like a C where I started about before see how see how it's like an S so you don't want that and you can see a lot of people doing Tai Chi with a back like this it's actually very bad for your back and also it makes you disconnected it disconnects your upper body with your lower body the key to having a strong core and Dan Tian is to connect your upper body with your lower body and this is the main mistake that people make by having the S curve of the spine and what it does is disconnects your body so for example I'm going to do an S curve on purpose my spine is like my belly sticking out I'm trying to and he pushes on my hind see I'll automatically go back, there's no resistance but now I stick my back out I drop my hip and now he pushes on it what happened? you're more rooted it's rooted what happens when you curve your back is now that energy transfer goes straight through your spine and into your hips and into the legs into the knees and into the ground when you break that connection by curving your spine now all the energy just goes in your spine it doesn't go to your legs so that's why he pushes that energy goes to the spine and then I go so that's the number one mistake that you can make in Tai Chi so when you practice your Tai Chi make sure that you always check put my hand back behind my back and see if it's straight if it's a C so even when you do your moves think about that think that the spine is going to be straight one exercise you can do is slow squats against the wall so this is the wall against me I want to first put my back against the wall and then see if there's any space behind my back see if I slip my hand behind my back if there's a space that I can slip my hand behind then there's too much space so I need to get rid of that space I want all my spine to be touching the wall once I get that then I can go up and down just go halfway and go back up sliding my spine up and down now after I do that and I'm good at it then I can go all the way down keeping my spine straight and touching the wall all the way and go slow like this so that's going to be very hard on your lower back but it strengthens your lower back it strengthens your leg so that's one key in Tai Chi of creating connectedness so stay tuned I'm going to show you the bonus mistake that people make so the bonus mistake that you can make in Tai Chi is doing it too fast I know everybody says this you want to do Tai Chi slow but many people don't understand why you do Tai Chi so slow well today we talked about three mistakes number one, relaxation number two, using your dan tian to lead your hands and number three, having a proper spine alignment what do all those things mean all those things mean body, integration of your whole body if your hand moves the whole body moves if your feet move, your whole body moves everything's connected and the reason we do Tai Chi so slow is that we're training that connectedness and it's impossible to train it doing it fast that's why we do it slow if we can do it fast and still get connectedness then everybody would do Tai Chi fast but the reason we do it slow Tai Chi doing it slow is probably the only way you can train that connectedness in your body by combining all the techniques that we learned relaxation leading with the dan tian and later on, how to use your breath to relax and connect your body to and your mind so there's many aspects of learning how to connect your whole body and mind as an integrated machine integrated unit in order to function totally and holistically when it comes in, you sink your chest so you press here like I'm pretty solid here because you're pushing down to my neck expand my chest and then you go there's actually an expanding chest so now there's another not going mechanism that blends so there's blending and it's sinking more so when you're sinking it sinks down to the body so the chin is tucked chest is in and then you push hard as more it's not going anywhere you expand a bit and you know what to do so you contract yeah easily moves balance so hard when you can try you feel like, oh I can push the guy you feel like you can push me like you think you got me yeah don't use this just relax when you push on here I'm totally relaxed I'm just using my whole structure in my body so this is actually touching my body so you feel like you got me there's actually more there's more moves alright so just relax this relax this whole thing suck in there so it feels like, oh yeah I got you now but you feel like now it's on your back leg right now you just expand yeah, okay I'm so new so let put that into your sucking in things so I'm ready I'm already sucked in and I'm already expanding but then you need to make sure to cap the elbow so if I go like this push it up there when you try to elbow me you do that elbow me at least I can control the elbow then if you feel yourself moving this way you're going to change it to here yeah so you need to in cap the elbow push in this is sucking in just a second and then expand step here and I bump into you like that, right? if I step too deeper yeah, okay my feet haven't touched the ground yet and I already made contact so now all the momentum is going through you instead of going to the ground okay, you try that I'll stand here and you just try so you gotta step really deep so I step with this foot so like that so that works too but that's not the technique so I'm here you want to take my place so here's my center so my foot basically has to be here oh yeah let's see how deep you have it go that's better but then don't knee forward be straight I'm trying to drop my height down because I feel like when I get here my shoulders here don't use your shoulder one technique is to use your shoulder that's for a more combative because you can use your shoulder bone but for training you're just going to bump into your chest so relax so relax your shoulder don't do this yeah, like that but don't stick it out like this I'm trying to pull it back so just relax you're not stepping people down I feel that when I step in so you don't want to step then go you have to pay before I land before my foot even touches the ground I'm already there same time yeah, there you go I can do that a lot more when you step first so you want to aim before and behind again the thing is to make a frame make this round sink your chest so there's like one big one big cup one big cup is gone because you stick out any part of the cup then it's just going to go in it won't affect the whole thing so you make this round so yeah so there's two ways you can sink down where you can rise up that's rising up so you can go rising up rising up or you can sink down so it's like going down you got it so now you just extend this and now you're bringing your whole body into it into the push don't push I'm going to show you the three mistakes in Tai Chi that are very common that people make the main advantages of learning Tai Chi is for health for your joints, for your bones for breathing, for relaxation and meditation but also we learn a concept called rooting or sinking so as you can see in the demonstration we'll hear how much do you weigh 240 pounds look at his muscles and my leg I'm only about 150 pounds look at my skinny arms and I'm able to resist and pushing me and I'm fairly relaxed without using a lot of strength I can resist this push and how hard were you pushing there he's putting all the strength in there and I'm just standing there not using too much strength so the key is don't fight strength don't fight force with force I'm going to teach you how to use structure the structure of your skeletal structure of your bones of your joints, of your alignment and also of your mind of what the intention is in order to resist force using just structure so one of the key things that you need to have structure well there's three mistakes that people make that destroy structure in Tai Chi and very few people that actually practice Tai Chi actually know and actually experience and know how to do this I'll show you those to you mistake number three is not being relaxed so a lot of people are confused about relaxation and about being placid there's two different things for example if I'm being placid he pushes and that's placid right there's nothing there nothing, it's placid but being relaxed in concept called shong in Chinese but relaxed but still have structure so he's pushing he's pushing harder harder, harder, harder I'm relaxing, my hands relaxed but he's pushing harder, harder I'm still relaxed I'm still able to resist them so that's the difference between being shong which means loose and placid but in English we use the word relaxation which is very easy to misinterpret so number one key when you practice your tai chi for example, practice your tai chi your hands are always relaxed there's only a tense state and a relaxed state now when we go to the gym, most people they practice being tense use your muscles, tense up to get more power which is okay, it works but if you practice being tense on time practice being tense then if you're fighting against someone bigger than you you're at a disadvantage because his force will be stronger than your force so rather than use force I use shong I use relaxation so when you practice your tai chi make sure that your hands are not open like this because that's too much tension because your hands are not closed like this because that's too much tension when it's relaxed, it's completely relaxed imagine holding an egg in your hand when you're open, just open them slightly just stretch them out a little bit when you're relaxed, relaxed when you're open, just open a little you always want to feel the energy ball in the palms of your hands so it's very subtle for example, when I do this I'm combining two things first of all, my hands are lifting up at the same time my hands are going from relaxed to slightly open and then back to relaxed slightly open it's a very minor detail, but what that does is it teaches you even though you're using tension my hands are slightly open that I'm still in a relaxed state so I never go from I never go up to 100% I go up to maybe 60 to 70% tension because once you go above that then you start to use force you stay below, let's say, 60% tension then you're not using force you're using relaxation and the key to Tai Chi is to train yourself so that you can still use relaxation at 60%, 50%, 40%, 30% eventually using no tension at all to be able to resist someone with force so that's what takes the training that's what takes the many, many hours of repetition and training doing the push hands that we just showed you in the demonstration doing that for a lot that you can learn how to use relaxation mistake number two in Tai Chi is to not use your Dan Tian or not use your core center of gravity to direct the movements so there's a very simple movement called pilot hands I'm using my core to direct my body this time I'm using just one hand see how my core is moving in a circle to direct my arm so the core or the Dan Tian leads the arms Sun Dai Sao that's what I say in Chinese the body leads the hand so that's number two mistake here's how it looks like when you make the mistake see a difference my hand is leading my core so there's very little power or connection when I'm moving my hand I'm just moving my hand I'm not even leading it with the core now do it correctly so how you can practice is actually put your finger or put your hand and fingers touch your belly button and then feel it move before your hand moves but now you get the difference and the difference you can tell let's see I'm just using my hand just my hand pain wise how much is that one to ten about four okay now I'm using my hip I mean using my Dan Tian how much pain more pain is there about seven and I didn't use more power I just used my waist and if I use more I can get it up to ten that's the key of generating power is to use your Dan Tian so let me show you demonstration in the 24 move Tai Chi form how to use the Dan Tian to guide your hands so let me show you the wrong way of doing this okay I'm trying very hard to doing the wrong way because I practice so much the proper way but what I'm doing is I'm leading with my hands and then I move my body so a very basic fundamental in early Tai Chi if you're a beginner is to learn how to move your hips now when you get advanced Tai Chi do the opposite, you learn to move your hands before your hips it's contradictory isn't it but I'll show you how to do that in the next lesson or in a later lesson and it goes with the concept that Bruce Lee taught which is to move your hands before your feet just like in fencing you want to move your hands before your feet the reason is because when somebody attacks you I don't have time to move my hip first and do a big Tai Chi move if somebody attacks me I have to move my hand first so what's the difference see before you learn Tai Chi and once you learn Tai Chi they move their hands first but there's no power and then they practice Tai Chi and then they'll learn how to use the hips to get power but they practice enough Tai Chi and now they'll get back to the beginning they use their hands first but now it comes with power how does that happen okay so let me show you again let's see if it's attacking I don't have time to move my hips and do a big Tai Chi move like in a lot of demonstrations I only have time to just move my hand up but there's power there how does that happen I just move my hand I move my hand and then my body go do it again I move my hand and then my body I didn't move my hip first just me moving my hips first too slow I have to go one, two but now I want to do it so that I move my hand first okay so how does that work maybe in a later lesson I can show you how to do that mistake number one that you can make in Tai Chi is to not sink your tailbone which means not to open your back now I'm going to show Will for example because I'm wearing a jacket you can't see so you see if you take your shirt and tighten it up the spine has a curve here so most people have that curve naturally but in Tai Chi you actually don't want that curve in Tai Chi you want to get rid of that curve so you want to sink down the tailbone so that you can feel that this is flatter and ideally it's actually a C, it's a cup so what you need to do is sink your tailbone down even more suck in your gut and then stretch this out like this so now I can feel it's lower back straightening up but still not enough, you want it to stick out push out over here, push, push, push better, okay so now you can feel that it's more like a C where I stand about before see how it's like an S so you don't want that and you can see a lot of people doing Tai Chi with a back like this it's actually very bad for your back and also it makes you disconnected it disconnects your upper body with your lower body the key to having a strong core and Dan Qian with your lower body and this is the main mistake that people make by having the S curve of the spine and what it does is it disconnects your body so for example I'm going to do an S curve on purpose my spine is like my belly sticking out I'm trying to and he pushes on my hand see I'll automatically go back, there's no resistance but now I stick my back out I drop my hip I make this into a C and now he pushes on it what happened? it's more rooted it's rooted see what happens when you curve your back is now that energy transfer goes straight through your spine and then into your hips and into the legs, into the knees, into the ground when you break that connection by curving your spine it goes in your spine it doesn't go to your legs so that's why he pushes that energy goes to the spine and then I go so that's the number one mistake that you can make in Tai Chi so when you practice your Tai Chi make sure that you always check put my hand back behind my back