Tai Chi Vlog 1 - Something New
JKD was a good start. But it wasn’t enough. It’s going to sound ridiculous but JKD just wasn’t kung fu-y enough. I wanted something that screamed kung fu. So after I got back into JKD I started looking around for more martial arts. And I stumbled upon a tai chi place that I think must have been new. I had checked the app Dazhong Dianping so many times for martial arts and had never seen it before but that was my lucky day.
Tai chi was a huge shock. While JKD had a lot in common with tang soo do tai chi was completely different. So while a lot of stuff in JKD I picked up maybe a little faster than normal I had a ton of trouble with a lot of stuff in tai chi. There were a couple of things early on that stood out as places I was struggling.
First is stances. I find my stances often seem too short. My best guess is that I’m either stepping into them a little wrong or rotating into them wrong after the step and one of those is making them too short. That being said it’s also possible that tai chi (Yang style at least) just has shorter stances and I’m assuming they should be longer because they are in tang soo do. But I don’t think so.
The second is that sort of ball you bring your hands into between moves. I suppose it’s sort of a chamber. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about check out my hands in the thumbnail image for the YouTube video below. That move. Your hands are supposed to be in the middle of your body with your elbows out a little. It sort of makes a circle. But I always seem to end up doing the cross body chamber from tang soo do. I’ve spent a lot of time getting that fixed…
The last thing actually isn’t related to tai chi, but my Chinese language skills. Or lack thereof as the case may be. The ideas behind tai chi seem to be much more opaque than the ideas behind JKD. This has made it much harder to understand what’s happening in class. The stuff happening in JKD, like rotate to create power, is much easier to explain and to demonstrate than drawing power from stances or other tai chi ideas. My limited Chinese has definitely caused me to run into a wall in understanding class. Realistically I don’t think I’ll ever be able to really understand tai chi until my Chinese improves. So that’s something to work on.
Even though I’ve run into a bunch of stuff I’m having trouble getting used to I’ve been really enjoying tai chi. It’s just so different and there’s something refreshing about doing something so new. I just hope you can teach an old dog new tricks or I’ll never figure out those stances.
Thanks for reading and I'll see you on my next trip. Don't forget to click the links below and follow to stay up to date on what I'm doing and where I am and to see all the pictures and videos from my trips.