No Losing and No Resisting<\/strong>:\u00a0 Losing means separating, and resisting means to stiffen against.\u00a0 If you separate, you can no longer sense your opponent’s motion and intention.\u00a0 If you stiffen, then you decrease your sensitivity.\u00a0 No Losing and No Resisting can be considered to be the epitome of all five strategic skills.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\nCombining Taiji Push Hands’ eight basic moving patterns and five strategic skills gives rise to 13 techniques.\u00a0 That is why Taijiquan is also called Thirteen Postures.<\/p>\n
In executing the above techniques, a Taijiquan practitioner must relax his body and mind.\u00a0 Relaxing his body not only allows him to be more sensitive to his opponent’s movement and intention, but it also makes it more difficult for his opponent to sense his movement and intention.\u00a0 Relaxing his mind allows him to process the information received and choosing the appropriate response quickly and almost automatically.\u00a0 Furthermore, following his opponent’s movement may mean that he has to change directions quite often.\u00a0 To facilitate such frequent and quick changes of directions, a Taijiquan practitioner should keep his upper body straight while relying on his feet, legs, and waist to execute the changes.\u00a0 Keeping the upper body straight also helps to maintain his balance.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It is important to point out that the root of martial power is from the feet, and that power is controlled by the waist, and manifested in the hands (fists or fingers).\u00a0 Taijiquan, unlike some of the other martial arts (e.g., Shaolinquan or Taekwondo), doesn’t frequently use the feet to strike the upper body of an opponent.\u00a0 Instead, it uses the feet more to solidify a person’s stance, weaken an opponent’s stance, and for low strikes.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In summary, the essence of Taijiquan from the perspective of Taiji Push Hands is to sense the opponent’s movement and intention and respond appropriately and almost automatically.\u00a0 Usually the appropriate response is to follow your opponent’s motion, and wait for the right opportunity to initiate a quick counter-attack.\u00a0 To achieve that objective, one has to stay connected to his opponent in a relaxed manner.\u00a0 This is a skill learned through a combination of choreographed push-hand form-sets and un-choreographed free-style push hands.<\/p>\n
Part 2 (in a future release of this website) will discuss the essence of Taijiquan from the perspective of Taiji Qigong and discuss regulating Qi, the internal energy in one’s body, to increase the power and effectiveness of the martial applications of Taijiquan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In an earlier article “Yin-Yang Theory and Martial Applications of Taijiquan” published in December 2006 in this website, we said that Taijiquan was originated as a martial art and we discussed the underlying basis behind Taijiquan as a martial art.\u00a0 In Taijiquan, one doesn’t oppose an opponent’s attack force with a frontal counter force, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"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\/88"}],"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\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":659,"href":"https:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88\/revisions\/659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}