see if it's straight you did a C so even when you do your moves think about that think that the spine is going to be straight one exercise you can do is to do very slow squats against the wall I want to first put my back against the wall and then see if there's any space behind my back see if I slip my hand behind my back if there's a space that I can slip my hand behind then there's too much space so I need to get rid of that space I want all my spine to be touching the wall once I get that then I can go up and down sliding my spine up and down the wall now after I do that and I'm good at it then I can go all the way down all the way down keeping my spine straight and touching the wall all the way going slow like this so that's going to be very hard on your lower back but it strengthens your lower back it strengthens your leg so that's one key in Tai Chi of creating connectedness I'm going to show you the bonus mistake that people make the bonus mistake that you can make in Tai Chi is doing it too fast I know everybody says this you want to do Tai Chi slow but many people don't understand why you do Tai Chi so slow today we talked about three mistakes 1. relaxation 2. using your dan tian to lead your hands 3. having a proper spine alignment what do all those things mean connecting this of your whole body integration of your whole body if your hand moves your whole body moves if your feet move your whole body moves everything's connected and the reason we do Tai Chi so slow is that we're training that connectedness and it's impossible to train it doing it fast that's why we do it slow if we can do it fast and still get connectedness then everybody would do Tai Chi fast but the reason we do it slow is because Tai Chi doing it slow is probably the only way you can train that connectedness in your body by combining all the techniques that we learned relaxation leading with the dan tian and later on how to use your breath to relax and connect your body to and your mind so there's many aspects of learning how to connect your whole body and mind as an integrated machine integrated unit in order to function totally and holistically when it comes in you sink your chest so you press here like I'm pretty solid here because you're pushing down to expand my chest and then you go there's actually so now there's another not going mechanism that blends so there's blending and it's sinking more so when you're sinking it sinks down to the bottom chin is tucked chest is in and then you push hard as well it's not going anywhere expand a bit and you don't want to be too quiet first so you contract yeah easy when we balance it hard because when you can try you feel like oh I can push the guy right you feel like you can push me you got me right okay don't use this just relax when you push down here I'm just using my whole structure in my body okay this is actually touching my body I'll let you in so you feel like you got me there's actually more alright just relax this whole thing suck in there so it feels like oh yeah I got you now but you feel like now it's on your back leg right now you just expand yeah okay alright I'm already so new I'm already sucked in ideally I want to make sure it's elbow but then you need to make sure the elbow cup the elbow so if I go like this push it up there but you try to elbow me a little bit you do that elbow me at least I can control the elbow if I don't then if you feel yourself moving this way you're right there you're going to change it to here okay so you need to in cup the elbow just suck it in just suck in and then expand step here I'm going to bump into you like that right step through deeper my feet haven't touched the ground yet and they've already made contact so now all the momentum is going through you instead of going to the ground okay I'll stand here and you can try so you gotta step really deep so I'll step with this foot or this one like that so that works too so I'll step deeper today you want to take my place so here's my center you want to be there so my foot basically has to be here oh yeah let's see how deep you have to go so that's better but then go knee forward be straight it's almost straight I'm trying to drop my height down because I feel like you want shoulders here don't use your shoulder one technique is to use your shoulder that's for a more combata because you can use your shoulder bone but for training you're just going to bump into the chest so relax your shoulder don't do this yeah but don't stick it out like this I'm trying to pull it back so just relax come I'm David Wong in this video I'm going to show you the three mistakes in Tai Chi that are very common that people make so one of the main advantages of learning Tai Chi is for health for your joints, for your bones for breathing, for relaxation and meditation but also we learn a concept called rooting or sinking so as you can see in the demonstration we'll hear how much do you weigh 220 pounds there's arms, holy cow as big as my leg I'm only about 150 pounds look at my skinny arms and I'm able to resist and pushing me and I'm fairly relaxed without using a lot of strength I can resist this push and how hard were you pushing there about 90 to 100% he's putting all the strength in there and I'm just standing there not using too much strength with strength don't fight force with force so in Tai Chi you'll teach you how to use structure the structure of your skeletal structure of your bones, of your joints, of your alignment and also of your mind of what the intention is in order to resist force using just structure so one of the key things that you need to have structure well there's three mistakes that people make that destroy structure in Tai Chi and very few people that actually practice Tai Chi actually know and actually experience and know how to do this so stay tuned and I'm going to show you those to you mistake number three is not being relaxed so a lot of people are confused about relaxation and about being placid there's two different things for example if I'm being placid he pushes and that's placid there's nothing there nothing, it's placid he's being relaxed in a concept called Song in Chinese it's being loose but relaxed but still have structure so he's pushing he's pushing harder, harder, harder I'm relaxing, my hands relax he's pushing harder, harder I'm still relaxed you see how I relax my arms I'm still able to resist them so that's the difference between being Song which means loose in English we use the word relaxation which is very easy to misinterpret so number one key when you practice your Tai Chi for example, practice your Tai Chi your hands are always relaxed there's only a tense state and a relaxed state now when we go to the gym most people practice being tense use your muscles tense up more power which is okay, it works but if you practice being tense all the time practice being tense like this then if you're fighting against someone bigger than you you're at a disadvantage because his force will be stronger than your force so rather than use force I use Song I use relaxation so when you practice your Tai Chi make sure that your hands are not open like this because that's too much tension your hands should always be in the middle when it's relaxed it's completely relaxed imagine holding an egg in your hand when you're open just open them slightly just stretch them out a little bit when you're relaxed, relaxed when you're open, just open a little you always want to feel an energy ball in the palms of your hands so it's very subtle when I do this I'm combining two things my hands are lifting up at the same time my hands are going from relaxed to slightly open and then back to relaxed slightly open it's a very minor detail but what that does is it teaches you even though you're using tension see my hands are slightly open that I'm still in a relaxed state so I never go from I never go up to 100% I go up to maybe 60 to 70% tension never go above that because once you go above that then you start to use force you stay below let's say 60% tension then you're not using force you're using relaxation and the key to Tai Chi is to train yourself so that you can still use relaxation at 60%, 50%, 40%, 30% eventually using no tension at all to be able to resist someone with force so that's what takes the training that's what takes the many many hours repetition and training doing the push hands that we just showed you in the demonstration doing that for a lot you can learn how to use relaxation mistake number two in Tai Chi is to not use your Dan Tian or not use your core the center of gravity to direct the movements so there's a very simple movement called pilot hands so I'm using my core to direct my body so say I'm using just one hand see how my core is moving in a circle to direct my arm so the core or the Dan Tian leads the arms that's what I say in Chinese the body leads the hand so that's number two the stick here's how it looks like when you make the stick see a difference my hand is leading my core the little power or connection when I'm moving my hand I'm just moving my hand I'm not even leading it with the core now do as you're doing correctly so how you can practice is actually put your finger or put your hand fingers touch your belly button and then feel it move before your hand moves so now you get the difference and the difference you can tell, let's see I'm just using my hand like this with my hand pain wise how much is that 1 to 10 about a 4 now I'm using my hip I mean using my Dan Tian how much pain is there brings it up to about a 7 a 7 right and I didn't use more power I just used my waist and if I use more I can get it up to 10 so that's the key of generating power is to use your Dan Tian so let me show you demonstration in the 24 move Tai Chi form of how to use the Dan Tian to guide your hand so let me show you the wrong way of doing this I'm trying very hard to do it the wrong way because I practice so much the proper way but what I'm doing is I'm leading with my hands and then I move my body so a very basic fundamental in early Tai Chi, if you're a beginner you need to learn how to move your hips now when you get advanced Tai Chi you actually do the opposite you learn to move your hands before your hips it's contradictory isn't it but I'll show you how to do that in the next lesson or in the later lesson and it goes with the concept that Bruce Lee taught which is to move your hands before your feet just like in fencing you want to move your hands before your feet I don't have time to move my hip first and do a big Tai Chi move if somebody attacks me I have to move my hand first so what's the difference before you learn Tai Chi and once you learn Tai Chi they move their hands first but there's no power and then they'll practice Tai Chi and then they'll learn how to use the hips to get power but they practice enough Tai Chi and now they'll get back to the beginning they use their hands first how does that happen so let me show you again I don't have time to move my hips and do a big Tai Chi move in a lot of demonstrations I only have time to just move my hand up but there's power there how does that happen I just move my hand and then my body I move my hand and then my body I didn't move my hip first just me moving my hips first too slow right I have to go one, two you already hit me but now I want to do it so that I move my hand first so how does that work maybe in a later lesson I can show you how to do that mistake number one that you can make in Tai Chi is to not sink your tailbone which means not to open your back now I'm going to show Will for example because I'm wearing a jacket you can't see so you see it's fine it has a curve here most people have that curve naturally but in Tai Chi you actually don't want that curve in Tai Chi you want to get rid of that curve so you want to sink down the tailbone so that you can feel that this is flatter and ideally it's actually a C so what you need to do is sink your tailbone down even more suck in your gut and then stretch this out like this so now I can feel it's lower back, it's straightening up but still not enough you want it to stick out push out here so now you can feel that it's more like a C whereas starting about before see how it's like an S so you don't want that and you can see a lot of people doing Tai Chi with a back like this it's actually very bad for your back and also it makes you disconnected it disconnects your upper body with your lower body the key to having a strong core and Dan Tian is to connect your upper body with your lower body and this is the main mistake that people make by having the S curve of the spine and what it does is disconnect your body so for example I'm going to do an S curve on purpose my spine is like my belly sticking out I'm trying to and he pushes on my hand I'll automatically go back there's no resistance but now I stick my back out I drop my hip and make this into a C and now he pushes on it what happened? it's a different it's more rooted see what happens when you curve your back is now that energy transfer goes straight through your spine and then into your hips when you break that connection by curving your spine now all the energy just goes in your spine it doesn't go to your legs so that's why he pushes that energy goes to the spine and then I go so that's the number one mistake that you can make in Tai Chi so when you practice your Tai Chi make sure that you always check put my hand back behind my back if it's straight if it's a C or even when you do your moves think about that think that the spine is going to be straight one exercise you can do is to do very slow squats against the wall so that's the wall again thing I want to first put my back against the wall and then see if there's any space behind my back see if I slip my hand behind my back if there's a space that I can slip my hand behind then there's too much space so I need to get rid of that space so that's fine to be touching the wall once I get that then I can go up and down just go halfway and go back up sliding my spine up and down the wall now after I do that and I'm good at it then I can go all the way down keeping my spine straight and touching the wall all the way and do it slow like this so that's going to be very hard on your lower back but it strengthens your lower back it strengthens your leg so that's one key in Tai Chi of creating connectedness so stay tuned I'm going to show you the bonus mistake that people make so the bonus mistake that you can make in Tai Chi is doing it too fast I know everybody says this you want to do Tai Chi slow but many people don't understand why you do Tai Chi so slow well today we talked about three mistakes number one, relaxation change your hands and number three, having a proper spine alignment what do all those things mean all those things mean connectedness of your whole body integration of your whole body if your hand moves your whole body moves if your feet move your whole body moves everything's connected and the reason we do Tai Chi so slow is that we're training that connectedness that's why we do it slow if we can do it fast and still get connectedness then everybody would do Tai Chi fast but the reason we do it slow is because Tai Chi doing it slow is probably the only way you can train that connectedness in your body by combining all the techniques that we learned relaxation leading with the dan tian and later on how to use your breath to relax and connect your body too and your mind and the aspects of learning how to connect your whole body and mind as an integrated machine integrated unit in order to function totally and holistically another technique is when it comes in you sink your chest so you press here like I'm pretty solid here because you're pushing down to my head you expand my chest and then you go so now there's another not