical, and psychological but also emotional health.

By slowing down each movement, it will help bring calmness and reduce anxiety. By relaxing our body, it will help us empty our mind and temporally forget about fear, guilt and anger. By putting more concentration on our movements, it will reduce our concentration on negative thoughts and emotions.

The preciseness and details of Tai Chi will help us think and repeat which better prepares our movements. If we could slow down, prepare, and think before acting rather then hurrying up and getting into a fight, we would not get in to so many conflicts.

We always consider our opponent’s reaction before each Tai Chi movement during practice of push hands. If we can do that for any occasions in our life, then we can bring progress.

Because the process of not having/ eliminating/ or having less negative emotions during Tai Chi practice, Tai Chi brings positive emotions and may increase our EQ. This is my point of view. Do you have any thoughts and comments?

Copyright by Huan's Tai Chi '09