...or you've been in a serious fight and couldn't escape and somehow, in the face of real violence, everything became chaos. You couldn't get your balance, your brain was reeling, you couldn't find your range and all the push hands practice or techniques that were so easy to execute in class... you just couldn't get them off. Maybe you were seriously hurt. And then it hits you:

1) That you're no closer to finding the true meaning and martial application of tai chi principles such as silk reeling, leading, following, borrowing, folding, receiving, turning, collecting, empty-solid, yin-yang, peng ching, etc. then when you started. 

2) That you’re no closer to understanding or performing mystical feats of “Chi” then when you started.

3) That endless microscopic examination of proper form is preventing you from seeing the bigger picture: that practicing patterned techniques and forms doesn't make you formless, spontaneous or adaptive to the chaos of REAL violence. In fact, it cripples your ability to apply internal principles to true fighting.

4) As far as you can tell--Combat Tai Chi for self defense no longer exists.

Push hands is a wonderful tai chi exercise that promotes balance, coordination and health. Unfortunately, as it is typically practiced (your school may be different...but it's rare*), it has almost no benefit in training to fight for your life.

As it is often done, how is it beneficial to practice slow push hands and then suddenly accelerate to full speed when you fa jin? Granted, push hands is not fighting, it's an exercise. But if you and the enemy are already fighting at full adrenaline velocity, and you can suddenly accelerate to 2, 3 or 4 times full speed, you'd be Superman and you wouldn't need any of this stuff! How does this develop your nervous system responses for the chaos of real violence? So why train this way?

If you're going to spend time training self-defense, shouldn't it have some specific relevance to real combat?

TOP 4 PROBLEMS:
 

1.  Too much pushing. Any fight that involves pushing is one you should have avoided in the first place because it's not serious. Run. If you can't run, and you feel like you could die, then fight like your life depends on it. That means crippling, penetrating strikes to lethal targets. What does this have to do with slow push hands training? Well...nothing.

Even high speed, full force pushing and throwing at the push hands competitive level...is still pushing. Do you have the skill to push someone twice your size hard enough to disable them? Maybe--if you're a grand champion. But even a 100 pound woman can stop a monster with a chop to the throat or stab to the eye. The trick--is HOW to get it past his defenses...AND elude his attack.

All that pushing training, even initially, blinds and cripples your innate response to real violence the way it really happens. "But I could easily translate my pushing skills into crippling combat strikes if the need arose." Dream on. Forget about pushing or being pushed. Learn to feel, find, create and hit through an opening--and avoid the same to you.

SOLUTION: Instead of pushing, substitute every variation of striking from any angle to any angle with balance and body unity, but still maintain contact. You will still be working balance and rooting but from the combatively REAL dynamic perspective of "Kill or Be Killed." Yield in the smallest possible space to create an opening you can snake through simultaneously and then hit...like a sewing machine. And what about kicking? Why not use your feet with the same offensive/defensive sensitivity as your hands?

What do we call this? Guided Chaos Contact Flow/Combat Flow. How do you hit at close range without getting hit, getting tight, grappling or breaking contact? Find out...

2. Inconsistent speed. To repeat what was explained above, Tai Chi practitioners will move slowly, feeling each other out, seeking the other's root, and then "faj" or explode rapidly to launch them backwards. This promotes utterly unrealistic reflexes. Two people fighting are essentially moving at one speed--super fast!--and one or the other may be going just slightly slower or quicker.

Moving very slowly and then very quickly in partner practice not only destroys both your defensive and offensive responses--it creates in your mind a false expectation of violence. If 2 people are moving at maximum speed, can one of them suddenly go twice that? No, not unless they're Superman. Then why train that way?

SOLUTION: flow at one speed. If moving slowly, learn to create and seal openings at that speed, NON-COOPERATIVELY, without cheating. This promotes sensitivity and adaptivity, especially when training at consistent slow speeds.

 3. Cooperative training. To expand on the above, any kind of patterned, cooperative partner training is worse than useless; it essentially sabotages your nervous system against future attacks. You CAN cooperate on speed and force levels because then you're both in relatively the same universe and more or less equally handicapped so you can focus on unconscious responses. If you're overwhelmed in practice you can't learn to sense and create...and wind up flailing and freezing...and getting injured. Speed and force can be added in later.

SOLUTION: You need to become familiar with interpreting and responding to unpatterned motion--chaos--right from the beginning, and we're going to guide you through it. If not understood, specific attributes such as Looseness, Body Unity, Balance and Sensitivity can be isolated out and developed through specific drills but they should never be mixed in with 2 person practice choreographed or cooperatively or else they become a recipe for disaster. Contact Flow incorporates all of these within the context of fighting to save your life--even if you're BOTH moving at only 1 mile per hour.

4. False beginnings. How do you start push hands? By touching hands? By stepping in with a big push? By tentatively "reeling silk" until you have joined with your partner's root? This is fine for push hands but disastrous for training your responses to fight to save your life. If you can't run from impending violence you want to do what Professor Bradley Steiner (President, International Combat Martial Arts Association) recommends: "Attack the Attacker!" However, you do not want to just charge in like a Rhino (unless maybe you are a Rhino--in which case who would attack you?). You want to do what GM Perkins advises: "Throw a monkey wrench into their attack." This entails moving in but offline simultaneously. This takes practice, and beginning your two-person practice like a waltz is another recipe for future disasters.

*John Perkins can personally vouch for the tremendous tai chi ability of Chicago master Wayson Liao