going mechanism that that blends so there's blending and it's sinking more so when you're sinking it sinks down to the bottom your chin is tucked your chest is in and then you push hard as well it's not going anywhere and you expand a bit and you go all the way full shoulders full shoulders coming so you contract easily lose balance soon because when you can try you feel like oh I can push the guy you feel like you can push me you've gotten me right don't use this don't use this just relax when you push on here I'm totally relaxed I'm just using my whole structure in my body so this is actually my body so you feel like you've got me because actually there's more there's more room just relax this whole thing suck in there so it feels like oh yeah I got you now but you feel like now it's on your back leg right now you just expand yeah okay I'm already so new right sucking in I'm already sucked in but then you need to make sure the elbow so if I go like this you can just push it up but you try to elbow me like this you do that elbow me at least I can control the elbow I don't right then if you feel yourself moving this way you can just go change it to here so you need to in this is sucking in just sucking in and then expand step here and I bump into you like that right? if I step through deeper see that? my feet haven't touched the ground yet and I've already made contact so now all the momentum through you instead of going to the ground okay I'll stand here and you try to try so you gotta step really deep so I step with this foot or this one like that so that works too but that's not the technique so I'm here you want to take my place so here's my center so my foot basically has to be here oh yeah see how deep you have to go so that's better but then don't need for you straight? it's all straight okay I'm trying to drop my height down because I feel like when I get here my shoulders here is this one technique is to use your shoulder? it should be that's for a more combative because you can use your shoulder bone for training you're just going to bump into the chest so relax your shoulder don't do this okay don't stick it out like this I'm trying to pull it back so just relax alright you're not stepping people down so when I step here so you don't want to step then go you have to pay before I land okay so before my foot even touches the ground I'm already there yeah there you go I can feel that a lot more when you step first so you want to aim for behind the edge the thing is to make a frame like this round so there's like one big one big cup one big cup is gone okay because you stick out any part of the cup then it's just going to go in it won't affect the whole thing so you make this round yeah so there's two ways you can sink down that's rising up okay so you go rising up or you can sink down so it's like you got it so now you just extend this and now you're bringing your whole body into it into a push don't push I'm going to show you the three mistakes in Tai Chi that are very common that people make so one of the main advantages of learning Tai Chi is for health for your joints for your bones for breathing for relaxation and meditation but also you learn a concept called rooting or sinking and demonstration we'll hear how much do you weigh 220 pounds okay there's muscles, there's arms holy cow, there's as big as my leg right I'm already I'm only about 150 pounds look at my skinny arms and I'm able to resist and pushing me and I'm fairly relaxed without using a lot of strength I can resist this push and how hard are you pushing there not using too much strength so the key is don't fight strength with strength don't fight force with force so in Tai Chi you will teach you how to use structure the structure of your skeletal structure of your bones, of your joints, of your alignment and also of your mind of what the intention is in order to resist force using just structure so one of the key things that you need to have structure well there's three mistakes that people make with structure in Tai Chi and very few people that actually practice Tai Chi actually know and actually experience and know how to do this so stay tuned and I'm going to show you those to you mistake number three is not being relaxed so a lot of people are confused about relaxation and about being placid there's two different things, for example if I'm being placid he pushes and that's placid right I'm sitting there placid but being relaxed in a concept called Song in Chinese it's being loose but still have structure so he's pushing he's pushing harder I'm relaxing, my hands are relaxing he's pushing harder I'm still relaxed see how relaxed my arm is I'm still able to resist him so that's the difference between being Song which means loose and placid but in English we use relaxation which is very easy to misinterpret so number one key when you practice your Tai Chi for example practice your Tai Chi your hands are always relaxed there's only a tense state and a relaxed state now when we go to the gym most people practice being tense use your muscles tense up to get more power which is okay, it works but if you practice being tense all the time practice being tense then if you're fighting against someone bigger than you you're at a disadvantage because his force will be stronger than your force so rather than use force I use Song I use relaxation so when you practice your Tai Chi make sure that your hands are not open like this because that's too much tension because your hands are not closed like this because that's too much tension your hands should always be in the middle when it's relaxed, it's completely relaxed imagine holding an egg in your hand when you're open just open them slightly just stretch them out a little bit when they're relaxed, relaxed when they're open, just open a little you always want to feel an energy ball the arms of your hands so it's very subtle for example, when I do this I'm combining two things first of all, my hands are lifting up at the same time my hands are going from relaxed to slightly open and then back to relaxed slightly open it's a very minor detail but what that does is it teaches you even though you're using tension see my hands are slightly open so I never go from I never go up to 100% I go up to maybe 60 to 70% tension never go above that because once you go above that then you start to use force stay below let's say 60% tension then you're not using force you're using relaxation and the key to Tai Chi is to train yourself so that you can still use relaxation at 60%, 50%, 40%, 30% eventually there's no tension at all to be able to resist someone with force so that's what takes the training that's what takes the many many hours repetition and training doing the push hands that we just showed you in the demonstration doing that for a lot then you can learn how to use relaxation mistake number two in Tai Chi is to not use your Dan Tian or not use your core center of gravity to direct the movements there's a powerful movement called bowed hands so I'm using my core to direct my body so say I'm using just one hand see how my core is moving in a circle to direct my arm so the core or the Dan Tian leads the arms that's what I say in Chinese the body leads the hand so that's number two mistake here's how it looks like when you make the mistake see the difference my hand is leading my core so there's very little power or connection when I'm moving my hand I'm just moving my hand I'm not even leading it with the core now do as you're doing correctly so how you can practice is actually put your finger or put your hand and fingers touch your belly button and then feel it move before your hand moves so now you get the difference and the difference you can tell let's see I'm just using my hand just my hand pain wise how much is that one to ten about four now I'm using my hip I mean using my Dan Tian how much pain more pain is there it brings it up to about seven seven right and I didn't use more power I just used my waist and if I use more I can get it up to ten so that's the key of generating power is to use your Dan Tian so let me show you a demonstration in the 24 move Tai Chi form of how to use the Dan Tian to guide your hands so let me show you the wrong way of doing this okay I'm trying very hard to doing the wrong way because I practice so much the proper way but what I'm doing is I'm leading with my hands and then I move my body so a very basic fundamental in early Tai Chi if you're a beginner is to learn how to move your hips now when you get advanced Tai Chi you actually do the opposite you learn to move your hands before your hips it's contradictory isn't it but I'll show you how to do that in the next lesson or the later lesson and it goes with the concept that Bruce Lee taught which is to move your hands before your feet just like in fencing before your feet the reason is because when somebody attacks you I don't have time to move my hip first and do a big Tai Chi move if somebody attacks me I have to move my hand first so what's the difference before you learn Tai Chi they move their hands first but there's no power and then they'll practice Tai Chi and then they'll learn how to use the hips to get power at the beginning they use their hands first but now it comes with power how does that happen so let me show you again I don't have time to move my hips and do a big Tai Chi move like in a lot of demonstrations I only have time to just move my hand up mistake number one that you can make in Tai Chi is to not sink your tailbone which means not to open your back I'm going to show Will for example because I'm wearing a jacket you can't see so you see if you take your shirt and tighten it up your spine has a curve here so most people have that curve naturally but in Tai Chi you actually don't want that curve in Tai Chi you want to get rid of that curve so you want to sink down the tailbone so you can feel that this is flatter and ideally it's actually a C it's a cup so what you need to do is sink your tailbone down even more suck in your gut and then stretch this out like this so what you can feel is lower back just straightening up but still not enough you want it to stick out push out over here push push push push that's better so now you can feel that it's more like a C where I stand about before see how see how it's like an S so you don't want that and you can see a lot of people doing Tai Chi with a back like this it's actually very bad for your back and also it makes you disconnected your upper body with your lower body the key to having a strong core and Dan Tian is to connect your upper body with your lower body and this is the main mistake that people make by having the S curve of the spine and what it does is disconnect your body so for example I'm going to do an S curve on purpose my spine is like my belly sticking out I'm trying to see I'll automatically go back there's no resistance but now I stick my back out I drop my hip and make this into a C and now he pushes on it what happened it's different it's more rooted see what happens when you curve your back is now that energy transfer goes straight through your spine and then into your hips into the knees and into the ground when you break that connection by curving your spine now all the energy just goes in your spine it doesn't go to your legs so that's why he pushes that energy goes to the spine and then I go so that's the number one mistake that you can make in Tai Chi so when you practice your Tai Chi make sure that you always check put my hand back behind my back I see it's straight it's a C so even when you do your moves think about that think that spine is going to be straight one exercise you can do is to do very slow squats against the wall I want to first put my back against the wall and then see if there's any space behind my back see if I slip my hand behind my back if there's a space that I can slip my hand behind then there's too much space so I need to get rid of that space I want all my spine to be touching the wall once I get that then I can go up and down just go half way and go back up sliding my spine up and down the wall now after I do that and I'm good at it then I can go all the way down all the way down keeping my spine straight and touching the wall all the way and go as slow like this so that's going to be very hard on your lower back but it strengthens your lower back on your leg so that's one key in Tai Chi of creating connectedness so stay tuned I'm going to show you the bonus mistake that people make so the bonus mistake that you can make in Tai Chi is doing it too fast I know everybody says this you want to do Tai Chi slow but many people don't understand why you do Tai Chi so slow well today we talked about three mistakes number one, relaxation to lead your hands number three, having a proper spine alignment what do all those things mean all those things mean connectedness of your whole body integration of your whole body if your hand moves your whole body moves if your feet move everything's connected and the reason we do Tai Chi so slow is that we're training that connectedness and it's impossible to train it fast, that's why we do it slow if we can do it fast and still get connectedness then everybody would do Tai Chi fast but the reason we do it slow is because Tai Chi doing it slow is probably the only way you can train that connectedness in your body by combining all the techniques that we learned relaxation, leading with the Dan Tian and later on how to use your breath to relax and connect your body too and your mind so there's many aspects of learning how to connect your whole body and mind as an integrated machine, integrated unit in order to function totally and holistically okay, so when it comes in you sink your chest so you press here like I'm pretty solid here because you're pushing down to my back like I expand my chest and then you go for the lead not to come but there's actually an expanding chest so now there's another not going mechanism that blends right, so there's blending and it's sinking more so when you're sinking it sinks down to the back the chin is tucked chest is in and then you push hard as well it's not going anywhere you expand a bit pull the shoulders like this so you contract yeah easily lose balance so hard because when you can try you feel like oh I can push the guy right you feel like you can push me you feel like you got me right don't use this just relax like when you push on here I'm totally relaxed I'm just using my whole structure okay so this is actually touching my body so you feel like you got me there's actually more there's more room just relax this whole thing suck in there so it feels like oh yeah I got you now but you feel like now it's on your back leg right now you just expand yeah okay alright so new okay right sucking in so I'm ready I'm already sucked in but then you need to make sure the elbow cut the elbow so if I go like this you can just push it up okay but you try to elbow me like this elbow me at least I can control the elbow okay right then if you feel yourself moving this way you can just change it to here yeah so you need to in cut the elbow this is sucking in just sucking in and then expand step here and I bump into you like that right? yeah if I step through deeper yeah okay my feet haven't touched the ground yet and I've already made contact so now all the momentum instead of going to the ground okay I'll stand here and try to bump into that so you gotta step really deep so I step with this foot or this one like that so that works too but that's not the technique so I'm here you want to take my place here's my center so my foot basically has to be here oh yeah let's see how deep you have to go but then don't need for be straight boom it's all straight one straight stick I'm trying to drop my height down I feel like that when