One of the most important techniques in Taijiquan, as well as in almost all martial arts, is the need to rotate your waist while you are executing various forms. This is true whether you are doing warm up exercises, doing the forms in one of the Taijiquan form sets (e.g., the Simplified Yang Style 24 Form), or executing sophisticated Qin Na1/Self Defense techniques. From both the health perspective and the martial arts perspective, it is important to rotate the waist.
From the health perspective, you are exercising more parts of your body when you rotate your waist. For example, in a simple warm up exercise of “wave hands like clouds” when the hands are moving 180 degrees out of phase, if you are just moving your arms and hands, then you are exercising only your arms and hands. However, if you also rotate your waist, together with rotating your knees and your shoulders, then you are adding the exercising of your knees, waist, and shoulders in addition to exercising your arms and hands. Furthermore, when your eyes also follow the direction of your rotation, then you are also exercising your eyes. Once you have gone beyond natural breathing and start using your lower abdomen to help breathe during the breathing cycle, then you are massaging, or exercising, the internal organs in your lower abdomen.
America at the Crossroad
Several significant events occurring recently in the U.S. should force us as Americans to scrutinize closely what has been happening in our country. In particular, our country, having been the richest and most powerful country in the world in essentially the second half of the 20th century, doesn’t seem from several perspectives to be doing that well in the 21st century. Actually, signs of many of these shortcomings were already there in previous years, even 20-30 years ago, we just haven’t been paying close attention to them while basking in the glory of being the richest and most powerful country in the world.
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