{"id":1535,"date":"2010-10-31T02:00:56","date_gmt":"2010-10-31T06:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/?p=1535"},"modified":"2010-11-01T23:09:00","modified_gmt":"2010-11-02T03:09:00","slug":"some-basic-but-important-fine-points-in-performing-taiji-forms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dontow.com\/2010\/10\/some-basic-but-important-fine-points-in-performing-taiji-forms\/","title":{"rendered":"Some Basic But Important Fine Points in Performing Taiji Forms"},"content":{"rendered":"
What is the best approach in teaching the important fine points of Taiji?\u00a0 Should the instructor not focus on these fine points, as new students already have their hands full in learning the rudimentary movements of the forms?\u00a0 Or should the instructor remind the students of these fine points because these fine points are important from either the health perspective or the martial arts perspective, and it is more difficult to undo a bad habit and replace it with a new one?\u00a0 Thus there are two general approaches to teaching Taiji.\u00a0 The major difference in the two approaches is the amount of emphasis on several basic but important fine points when performing the forms.\u00a0 This article discusses some of these fine points and the approach that I favor.
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Although Taiji is an exercise that people of all ages can learn and one doesn’t have to be an athlete to perform the forms, it is not necessarily easy to perform the forms well. \u00a0 To learn a new form, usually it takes many repetitions, at first following an instructor or a video, then followed by performing the form over and over on one’s own.\u00a0 It is also very easy to forget, so if one hasn’t practiced a form for several days, then very likely one would have forgotten some aspects of the form, if not the whole form.\u00a0 Therefore, some instructors would refrain from correcting the students’ forms if they can follow the general movements of the forms, even though they are missing many of the important fine points of Taiji, for fear that it is too much for the students to learn at the same time.<\/p>\n
My own preference is that although initially we should not demand perfection from the students in performing the forms, we should emphasize the correct way and the significance of performing the form in that way.\u00a0 Having these fundamental fine points incorporated from the very beginning will actually result in a shorter time for the students to learn and perform the forms correctly.\u00a0 Furthermore, the quality of their performance will be better than those students who first learned the forms without paying attention to the fine points and then correcting their performance after they have already “learned” the forms.<\/p>\n
We now discuss several of the basic but important fine points in performing Taiji forms.<\/p>\n
We want also to mention several other fine points that are not as directly tied to bodily positions during form movement:<\/p>\n
From the above discussion, we can see that to perform the Taiji forms well, one needs to pay attention to many fine points.\u00a0 These fine points are important because they are either beneficial from the health perspective or beneficial from the martial arts perspective, or from both perspectives.\u00a0 All of these fine points, with the exception of using lower abdominal breathing and utilizing the mind to direct the Qi, can be taught in the first Taiji course.\u00a0 Whether these fine points are incorporated in the first or subsequent courses, it will normally require several courses over an extended period of time before one can perfect all these fine points in one’s performance.\u00a0 This is why it is extremely beneficial to take the same Taiji course multiple times.\u00a0 Each time, you either learn more of these subtle points while doing the forms, or your incorporation of these subtle points becomes better and better.\u00a0 I can speak about this from my personal experience.\u00a0 I took the same course “Simplified Yang Style 24 Form” from three different teachers for at least seven times [1] , and the last few times I took the course was after I had already taught the same course several times.\u00a0 I found that I learned a non-negligible amount in each course.<\/p>\n
_______________<\/p>\n
[1]\u00a0 For most of these courses, I also had to pay tuition.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What is the best approach in teaching the important fine points of Taiji?\u00a0 Should the instructor not focus on these fine points, as new students already have their hands full in learning the rudimentary movements of the forms?\u00a0 Or should the instructor remind the students of these fine points because these fine points are important […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1535"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1535"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1535\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1598,"href":"https:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1535\/revisions\/1598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}