I get here my shoulders here yeah don't use your shoulder one technique is to use your shoulder that's for a more combata because you can use your shoulder bone if you're training you can bump into your chest like that so relax your shoulder don't do this yeah like that don't stick it out like this I'm trying to pull it back so just relax I'm David Wong and in this video I'm going to show you the three mistakes in Tai Chi that are very common that people make so one of the main advantages of learning Tai Chi is for health for your joints for breathing for relaxation and meditation but also you learn a concept called rooting or sinking so as you can see in the demonstration we'll hear how much do you weigh 220 pounds look at his muscles look at his arms, holy cow he's as big as my leg I'm only about 150 pounds look at my skinny arms and I'm able to resist and pushing me without using a lot of strength I can resist this push and how hard were you pushing there he's putting all the strength in there and I'm just standing there not using too much strength so the key is don't fight strength don't fight force with force so in Tai Chi you'll teach you how to use structure the structure of your skeletal structure of your bones, of your joints of your alignment and also of your mind of what the intention is using force using just structure so one of the key things that you need to have structure well there's three mistakes that people make that destroy structure in Tai Chi and very few people that actually practice Tai Chi actually know and actually experience and know how to do this so stay tuned and I'm going to show you those to you mistake number three is not being relaxed so a lot of people are confused about relaxation there's two different things for example if I'm being placid he pushes and that's placid there's nothing there nothing, it's placid but being relaxed in a concept called Song in Chinese it's being loose but relaxed but still have structure so he's pushing harder, harder, harder my hands relax when he's pushing harder, I'm still relaxed you see how it relaxes my arm I'm still able to resist so that's the difference between being Song which means loose and placid but in English we use the word relaxation which is very easy to misinterpret so number one key when you practice your Tai Chi for example your hands are always relaxed there's only a tense state and a relaxed state now when we go to the gym, most people practice being tense use your muscles, tense up to get more power which is okay, it works but if you practice being tense all the time practice being tense then if you're fighting against someone bigger than you you're at a disadvantage force will be stronger than your force so rather than use force I use Song I use relaxation so when you practice your Tai Chi make sure that your hands are not open like this because that's too much tension because your hands are not closed like this because that's too much tension your hands should always be in the middle when it's relaxed, it's completely relaxed imagine holding an egg in your hand when you're open, just open them slightly just stretch them out a little bit when they're relaxed, relaxed when they're open, just open a little you always want to feel the energy ball in the palms of your hands so it's very subtle for example, when I do this I'm combining two things first of all, my hands are lifting up at the same time my hands are going from relaxed to slightly open and then back to relaxed slightly open but what that does is it teaches you even though you're using tension see my hands are slightly open that I'm still in a relaxed state so I never go from I never go up to 100% I go up to maybe 60 to 70% tension never go above that because once you go above that, then you start to use force you stay below, let's say, 60% tension then you're not using force, you're using relaxation in Tai Chi, it's to train yourself so that you can still use relaxation at 60%, 50%, 40%, 30% eventually using no tension at all to be able to resist someone with force so that's what takes the training that's what takes the many many hours of repetition and training doing the push hands that we just showed you in the demonstration doing that for a lot, then you can learn how to use relaxation mistake number two in Tai Chi is to not use your dan tian or not use your core the center of gravity to direct the movements so there's a very simple movement called bowed hands so I'm using my core to direct my body because I'm using just one hand see how my core is moving in a circle to direct my arm so the core or the dan tian leads the arms sun dai sao in chinese the body leads the hand so that's number two mistake here's how it looks like when you make the mistake see the difference my hand is leading my core so there's very little power or connection when I'm moving my hand I'm just moving my hand, I'm not even leading it with the core so how you can practice is actually put your finger or put your hand your fingers touch your belly button and then feel it move before your hand moves so now you get the difference and the difference you can tell, let's see I'm just using my hand like this just my hand, pain wise how much is that? 1 to 10 about a 4 now I'm using my hit I mean using my dan tian how much pain is there? about a 7 and I didn't use more power I just used my waist and if I use more I can get it up to 10 so that's the key of generating power is to use your dan tian so let me show you a demonstration in the 24 move tai chi form how to use the dan tian to guide your hands so let me show you the wrong way of doing this I'm trying very hard to do it the wrong way because I practice so much the proper way but what I'm doing is I'm leading with my hands and then I move my body so a very basic fundamental in early tai chi if you're a beginner is to learn how to move your hips now when you get advanced tai chi you actually do the opposite you learn to move your hands before your hips it's contradictory isn't it but I'll show you how to do that in the next lesson or in a later lesson and it goes with the concept that Bruce Lee taught which is to move your hands before your feet just like in fencing you want to move your hands before your feet the reason is because when somebody attacks you I don't have time to move my hip first and do a big tai chi move right if somebody attacks me I have to move my hand first so what's the difference see before you learn tai chi and once you learn tai chi they move their hands first but there's no power and then they'll learn how to use the hips to get power but they practice enough tai chi and now they'll go back to the beginning they use their hands first but now it comes with power how does that happen let me show you again I don't have time to move my hips and do a big tai chi move like in a lot of demonstrations I only have time to just move my hand up but there's power there how does that happen I just move my hand I move my hand and then my body go do it again I move my hand and then my body I didn't move my hip first just me moving my hips first too slow right I have to go one, two you already hit me but now I want to do it so that I move my hand first so how does that work maybe in a later lesson I can show you how to do that mistake number one that you can make in tai chi is to not sink your tailbone which means not to open your back now I'm going to show will for example because I'm wearing a jacket you can't see so you see if you take your shirt and tighten it up your spine has a curve here so most people have that curve naturally but in tai chi you actually don't want that curve in tai chi you want to get rid of that curve so you want to sink down the tailbone so that you can feel that this is flatter and ideally it's actually a C it's a couple so what you need to do is sink your tailbone down even more suck in your gut and then stretch this out like this so now I can feel it's lower back straightening up but still not enough you want it to stick out push out over here push push push that's better so now you can feel that it's more like a C where I started about before see how it's like an S so you don't want that people doing tai chi with a back like this is actually very bad for your back and also it makes you disconnected it disconnects your upper body with your lower body the key to having a strong core and dan tian is to connect your upper body with your lower body and this is the main mistake that people make by having the S curve of the spine and what it does is disconnects your body so for example I'm going to do an S curve on purpose my spine is like my belly sticking out and he pushes on my hind see I'll automatically go back there's no resistance but now I stick my back out I drop my hip and make this into a C and then now he pushes on it what happened is the difference yeah it's more rooted see what happens when you curve your back is now that energy transfer goes straight through your spine and then into your hips and into the legs into the knees into the ground when you break that connection by curving your spine now all the energy just goes in your spine doesn't go to your legs so that's why he pushes that energy goes into the spine and then I go so that's the number one mistake that you can make in tai chi so when you practice your tai chi make sure that you always check put my hand back behind my back and see if it's straight if it's a C so even when you do your moves think about that think that the spine is going to be straight one exercise you can do is to do very slow squats against the wall I want to first put my back against the wall and then see if there's any space behind my back I'm going to slip my hand behind my back if there's a space that I can slip my hand behind then there's too much space so I need to get rid of that space I want all my spine to be touching the wall once I get that then I can go up and down just go halfway and go back up sliding my spine up and down the wall now after I do that and I'm good at it then I can go all the way down keeping my spine straight and touching the wall all the way and do it slow like this so that's going to be very hard on your lower back but it strengthens your lower back it strengthens your leg so that's one key in Tai Chi of creating connectedness so stay tuned I'm going to show you the bonus mistake that people make so the bonus mistake that you can make in Tai Chi is doing it too fast I know everybody says this you want to do Tai Chi slow why you do Tai Chi so slow well today we talked about three mistakes number one relaxation number two using your dan tian to lead your hands and number three having a proper spine alignment what do all those things mean all those things mean connectedness of your whole body integration of your whole body if your hand moves your whole body moves if your feet move your whole body moves everything's connected the reason we do Tai Chi so slow is that we're training that connectedness and it's impossible to train it doing it fast that's why we do it slow if we can do it fast and still get connectedness then everybody would do Tai Chi fast but the reason we do it slow is because Tai Chi doing it slow is probably the only way you can train that connectedness in your body by combining all the techniques that we learned relaxation training with the dan tian and later on how to use your breath to relax and connect your body to and your mind so there's many aspects of learning how to connect your whole body and mind as an integrated machine integrated unit in order to function totally and holistically so when it comes in you sink your chest so you press here like I'm pretty solid here you're pushing down to my back and then you go so there's actually your chest and expanded chest so now there's another mechanism that that blends so there's blending so when you're sinking it sinks down to the bottom so your chin is tucked chest is in and then you push hard as well it's not going anywhere it's going to expand a bit so you contract easily when we balance so when you can try you feel like oh I can push the guy you feel like you can push me you think you got me don't use that then don't use this just relax when you push in here I'm totally relaxed I'm just using my whole structure so this is actually touching my body so you feel like you got me there's actually more there's more room just relax this whole thing suck in everything so it feels like oh yeah I got you now but you feel like now it's on your back leg just expand yeah okay I'm already so new put that into your sucking I'm already sucked in I'm already expanding but then you need to make sure the elbow so if I go like this you can just push it up but you try to elbow me like this you do that elbow me and we think I control the elbow I don't right then if you feel yourself moving this way you're going to change it to here yeah so you need to in, cut the elbow regular push in is this sucking in just sucking in and then expand step here and I bump into you like that right if I step too deeper see that my feet haven't touched the ground yet and they've already made contact so now all the momentum is going through you instead of going to the ground okay I'll stand here and you try to try you gotta step really deep so I step with this foot or this one like that so that works too but that's not the technique so step deeper you want to take my place here's my center so my foot basically has to be here oh yeah yeah see how deep you have to go but then don't knee forward be straight boom, it's almost straight one straight step I'm trying to drop my height down because I feel like when I get here my shoulders here don't use your shoulders the technique is to use your shoulder that's where I come back because you can use your shoulder bone but for training you're just going to bump into the chest so relax your shoulder don't do this yeah but don't stick it out like this I'm trying to pull it back so just relax you're not stepping people down so I feel that when I step here so so you you don't want to step then go you have to go you have to pay before I land so before my foot even touches the ground I'm already there yeah or the same time yeah I feel that a lot more but you step first so you want to aim before behind again the other thing is to make a frame make this round sink your chest so this is like one big one big cup one big cup is gone because you stick out any part of the cup then it's just going to go in it won't affect the whole thing so you make this round so there's two ways you can sink down or you can rise up so you can go rising up rising up or you can sink down so it's like going downwards you got it you got your pushes same idea right so now you just extend this so now you're bringing your whole body into it I'm going to show you the three mistakes that are very common that people make so one of the main advantages of learning Tai Chi is for health, for your joints for your bones, for breathing for relaxation and meditation but also you learn a concept called rooting or sinking so as you can see in the demonstration we'll hear how much do you weigh 220 pounds look at his muscles his arms, holy cow he's as big as my leg 150 pounds look at my skinny arms and I'm able to resist and pushing me and I'm fairly relaxed without using a lot of strength I can resist this push and how hard are you pushing there and I'm just standing there not using too much strength so the key is don't fight strength don't fight force with force so in Tai Chi you'll teach you how to use structure of your skeletal structure of your bones, of your joints, of your alignment and also of your mind of what the intention is in order to resist force using just structure so one of the key things that you need to have structure well there's three mistakes that people make that destroy