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, Will here, how much do you weigh? 220 pounds. 220 pounds? Look at his muscles. Look at his arms. Holy cow. He's as big as my leg. Right? I'm already, I'm only about 150 pounds. Look at my skinny arms. And I'm really able to resist him pushing me and I'm fairly relaxed without using a lot of strength. I can resist his push. And how hard were you pushing there? About 90 to 100 percent. 90 to 100 percent. 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 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.  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 a placid. But being relaxed in a concept called shong or shong in Chinese, it's being loose but relaxed but still have structure, so he's pushing, he's pushing harder, harder, harder. I'm relaxed, see, my hands relax when he's pushing, harder, harder. I'm still relaxed, see how relaxed my arm is, and I'm still able to resist them, okay? 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 practice being tense. Use your muscles, tense up to get more power, which is okay, it works. If you practice being tense all the time, and 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. 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 to slightly open, 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. 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 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, 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. Just 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. 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 I'm just doing it correctly. 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 say I'm just using my hand like this, just my hand, pain-wise, how much is that? You got to feel it, yes. One to ten? About four. Four, okay. Now I'm using my hit, I mean using my dan tian, how much pain more pain is there? It brings it up to about a seven. A 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, right? 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 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? Okay? 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 to giant 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 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 his attacking, right? I don't have time to move my hips and do a big tai chi move like in a lot of demonstrations, right? I only have time to just move my hand up, right? But there's power there. How does that happen? Yeah. Right? I just move my hand, right? I'm not going to move my hand and then my body. Go 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 know what? Hit me. 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, okay? 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, sucking your gut and then stretch this out like this, okay? So now I can feel it's lower back, it's straightening up, okay? But it's still not enough. You want it to stick out. So push out over here. Push, push, push. That's 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 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 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 hand. Push, push, push. See? I'll automatically go back. There's no resistance. So 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? It's different. Yeah. 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. So that's why he pushes, right? 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. You did 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. So that's what the wall is 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.  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 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. 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. 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. So when it comes in, you sink your chest, so you press here, like I'm pretty solid here, right? Because you're pushing it down to my back. So I expand my chest, and then you go, and then you have to come. But there's actually an expanded chest. So now there's another, not going mechanism that blends. So there's blending, and it's sinking more. I try to do it to see. So when you're sinking, it sinks down to the bottom. So your chin is tight, your chest is in, and then you push hard as more. It's not going anywhere. It expands a bit, and you know what you want from me. So you contract? Yeah. Easily when we balance it, alright? Because when you contract, you feel like, oh, I can push the guy, right? Yeah. You feel like you can push me. You feel like you've gotten me, right? Yeah. Okay. Don't use this. Yeah. Just relax. Like when you push in here, I'm totally relaxed. I'm just using my whole structure, my body. Okay. So this is actually touching my body, that you in. Yeah. So you feel like you've gotten me, right? Yeah. Because actually there's more. There's more room. Yeah. Alright. Alright.  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. Alright. It's so new. Okay. So, Glenn, put that into your sucking. And so, you're ready? I'm already sucked in. Yeah. I'm already expanding. Okay. Ideally I want to make sure it's elbow. But then you need to make sure the elbow, copy elbow. Yeah. Copy elbow. So if I go like this, you can just push it up there. Okay. But you try to elbow me like this. You do that. You do elbow me. Okay. And you think I control the elbow. Okay. I don't. Then if you feel yourself moving this way, you're... Right there. You're going to just change it to here. Yeah. Okay. Alright. So you need to... In, cut the elbow. Is this sucking in? Is this sucking in? Just a second. And then expand. When you're freaking in, just pull forward. Step here and I bump into you like that, right? Yeah. Step through deeper. Yeah. Okay. See that? So my feet haven't touched the ground yet and they've already made contact. Okay. So now all the momentum is going through you instead of going to the ground. Okay. Okay. You try that. I'll stand here and you just try it. Bump it like that. So you got to step really deep. So I step with this foot or... No, this foot. This one. So like that. You're going to check. Yeah. So that works too. But that's not the technique. So... So I'm here. Step deeper today. You want to take my place. Here's my center. You want to be there. So my foot basically has to be here. Oh yeah. All