structure in Tai Chi and very few people that actually practice Tai Chi actually know and actually experience and know how to do this so stay tuned and I'm going to show you those to you is not being relaxed so a lot of people are confused about relaxation and about being placid there's two different things for example if I'm being placid, he pushes and that's placid right there's nothing there I think it's placid but be relaxed in a concept called shong in Chinese it's being loose but relaxed but still have structure so he's pushing he's pushing harder I'm relaxed see, my hands relaxed but he's pushing harder I'm still relaxed see how relaxed my arm is I'm still able to resist him so that's the difference between being shong which means loose and placid but in English we use the word relaxation which is very easy to misinterpret so number one key practice your tai chi practice your tai chi your hands are always relaxed there's only a tense state and a relaxed state now when we go to the gym most people practice being tense use your muscles tense up to get more power which is okay, it works but if you practice being tense all the time practice being tense like this then if you're fighting against someone bigger than you you're at a disadvantage because his force will be stronger than your force so rather than use force I use shong I use relaxation so when you practice your tai chi make sure that your hands are not open like this because that's too much tension because your hands are not closed like this because that's too much tension your hands should always be in the middle imagine holding an egg in your hand when you're open just open them slightly just stretch them out a little bit when you're relaxed when you're open, just open a little you always want to feel the energy ball in the palms of your hands so it's very subtle for example, when I do this I'm combining two things first of all, my hands are lifting up at the same time to relax to slightly open and then back to relaxed slightly open it's a very minor detail but what that does is it teaches you even though you're using tension see my hands are slightly open that I'm still in a relaxed state so I never go from I never go up to 100% I go up to maybe 60 to 70% tension never go above that but you stay below let's say 60% tension then you're not using force, you're using relaxation and the key to Tai Chi is to train yourself so that you can still use relaxation at 60% 50% 40% 30% eventually using no tension at all to be able to resist someone with force so that's what takes the training that's what takes the many many hours repetition and training which hands that we just showed you in the demonstration doing that for a lot that you can learn how to use relaxation mistake number two in Tai Chi is to not use your Dan Tian or not use your core center of gravity to direct the movements, okay? so there's a very simple movement called followed hands so I'm using my core to direct my body so I'm using just one hand see how my core is moving in a circle to direct my arm so the core or the Dan Tian leads the arms that's what I say in Chinese the body leads the hand so that's number two the stick here's how it looks like when you make the stick see the difference my hand is leading my core so there's very little power or connection when I'm moving my hand I'm just moving my hand I'm not even leading it with the core now do as you're doing correctly so how you can practice is actually put your finger or put your hand and your fingers touch your belly button and then feel it move before your hand moves so now you get the difference and the difference you can tell let's see I'm just using my hand like this just my hand pain-wise how much is that? one to ten about four okay now I'm using my hip I mean using my Dan Tian how much pain more pain is there? about seven and I didn't use more power I just used my waist and if I use more I can get it up to ten so that's the key of generating power is to use your Dan Tian so let me show you a demonstration in the 24 move Tai Chi form how to use the Dan Tian to guide your hands so let me show you the wrong way of doing this okay I'm trying very hard to do it the wrong way because I practice so much the proper way but what I'm doing is I'm leading with my hands and then I move my body so a very basic fundamental in early Tai Chi if you're a beginner is to learn how to move your hips now when you get advanced Tai Chi you actually do the opposite you learn to move your hands before your hips it's a big victory isn't it but I'll show you how to do that in the next lesson or in a later lesson and it goes with the concept that Bruce Lee taught which is to move your hands before your feet just like in fencing you want to move your hands before your feet the reason is because when somebody attacks you I don't have time to move my hips first and do a big Tai Chi move if somebody attacks me first so what's the difference see before you learn Tai Chi and once you learn Tai Chi they move their hands first but there's no power and then they practice Tai Chi and then they'll learn how to use the hips to get power but they practice enough Tai Chi and now they'll get back to the beginning they use their hands first but now it comes with power how does that happen okay so let me show you again let's see if it's attacking right I don't have time to move my hips and do a big Tai Chi move like in demonstrations right I only have time to just move my hand up but there's power there how does that happen I just move my hand I'm not moving my hand and then my body go again I move my hand and then my body I didn't move my hips first here's me moving my hips first too slow right I have to go one two you already hit me but now I want to do it so that I move my hand first okay so how does that work maybe in a later lesson I can show you how to do that mistake number one that you can make in Tai Chi is to not sink your tailbone which means not to open your back now I'm going to show Will for example because I'm wearing a jacket you can't see so you see if you take your shirt and tighten it up your spine has a curve here right so most people have that curve naturally but in Tai Chi you actually don't want that curve in Tai Chi you want to get rid of that curve so you want to sink down the tailbone so that you can feel that this is flatter and ideally it's actually a C it's a couple so what you need to do is sink your tailbone down even more suck in your gut and then stretch this out like this so now I can feel it's lower back it's straightening up but still not enough you want it to stick out push out over here push push push that's better so now you can feel more like a C where I stand about before see how it's like an S so you don't want that and you can see a lot of people doing Tai Chi with a back like this it's actually very bad for your back and also it makes you disconnected it disconnects your upper body with your lower body the key to having a strong core and Dan Qian is to connect your upper body with your lower body and this is the main mistake that people make by having the S curve off the spine and what it does is disconnect your body so for example I'm going to do an S curve on purpose my spine is like my belly sticking out I'm trying to and he pushes on my hand see I'll automatically go back there's no resistance but now I stick my back out I drop my hip I make this into a C and he pushes on it what happens you're more rooted it's rooted see what happens when you curve your back is now that energy transfer goes straight through your spine and then into your hips and into the legs, into the knees and into the ground when you break that connection by curving your spine now all the energy just goes in your spine doesn't go to your legs that energy goes to the spine and then I go so that's the number one mistake that you can make in Tai Chi so when you practice your Tai Chi make sure that you always check put my hand back behind my back it's straight you don't want to be like this so even when you do your moves think about that think that the spine is going to be straight one exercise you can do is to do very slow squats against the wall I want to first put my back against the wall and then see if there's any space behind my back see if I slip my hand behind my back if there's a space that I can slip my hand behind then there's too much space so I need to get rid of that space I want all my spine to be touching the wall once I get that then I can go up and down just go halfway and go back up sliding my spine up and down now after I do that and I'm good at it then I can go all the way down all the way down keeping my spine straight and touching the wall all the way going slow like this so that's going to be very hard on your lower back but it strengthens your lower back it strengthens your leg so that's one key in Tai Chi of creating connectedness so stay tuned I'm going to show you the bonus mistake that people make so the bonus mistake that you can make in Tai Chi is doing it too fast I know everybody says this you want to do Tai Chi slow but many people don't understand why you do Tai Chi so slow today we talked about three mistakes 1. relaxation 2. using your dan tian to lead your hands 3. having a proper spine alignment what do all those things mean all those things mean connectedness of your whole body 4. integration of your whole body if your hand moves the whole body moves if your feet move everything's connected and the reason we do Tai Chi so slow is that we're training that connectedness and it's impossible to train it doing it fast that's why we do it slow if we can do it fast and still get connectedness then everybody would do Tai Chi fast but the reason we do it slow is because Tai Chi doing it slow is probably the only way you can train that connectedness in your body by combining all the techniques that we learned relaxation, leading with the dan tian and later on how to use your breath to relax and connect your body too and your mind so there's many aspects of learning how to connect your whole body and mind as an integrated machine, integrated unit in order to function totally and holistically when it comes in you sink your chest so you press here like I'm pretty solid here because you're pushing down to my back but there's actually so now there's another not going mechanism that blends so there's blending so when you're sinking it sinks down to the bottom your chin is tucked your chest is in the hardest part it's not going anywhere you can expand a bit and you know your balance both shoulders both shoulders so you can try yeah easy when you're bouncing cause when you can try you feel like you can push the guy you feel like you can push me you think you got me okay don't use this just relax when you push in here I'm just using my whole structure in my body so this is actually touching my body so you feel like you got me cause actually there's more there's more room just relax this whole thing suck in there so it feels like oh yeah I got you now but you feel like now it's on your back leg right now you just expand yeah okay I'm so new so Glenn put that into here I'm already sucked in I'm already expanding ideally I want to make sure it's elbow but then you need to make sure the elbow so if I go like this you can just push it up there you guys now elbow me at least I can control the elbow I don't right then if you feel yourself moving this way you're right there you can just change it to here so you need to in this is sucking in just sucking in and then expand when you're pushing in you just pull forward step here and I bump into you like that right step through deeper my feet haven't touched the ground yet and I already made contact so now all the momentum is going through you instead of going to the ground okay I'll stand here and you just try so you gotta step really deep so I step with this foot or this one like that so that works too but that's not the technique so I'm here you want to take my place so here's my center so my foot basically has to be here oh yeah yeah see how deep you have to go but then don't need for you straight it's almost straight I'm trying to drop my height down because I feel like that when I get here my shoulders here one technique is to use the shoulder that would be that's for a more combata because you can use the shoulder bone if you're training you're just going to bump into the chest so so relax the shoulder don't do this yeah but don't stick it out like this I'm trying to pull it back so just relax come I'm David Wong and in this video I'm going to show you the three mistakes that are very common that people make so one of the main advantages of learning Tai Chi is for health, for your joints for your bones, for breathing for relaxation and meditation but also you learn a concept called rooting or sinking so as you can see in the demonstration we'll hear how much do you weigh 220 pounds look at his muscles his arms, holy cow he's as big as my leg 150 pounds look at my skinny arms and I'm able to resist and pushing me and I'm fairly relaxed without using a lot of strength I can resist this push and how hard were you pushing there 100% he's putting all the strength in there and I'm just standing there not using too much strength so the key is don't fight strength don't fight force with force with the structure of your skeletal structure of your bones, of your joints of your alignment and also of your mind of what the intention is in order to resist force using just structure so one of the key things that you need to have structure well there's three mistakes that people make that destroy structure in Tai Chi and very few people that actually practice Tai Chi actually know and actually experience and know how to do this so stay tuned and I'm going to show you those to you and number three is not being relaxed so a lot of people are confused about relaxation and about being placid there's two different things for example if I'm being placid he pushes and that's placid there's nothing there nothing, it's a placid but being relaxed in a concept called Song in Chinese it's being loose I still have structure he's pushing harder I'm relaxed he's pushing harder I'm still relaxed see how relaxed my arm is I'm still able to resist them so that's the difference between being Song which means loose and placid but in English we use the word relaxation which is very easy to misinterpret so number one key when you practice your Tai Chi for example, practice your Tai Chi your hands are always relaxed there's only a tense state and a relaxed state now when we go to the gym, most people practice being tense use your muscles, tense up to get more power which is okay, it works but if you practice being tense all the time practice being tense like this then if you're fighting against someone bigger than you you're at a disadvantage because his force will be stronger than your force so rather than use force I use Song I use relaxation so when you practice your Tai Chi make sure that your hands are not open like this because that's too much tension because your hands are not closed like this because that's too much tension your hands should always be in the middle when you're relaxed, imagine holding an egg in your hand when you're open, just open them slightly just stretch them out a little bit when you're relaxed, relaxed when you're open, just open a little you always want to feel the energy ball in the palms of your hands so it's very subtle for example, when I do this I'm combining two things first of all, my hands are lifting up at the same time so I'm going from relaxed to slightly open and then back to relaxed slightly open it's a very minor detail, but what that does is it teaches you even though you're using tension see my hands are slightly open that I'm still in a relaxed state so I never go from I never go up to 100% I go up to maybe 60 to 70% tension never go above that when you start to use force you stay below, let's say, 60% tension then you're not using force you're using relaxation and the key to Tai Chi is to train yourself so that you can still use relaxation at 60%, 50%, 40%, 30% eventually using no tension at all to be able to resist someone with force so that's what takes the training that's what takes the many, many hours of repetition and training doing the push hands that we just showed you in the demonstration doing that for a lot that you can learn how to use relaxation mistake number two in Tai Chi is to not use your dan tian or not use your core the center of gravity to direct the movements so there's a very simple movement called pilot hands so I'm using my core to direct my body this time I'm using just one hand see how my core is moving in a circle to direct my arm so the core or the dan tian leads the arms sun dai sao that's what I say in Chinese the body leads the hand so that's number two mistake here's how it looks like when you make the mistake see a difference my hand is leading my core so there's very little power or connection when I'm moving my hand I'm just moving my hand I'm not even leading it with the core now do it correctly so how you can practice is actually put your finger or put your hand and your fingers touch your belly button and then feel it move before your hand moves so now you get the difference and the difference you can tell let's see I'm just using my hand like this just my hand pain wise how much is that 1 to 10 about a 4 4 okay now I'm using my hip I'm using my dan tian how much pain more pain is there 7 and I didn't use more power I just used my waist and if I use more I can get it up to 10 so that's the key of generating power is to use your dan tian so let me show you a demonstration in the 24 move tai chi form how to use the dan tian guide your hands so let me show you the wrong way of doing this I'm trying very hard to do it the wrong way because I practice so much the proper way but what I'm doing is I'm leading with my hands and then I move my body so a very basic fundamental in early tai chi if you're a beginner is to learn how to move your hips now when you get advanced tai chi you actually do the opposite you learn to move your hands before your hips but I'll show you how to do that in the next lesson or in the later lesson and it goes with the concept that Bruce Lee taught which is to move your hands before your feet just like in fencing you want to move your hands before your feet the reason is because when somebody attacks you I don't have time to move my hip first and do a big tai chi move if somebody attacks me I have to move my hand first so what's the difference see before you learn tai chi and once you learn tai chi they move their hands first but there's no power and then they practice tai chi and then they'll learn how to use their hips to get power but they practice enough tai chi and now they'll get back to the beginning they use their hands first but now it comes with power how does that happen so let me show you again let's see if it's attacking I don't have time to move my hips and do a big tai chi move I only have time to just move my hand up but there's power there, how does that happen I just move my hand I'm not moving my hand and then my body go do it again I moved my hand and then my body I didn't move my hip first here's me moving my hips first too slow, I have to go one, two you don't want to hit me but now I want to do it so that I move my hand first how does that work maybe you in a later lesson I can show you how to do that mistake number one that you can make in tai chi is to not sink your tailbone which means not to open your back now I'm going to show Will for example because I'm wearing a jacket you can't see so you see if you take this shirt and tighten it up it's fine, it has a curve here so most people have that curve naturally but in tai chi you actually don't want that curve in tai chi you want to get rid of that curve so you want to sink down the tailbone so that you can feel that this is flatter and ideally it's actually a C it's a couple so what you need to do is sink your tailbone down even more suck in your gut and then stretch this out like this so now I can feel it's lower back, it's straightening up but still not enough you want it to stick out push out over here, push push push that's better so now you can feel that it's like a C where I started about before see how it's like an S so you don't want that and you can see a lot of people doing tai chi with a back like this it's actually very bad for your back and also it makes you disconnected it disconnects your upper body with your lower body the key to having a strong core and dan qian is to connect your upper body with your lower body and this is the main mistake that people make by having the S curve off the spine and what it does is it disconnects your body so for example I'm going to do an S curve on purpose my spine is like my belly sticking out I'm trying to and he pushes on my hand see I'll automatically go back, there's no resistance but now I stick my back out I drop my hip I make this into a C and he pushes on it what happened? you're more rooted it's rooted what happens when you curve your back is now that energy transfer goes straight through your spine and then into your hips and into the legs, into the knees and into the ground when you break that connection by curving your spine now all the energy just goes in your spine doesn't go to your legs that energy goes to the spine and then I go so that's the number one mistake that you can make in Tai Chi so when you practice your Tai Chi make sure that you always check put my hand back behind my back if it's straight, you do the C you don't want to be like this so even when you do your moves think about that the spine is going to be straight one exercise you can do is to do very slow squats against the wall I want to first put my back against the wall and see if there's any space behind my back see if I slip my hand behind my back if there's a space that I can slip my hand behind then there's too much space so I need to get rid of that space I want all my spine to be touching the wall once I get that, then I can go up and down just go halfway and go back up sliding my spine up and down now after I do that and I'm good at it then I can go all the way down all the way down keeping my spine straight and touching the wall all the way and do it slow like this so that's going to be very hard on your lower back but it strengthens your lower back it strengthens your leg so that's one key in Tai Chi of creating connectedness so stay tuned, I'm going to show you the bonus mistake that people make the bonus mistake that you can make in Tai Chi is doing it too fast I know everybody says this you want to do Tai Chi slow but many people don't understand why you do Tai Chi so slow today we talked about three mistakes number one, relaxation number two, using your dan tian to lead your hands and number three, having a proper spine alignment what do all those things mean all those things mean connectedness of your whole body the integration of your whole body if your hand moves your whole body moves if your feet move, your whole body moves everything's connected and the reason we do Tai Chi so slow is that we're training that connectedness and it's impossible to train it doing it fast that's why we do it slow if we can do it fast and still get connectedness then everybody would do Tai Chi fast but the reason we do it slow is because Tai Chi doing it slow is probably the only way you can train that connectedness in your body by combining all the techniques that we learned relaxation, leading with the dan tian and later on, how to use your breath to relax and connect your body too, and your mind so there's many aspects of learning how to connect your whole body and mind as an integrated machine, integrated unit in order to function totally and holistically when you come in, you sink your chest so you press here like I'm pretty solid here because you're pushing down to my neck to expand my chest and then you go there's actually an expanded chest so now there's another not going mechanism that blends so there's blending it's sinking more so when you're sinking it sinks down to the rock so the chin is tucked chest is in and then you push hard as well it's not going anywhere expand a bit and you know your balance both shoulders both shoulders coming so you contract yeah easily moves balance to the heart because when you can try you feel like oh I can push the guy right you feel like you can push me and we jump okay don't use this just relax when you push in here I'm just using my whole structure in my body okay this is actually touching my body I'll let you in so you feel like you got me there's more alright alright relax this whole thing suck in there so it feels like oh yeah I got you now but you feel like now it's on your back leg right now you just expand yeah okay alright so new so let put that into your pushing so you're sucking in I'm already sucked in I'm already expanding but then you need to make sure you cut the elbow so if I go like this push it up when you try to elbow me you do that elbow me at least I can control the elbow right then if you feel yourself moving this way you're you're gonna change it to here alright so you need to in, cut the elbow just a second just a second and then expand then you're pushing in step here and I bump into you like that right if I step too deeper my feet haven't touched the ground yet and I've already made contact so now all the momentum is going through you instead of going to the ground okay you try that I'll stand here and you try to bump into it so you gotta step really deep on your foot or this one so like that so that works too but that's not the technique so I'm here you wanna take my place so here's my center you wanna be there so my foot basically has to be here oh yeah let's see how deep you have to go that's better but then don't knee forward boom, it's all straight I'm trying to drop my height down I feel like that when I get here my shoulder is here yeah, don't use your shoulder one technique is to use your shoulder that's for a more combata because you can use your shoulder bone what for training you're just gonna bump into your chest like that so relax your shoulder don't do this yeah, like that don't stick it out like this I'm trying to pull it back so just relax you're not stepping people down so I feel that when I step in so you don't want to step then go you have to go before I land before my foot even touches the ground I'm already there so yeah, there you go I feel that a lot more but you step first so you want to aim before and behind the guy another thing is to make a frame make this round sink your chest so this is like one big one big cup one big cup is gone because you stick out any part of the cup it's just gonna go in it won't affect the whole thing so you make this round so there's two ways you can sink down or you can rise up that's rising up so you go or you can sink down so it's like going downwards you got it same idea so now you just extend this so now you're bringing your whole body into it so don't push just like this video I'm gonna show you the three mistakes in Tai Chi that are very common that people make. One of the main advantages of learning Tai Chi is for health for your joints, for your bones for breathing, for relaxation and meditation but also you learn a concept called rooting or sinking so as you can see in the demonstration we'll hear how much do you weigh 220 pounds look at his muscles his arms, holy cow he's as big as my leg I'm only about 150 pounds look at my skinny arms and I'm able to resist and pushing me and I'm fairly relaxed without using a lot of strength I can resist this push there's a lot of strength in there and I'm just standing there not using too much strength so the key is don't fight strength with strength don't fight force with force so in Tai Chi you'll teach you how to use structure the structure of your skeletal structure of your bones, of your joints of your alignment and also of your mind of what the intention is in order to resist force using just structure there are some mistakes that people make that destroy structure in Tai Chi and very few people that actually practice Tai Chi actually know and actually experience and know how to do this so stay tuned and I'm going to show you those to you mistake number three is not being relaxed so a lot of people are confused about relaxation and about being placid there's two different things for example if I'm being placid it's nothing there I'm not being placid but being relaxed in a concept called Song or shong in Chinese it's being loose but relaxed but still have structure so you're pushing it's pushing harder, harder, harder I'm relaxed, my hands relax when he's pushing harder, harder I'm still relaxed I'm still able to resist them so that's the difference between being Song which means loose and placid but in English we use the word relaxation which is very easy to misinterpret so number one key, when you practice your Tai Chi for example, practice your Tai Chi your hands are always relaxed there's only a tense state and a relaxed state now when we go to the gym we practice being tense use your muscles tense up to get more power which is okay, it works but if you practice being tense all the time practice being tense then if you're fighting against someone bigger than you you're at a disadvantage because his force will be stronger than your force so rather than use force I use Song I use relaxation so when you practice your Tai Chi make sure that your hands are not open like this because that's too much tension because your hands are not closed like this because that's too much tension your hands should always be in the middle when it's relaxed, it's completely relaxed imagine holding an egg in your hand when you're open, just open them slightly just stretch them out a little bit when you're relaxed, relaxed when you're open, just open a little you always want to feel an energy ball in the palms of your hands so it's very subtle for example when I do this, I'm combining two things first of all, my hands are lifting up at the same time my hands are going from relaxed to slightly open and then back to relaxed slightly open it's a very minor detail but what that does is it teaches you even though you're using tension see my hands are slightly open that I'm still in a relaxed state so I never go from I never go up to 100% I go up to maybe 60 to 70% tension never go above that because once you go above that, then you start to use force if you stay below let's say 60% tension then you're not using force, you're using relaxation and the key to Tai Chi is to train yourself so that you can still use relaxation at 60%, 50%, 40%, 30% eventually using no tension at all to be able to resist someone with force so that's what takes the training that's what takes the many many hours repetition and training doing the push hands that we just showed you in the demonstration doing that for a lot then you can learn how to use relaxation mistake number two in Tai Chi is to not use your Dan Tian or not use your core center of gravity to direct the movements so there's a very simple movement called bowed hands so I'm using my core to direct my body because I'm using just one hand see how my core is moving in a circle to direct my arms so the core or the Dan Tian leads the arms that's what I say in Chinese the body leads the hand so that's number two mistake here's how it looks like when you make the mistake see the difference my hand is leading my core so there's very little power or connection when I'm moving my hand I'm just moving my hand I'm not even leading it with the core so how you can practice is actually put your finger or put your hand and your fingers touch your belly button and then feel it move before your hand moves so now you get the difference and the difference you can tell let's see I'm just using my hand just my hand pain wise how much is that one to ten about four now I'm using my hip I'm using my Dan Tian how much pain more pain is there it brings it up to about seven seven right and I didn't use more power I just used my waist and if I use more I can get it up to ten so that's the key of generating power is to use your Dan Tian so let me show you a demonstration in the 24 move Tai Chi form of how to use the Dan Tian to guide your hands so let me show you the wrong way of doing this okay I'm trying very hard to doing the wrong way because I practice so much the proper way but what I'm doing is I'm leading with my hands and then I move my body so a very basic fundamental in early Tai Chi if you're a beginner is to learn how to move your hips now when you get advanced Tai Chi you actually do the opposite you learn to move your hands before your hips it's contradictory isn't it but I'll show you how to do that in the next lesson or in a later lesson and it goes with the concept that Bruce Lee taught which is to move your hands before your feet just like in fencing you want to move your hands before your feet the reason is because when somebody attacks you I don't have time to move my hip first and do a big Tai Chi move right if somebody attacks me I have to move my hand first so what's the difference before you learn Tai Chi and once you learn Tai Chi they move their hands first but there's no power and then they practice Tai Chi and then they'll learn how to use the hips to get power but they practice enough Tai Chi and they use their hands first but now it comes with power how does that happen so let me show you again I don't have time to move my hips and do a big Tai Chi move like in a lot of demonstrations I only have time to just move my hand up but just power there how does that happen I just move my hand and then my body I move my hand and then my body then move my hip first here's me moving my hips first too slow right I have to go one, two but now I want to do it so that I move my hand first how does that work maybe in a later lesson I can show you how to do that mistake number one that you can make in Tai Chi is to not sink your tailbone which means not to open your back now I'm going to show Will I'm wearing a jacket you can't see so you see if you take your shirt and tighten it up it's fine, it has a curve here so most people have that curve naturally but in Tai Chi you actually don't want that curve in Tai Chi you want to get rid of that curve so you want to sink down the tailbone so that you can feel that this is flatter and ideally it's actually a C it's a cup so what you need to do is sink your tailbone down even more suck in your gut like this so now I can feel it's lower back straightening up but still not enough, you want it to stick out push out over here, push, push, push that's better so now you can feel that it's more like a C where I started about before see how see how it's like an S so you don't want that and you can see a lot of people doing Tai Chi with a back like this it's actually very bad for your back it makes you disconnected it disconnects your upper body with your lower body the key to having a strong core and Dan Qian is to connect your upper body with your lower body and this is the main mistake that people make by having the S curve of the spine and what it does is disconnects your body so for example I'm going to do an S curve on purpose my spine is like my belly sticking out I'm trying to and he pushes on my high see I'll automatically go back there's no resistance but now I stick my back out I drop my hip and make this into a C and now he pushes on it what happened it's different it's rooted see what happens when you curve your back is now that energy transfer goes straight and then into your hips and into the legs and knees and ground when you break that connection by curving your spine now all the energy just goes in your spine doesn't go to your legs so that's why he pushes that energy goes to the spine and then I go so that's the number one mistake that you can make in Tai Chi so when you practice your Tai Chi make sure that you always check put my hand back behind my back it's in a C you don't want to be like this so even when you do your moves think about that think that the spine is going to be straight one exercise you can do is to do very slow squats against the wall I want to first put my back against the wall and then see if there's any space behind my back see if I slip my hand behind my back if there's a space that I can slip my hand behind then there's too much space so I need to get rid of that space I want all my spine to be touching the wall once I get that then I can go up and down just go halfway and go back up sliding my spine up and down the wall now after I do that and I'm good at it then I can go all the way down all the way down keeping my spine straight and touching the wall all the way and go in slow like this so that's going to be very hard on your lower back but it strengthens your lower back it strengthens your leg so that's one key in Tai Chi of creating connectedness so stay tuned I'm going to show you the bonus mistake that people make so the bonus mistake that you can make in Tai Chi is doing it too fast I know everybody says this you want to do Tai Chi slow but many people don't understand why you do Tai Chi so slow well today we talked about three mistakes number two using your Dantian to lead your hands and number three having a proper spine alignment what do all those things mean? all those things mean connectedness of your whole body integration of your whole body if your hand moves your whole body moves if your feet move everything's connected and the reason we do Tai Chi so slow is that we're training that connectedness it's possible to train it doing it fast that's why we do it slow if we can do it fast and still get connectedness then everybody would do Tai Chi fast but the reason we do it slow is because Tai Chi doing it slow is probably the only way you can train that connectedness in your body by combining all the techniques that we learned relaxation leading with the Dantian and later on how to use your breath and your mind so there's many aspects of learning how to connect your whole body and mind as an integrated machine integrated unit in order to function totally and holistically when it comes in you sink your chest it's like a press here like I'm pretty solid here because you're pushing down to my back you expand my chest and then you go for the lead and expand your chest so now there's another not going mechanism that lends right so there's blending and it's sinking more let's try and do it see so when you're sinking it sinks down to the bottom your chest is in and then you push hard as well it's not going anywhere and you expand a bit yeah so you contract yeah easily lose balance so hard because when you can try and you feel like oh I can push the guy right you feel like you can push me you think you got me right don't use this just relax like when you push in here I'm just using my whole structure in my body so this this is actually touching my body I let you in so you feel like you got me right because actually there's more alright alright just relax this whole thing suck in there everything so it feels like oh yeah I got you now but you feel like now it's on your back leg right now you just expand okay alright so new put that into your sucking in already I'm already sucked in you're already expanding but then you need to make sure the elbow cap the elbow cap the elbow so if I go like this you can just push it up but you try to elbow me like this you do that elbow me at least I can control the elbow if I don't then if you feel yourself moving this way you're you're going to change it to here okay so you need to in cap the elbow is this sucking in just sucking in and then expand when you're freaking in just go for it step here and I bump into you like that right? yeah if I step too deeper I haven't touched the ground yet and I've already made contact so now all the momentum is going through you instead of going to the ground okay I'll stand here and you just try so you gotta step really deep so I step with this foot or this one so like that you gotta check so that works too but that's not the technique so I'm here you want to take my place so here's my center I want to be there so my foot basically has to be here alright see how deep you have to go that's better but then don't knee forward be straight boom it's all straight one straight stitch I'm trying to drop my height down cause I feel like that when I get here my shoulder's here yeah don't use your shoulder one technique is to use your shoulder that's where I more like come back up cause you can use your shoulder bone if you're training you're just going to bump with your chest like that so relax your shoulder don't do this yeah like that don't stick it out like this I'm trying to pull it back so just relax I'm David Wong and in this video I'm going to show you the three mistakes in Tai Chi that are very common that people make one of the main advantages of learning Tai Chi is for health for your joints, for your bones for breathing, for relaxation and meditation but also we learn a concept called rooting or sinking so as you can see in the demonstration Will here, how much do you weigh? 220 pounds look at his muscles, look at his arms, holy cow he's as big as my leg I'm only about 150 pounds look at my skinny arms and I'm able to resist and pushing me and I'm fairly relaxed without using a lot of strength I can resist this push and how hard were you pushing there? 200% and I'm just standing there not using too much strength so the key is don't fight strength don't fight force with force so in Tai Chi you'll teach you how to use structure the structure of your skeletal structure of your joints, of your alignment and also of your mind of what the intention is in order to resist force using just structure so one of the key things that you need to have structure well there's three mistakes that people make that destroy structure in Tai Chi and very few people that actually practice Tai Chi actually know and actually experience and know how to do this so stay tuned and I'm going to show you those to you mistake number three is not being relaxed so a lot of people are confused about relaxation and about being placid there's two different things for example if I'm being placid he pushes and that's placid there's nothing there nothing, it's placid but being relaxed in a concept called Song in Chinese it's being loose but relaxed but still have structure he's pushing harder I'm relaxed he's pushing harder I'm still relaxed I'm still able to resist okay so that's the difference between being Song which means loose and placid but in English we use the word relaxation which is very easy to misinterpret so number one key when you practice your Tai Chi your hands are always relaxed there's only a tense state and a relaxed state now when we go to the gym most people practice being tense use your muscles tense up to get more power which is okay, it works but if you practice being tense all the time practice being tense then if you're fighting against someone bigger than you you're at a disadvantage because his force will be stronger than your force so rather than use force I use Song I use relaxation so when you practice your Tai Chi make sure that your hands are not open like this because that's too much tension because your hands are not closed like this because that's too much tension your hands should always be in the middle when it's relaxed, it's completely relaxed imagine holding an egg in your hand when you're open just open them slightly just stretch them out a little bit when you're relaxed, relaxed when you're open, just open a little you always want to feel the energy ball in the palms of your hands so it's very subtle for example, when I do this I'm combining two things first of all, my hands are lifting up at the same time my hands are going from relaxed and then back to relaxed slightly open it's a very minor detail but what that does is it teaches you to even though you're using tension see my hands are slightly open that I'm still in a relaxed state so I never go from I never go up to 100% I go up to maybe 60 to 70% tension never go above that because once you go above that then you start to use force say 60% tension then you're not using force, you're using relaxation and the key to Tai Chi is to train yourself so that you can still use relaxation at 60% 50% 40% 30% eventually using no tension at all to be able to resist someone with force so that's what takes the training that's what takes the many many hours repetition and training doing the push hands that we just showed you doing that for a lot then you can learn how to use relaxation mistake number two in Tai Chi is to not use your dan tian or not use your core center of gravity to direct the movements okay so there's a very simple movement called followed hands so I'm using my core to direct my body see how my core is moving in a circle to direct my arms so the core or the dan tian leads the arms sun dai sao that's what I say in Chinese the body leads the hand so that's number two mistake here's how it looks like when you make the mistake see a difference my hand is leading my core so there's very little power or connection when I'm moving my hand I'm just moving my hand, I'm not even leading it with the core now do as you're doing correctly so how you can practice is actually put your finger or put your hand and your fingers touch your belly button and then feel it move before your hand moves so now you get the difference and the difference you can tell, let's see I'm just using my hand like this just my hand pain wise how much is that 1 to 10 4 now I'm using my hip I mean using my dan tian how much pain more pain is there it brings it up to about a 7 a 7 right and I didn't use more power I just used my waist and if I use more I can get it up to 10 so that's the key of generating power is to use your dan tian so let me show you demonstration in the 24 move tai chi form how to use the dan tian to guide your hands so let me show you the wrong way of doing this I'm trying very hard to do it the wrong way because I practice so much the proper way but what I'm doing is I'm leading with my hands and then I move my body so a very basic fundamental in early tai chi if you're a beginner is to learn how to move your hips now when you get advanced tai chi you actually do the opposite you learn to move your hands before your hips it's contradictory isn't it but I'll show you how to do that in the next lesson or in the later lesson and it goes with the concept that Bruce Lee taught which is to move your hands before your feet just like in fencing you want to move your hands before your feet the reason is because when somebody attacks you I don't have time to move my hip first and do a big tai chi move right if somebody attacks me I have to move my hand first that's the difference before you learn tai chi they move their hands first but there's no power and then they practice tai chi and then they'll learn how to use the hips to get power but they practice enough tai chi and now they'll get back to the beginning they use their hands first but now it comes with power how does that happen so let me show you again I don't have time to move my hips and do a big tai chi move like in a lot of demonstrations I don't have time to just move my hand up but just power there how does that happen right I just move my hand and then my body I move my hand and then my body I didn't move my hips first just me moving my hips first too slow I have to go one, two you already hit me but now I want to do it so that I move my hand first how does that work maybe in a later lesson I can show you how to do that mistake number one that you can make in tai chi is to not sink your tailbone which means not to open your back now I'm going to show Will for example because I'm wearing a jacket you can't see you see if you take your shirt and tighten it up it's fine it has a curve here most people have that curve naturally but in tai chi you actually don't want that curve in tai chi you want to get rid of that curve so you want to sink down the tailbone so that you can feel that this is flatter and ideally it's actually a C it's a couple so what you need to do is sink your tailbone down even more suck in your gut and then stretch this out like this so now I can feel it's lower back it's straightening up but still not enough you want it to stick out push push push push so now you can feel that it's more like a C you want to stand about before see how see how it's like an S so you don't want that and you can see a lot of people doing tai chi with a back like this it's actually very bad for your back and also it makes you disconnected it disconnects your upper body with your lower body the key to having a strong core and dan tian is to connect your upper body with your lower body and this is the main mistake that people make with this curve of the spine and what it does is it disconnects your body so for example I'm going to do an S curve on purpose my spine is like my belly is sticking out and he pushes on my hind see I'll automatically go back there's no resistance but now I stick my back out I drop my hip and make this into a C and now he pushes on it what happened it's different you're more rooted it's rooted see what happens when you curve your back is now that energy transfer goes straight through your spine and then into your hips and into the legs, into the knees, into the ground when you break that connection by curving your spine now all the energy just goes in your spine it doesn't go to your legs that energy goes to the spine and then I go so that's the number one mistake that you can make in Tai Chi so when you practice your Tai Chi make sure that you always check put my hind back behind my back if it's straight, it's a C you don't want to be like this so even when you do your moves think about that think that the spine is going to be straight one exercise you can do is to do very slow squat against the wall I want to first put my back against the wall and then see if there's any space behind my back see if I slip my hand behind my back if there's a space that I can slip my hand behind then there's too much space so I need to get rid of that space I want all my spine to be touching the wall once I get that, then I can go up and down just go half way and go back up sliding my spine up and down now after I do that and I'm good at it then I can go all the way down all the way down keeping my spine straight and touching the wall all the way going slow like this so that's going to be very hard on your lower back but it strengthens your lower back it strengthens your leg so that's one key in Tai Chi of creating connectedness so stay tuned, I'm going to show you the bonus mistake that people make so the bonus mistake that you can make in Tai Chi is doing it too fast I know everybody says this you want to do Tai Chi slow but many people don't understand why you do Tai Chi so slow well today we talked about three mistakes number one, relaxation number two, using your dan tian to lead your hands and number three, having a proper spine alignment what do all those things mean all those things mean connectedness of your whole body integration of your whole body if your hand moves the whole body moves if your feet move, your whole body moves everything's connected and the reason we do Tai Chi so slow is that we're training that connectedness and it's impossible to train it doing it fast that's why we do it slow if we can do it fast and still get connectedness then everybody would do Tai Chi fast but the reason we do it slow Tai Chi doing it slow is probably the only way you can train that connectedness in your body by combining all the techniques that we learned relaxation, leading with the dan tian and later on how to use your breath to relax and connect your body to and your mind so there's many aspects of learning how to connect your whole body and mind as an integrated machine integrated unit in order to function totally and holistically another technique is when it comes in you sink your chest so you press here like I'm pretty solid here because you're pushing down to my back expand my chest there's actually sink your chest and expand your chest so now there's another mechanism that blends so there's blending try and do it so when you're sinking it sinks down to the back so your chin is tucked chest is in and then you push hard as well it's not going anywhere you expand a bit and you know your balance you're quite so you contract yeah easily when we balance it hard because when you can try you feel like oh I can push the guy you feel like you can push me you think you got me right don't use this just relax when you push in here I'm totally relaxed I'm just using my whole structure in my body so this is actually touching my body so you feel like you got me there's actually more yeah alright just relax this whole thing suck in there so it feels like oh yeah I got you now but you feel like now it's on your back leg right now you just expand yeah okay alright so new okay so Glenn put that into your pushing already I'm already sucked in but then you need to make sure the elbow so if I go like this push it up but you try to elbow me you do that elbow me at least I can control the elbow if I don't right then if you feel yourself moving this way you're going to change it to here so you need to in is this sucking in just a second and then expand step here and I bump into you like that right? yeah if I step too deeper my feet haven't touched the ground yet and I've already made contact so now all the momentum is going through you instead of going to the ground okay I'll stand here and you just try so you gotta step really deep so I step with this foot or this one like that so that works too but that's not the technique so I'm here you want to take my place here's my center so my foot basically has to be here oh yeah see how deep you have to go but then don't need for be straight boom, it's almost straight I'm trying to drop my height down because I feel like that when I get here my shoulders here yeah don't use your shoulder is this one technique is to use your shoulder that's for a more combata because you can use your shoulder bone but for training you're just going to bump into your chest like that so relax your shoulder don't do this yeah like that don't stick it out like this I'm trying to pull it back so just relax you're not stepping deep enough so I feel that when I step here so you don't want to step then go you have to go you have to pay before I land so before my foot even touches the ground I'm already there same time so there you go you've done that a lot more than me but you stepped first so you want to aim for behind again another thing is to make a frame make this round sink your chest so this is like one big one big cup one big cup is gone because you stick out any part of the cup then it's just going to go in it won't affect the whole thing so you make this round you go so there's two ways you can sink down or you can rise up that's rising up so you go rising up or you can sink down you got it so now you just extend this so now you're bringing your whole body into it so I'm going to show you the three mistakes in Tai Chi that are very common that the advantages of learning Tai Chi is for health, for your joints for your bones, for breathing for relaxation and meditation but also you learn a concept called rooting or sinking so as you can see in the demonstration we'll hear how much do you weigh 220 pounds look at his muscles look at his arms, look at his cow he's as big as my leg I'm only about 150 pounds look at my skinny arms and I'm able to resist and pushing me and I'm fairly relaxed without using a lot of strength I can resist this push and how hard were you pushing there and I'm just standing there not using too much strength so the key is don't fight strength don't fight force with force so in Tai Chi you'll teach you how to use structure the structure of your skeletal structure the strength of your joints of your alignment and also of your mind of what the intention is in order to resist force using just structure so one of the key things that you need to have structure well there's three mistakes that people make that destroy structure in Tai Chi and very few people that actually practice Tai Chi actually know and actually experience and know how to do this so stay tuned and I'm going to show you those to you mistake number three so a lot of people are confused about relaxation and about being placid there's two different things for example if I'm being placid he pushes and that's placid there's nothing there nothing, it's placid but be relaxed in a concept called Song in Chinese it's being loose but relaxed but still have structure he's pushing harder I'm relaxing he's pushing harder I'm still relaxed I'm still able to resist still so that's the difference between being Song which means loose and placid but in English we use the word relaxation which is very easy to misinterpret so number one key when you practice your Tai Chi your hands are always relaxed there's only a tense state and a relaxed state now when we go to the gym most people practice being tense use your muscles tense up to get more power which is okay, it works but if you practice being tense all the time practice being tense like this then if you're fighting against someone bigger than you you're at a disadvantage because his force will be stronger than your force so rather than use force I use Song I use relaxation so when you practice your Tai Chi make sure that your hands are not open like this because that's too much tension because your hands are not closed like this because that's too much tension your hands should always be in the middle when it's relaxed, it's completely relaxed when you're open just open them slightly just stretch them out a little bit when you're relaxed, relaxed when you're open, just open a little you always want to feel an energy ball in the palms of your hands so it's very subtle for example, when I do this I'm combining two things first of all, my hands are lifting up at the same time my hands are going from relaxed and then back to relaxed slightly open it's a very minor detail but what that does is it teaches you even though you're using tension see my hands are slightly open that I'm still in a relaxed state so I never go from I never go up to 100% I go up to maybe 60 to 70% tension never go above that because once you go above that then you start to use force let's say 60% tension then you're not using force, you're using relaxation and the key to Tai Chi is to train yourself so that you can still use relaxation at 60%, 50%, 40%, 30% eventually using no tension at all to be able to resist someone with force so that's what takes the training that's what takes the many many hours repetition and training doing the push hands that we just showed you relaxation doing that for a lot that you can learn how to use relaxation mistake number two in Tai Chi is to not use your dan tian or not use your core center of gravity to direct the movements so there's a very simple movement called followed hands so I'm using my core to direct my body so say I'm using just one hand see how my core is moving in a circle to direct my arms so the core or the dan tian leads the arms sun dai sao that's what I say in Chinese the body leads the hand so that's number two mistake here's how it looks like when you make the mistake see the difference my hand is leading my core so there's very little power or connection when I'm moving my hand I'm just moving my hand, I'm not even leading it with the core now do as you're doing correctly so how you can practice is actually put your finger or put your hand and your fingers touch your belly button and then feel it move before your hand moves so now you get the difference and the difference you can tell, let's see I'm just using my hand like this just my hand pain wise how much is that one to ten about four four, okay now I'm using my hip, I mean using my dan tian how much pain more pain is there it brings it up to about seven seven right and I didn't use more power I just used my waist and if I use more I can get it up to ten so that's the key of generating power is to use your dan tian so let me show you demonstration in the 24 move tai chi form how to use the dan tian to guide your hand so let me show you the wrong way of doing this okay I'm trying very hard to do the wrong way because I practice so much the proper way but what I'm doing is I'm leading with my hands and then I move my body so a very basic fundamental in early tai chi if you're a beginner is to learn how to move your hips now when you get advanced tai chi you actually do the opposite you learn to move your hands before your hips it's contradictory isn't it but I'll show you how to do that in the next lesson or in a later lesson and it goes with the concept that Bruce Lee taught which is to move your hands before your feet just like in fencing you want to move your hands before your feet the reason is because when somebody attacks you I don't have time to move my hip first and do a big tai chi move right if somebody attacks me I have to move my hand first what's the difference before you learn tai chi they move their hands first but there's no power and then they practice tai chi and then they'll learn how to use the hips to get power but they practice enough tai chi and now they'll get back to the beginning they use their hands first but now it comes with power how does that happen so let me show you again, let's see if it's attacking I don't have time to move my hips and do a big tai chi move like in a lot of demonstrations I don't have time to just move my hand up but just power there how does that happen right I just move my hand and then my body I move my hand and then my body I didn't move my hip first just me moving my hips first too slow right I have to go one, two you already hit me but now I want to do it so that I hit move my hand first so how does that work maybe in a later lesson I can show you how to do that mistake number one that you can make in tai chi is to not sink your tailbone which means not to open your back now I'm going to show Will for example because I'm wearing a jacket you can't see so you see if you take your shirt and tighten it up your spine has a curve here so most people have that curve naturally but in tai chi you actually don't want that curve in tai chi you want to get rid of that curve so you want to sink down the tailbone so that you can feel that this is flatter and ideally it's actually a C it's a cup so what you need to do is sink your tailbone down even more sucking your gut and then stretch this out like this so now I can feel it's lower back it's straightening up but still not enough you want it to stick out push out here push push push so now you can feel that it's more like a C here I've started about before see how it's like an S so you don't want that and you can see a lot of people doing tai chi with a back like this it's actually very bad for your back and also it makes you disconnected it disconnects your upper body with your lower body the key to having a strong core and dan qian