right. Yeah. Let's see how deep you have to go. So... But then don't need for... You straight? Yeah. Boom. It's almost straight. It's like one straight stick. Okay. I'm trying to drop my height down because I feel like that. When I get here, my shoulder's here. Yeah. Don't use your shoulder. Yeah. The technique is to use your shoulder. That's where I come back up. Yeah. Because you can use your shoulder bone. Yeah. But for training, you're just going to bump with your chest. Okay. Like that. Okay. So relax your shoulder. Don't do this. Okay. Yeah. Like that. All right. But don't stick it out like this. I'm trying to pull it back. Yeah. So just relax. All right. You're not stepping deep enough. So I feel that when I step here... Okay. So you don't want to step and go. Yeah. You have to go. You have to hit before I land. Okay. So before my foot even touches the ground, I'm already there. Yeah. Or at the same time. Yeah. So... Yeah. There you go. No problem. I feel that a lot more than... Okay. But you step first, right? So you want to aim for behind the guy. Okay. Another thing is to make a frame. Yeah. Make this round. Yeah. Sink your chest. So this is like one big... One big cup. Yeah. One big cup is gone. Step. 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. Okay. So you make this round. There you go. Yeah. All right. So there's two ways you can sink down. Yeah. Or you can rise up. Or you can sink... That's rising up. Okay. Yeah. So here you go. Yeah. Rising up. Yeah. Rising up. Okay. Or you can sink down. So it's like going down. Going downwards. Yeah. All right. You got it. Yeah. Pushes. Yeah. Same idea, right? Pretending I'm not even there. All right. So now you just extend this. Yeah. And now you're bringing your whole body into it. Into the push. Yeah. So. Just like... Stop. Just keep it there. Okay. 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, you 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. 320 pounds. Look at those muscles. Look at those arms. Holy cow. They're 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 them 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? Maybe 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 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 environment, 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.  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. Okay? But being relaxed in a concept called shong, or shong in Chinese, it's being loose but relaxed but still have structure, so he's pushing, he's pushing harder, harder, harder, harder. So I'm still relaxed, see? My hands relax, but he's pushing harder, harder. I'm still relaxed. You see how I relax my arms and I'm still able to resist them. Okay? 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. It'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 all the time, if you 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. Make sure 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 I'm just doing it correctly. 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? One to ten. 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 seven. A 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, right? 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 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, right? I don't have time to move my hips and do a big tai chi move like in a lot of demonstrations, right? I only have time to just move my hand up, right? But there's power there. How does that happen? Yeah. Right? I just move my hand, right? I'm not moving my hand and then my body. Go ahead and 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. Okay? But now I want to do it so that I move my hand first. Okay? 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 this shirt and tighten it up, it's fine. It 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, okay? 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, sucking your gut, and then stretch this out like this. Okay? So now I can feel his lower back is straightening up. Okay? But still not enough. You want it to stick out. You push out over here. Push, push, push. That's better. Okay? 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. 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 off 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 hand. Push, push, push. 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? It's a difference. 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. So that's why he pushes. That energy goes to the spine and then I go. 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? It's straight. 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. So that's 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.  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 very 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 will 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, right? Because you're pushing down to expand my chest. And then you go. So now there's another mechanism that blends. So there's blending. I'll try to do it. 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. You can expand a bit and you know your balance. Just expand. Both shoulders? Yeah. So you contract? Yeah. Because when you can try, you feel like, oh, I can push the guy, right? Yeah. You feel like you can push me. Right? You think you got me, right? Yeah. Don't use this. Yeah. Just relax. Like when you push on here, I'm totally relaxed. I'm just using my whole structure in my body. Okay. So this is actually to touch my body. I let you in. Yeah. So you feel like you got me, right? Yeah. Because actually there's more. There's more room. Yeah. All right. Just relax this whole thing.  So it feels like, oh yeah, I got you now. But you feel like now it's on your back leg, right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. I'm so new. Okay. So, Glenn, put that into here. So I'm ready. I'm already sucked in. Yeah. And I'm already expanding. Okay. You'll be elbowing. But then you need to make sure the elbow, tap the elbow. Yeah. Tap the elbow. So if I go like this, you can just push it up. Okay. But you try to elbow me like this. You do that. Elbow me. Okay. At least I can control the elbow. Okay. I don't. Right? Then if you feel yourself moving this way, you're right there. You're going to change it to here. Okay. All right. So you need to get in, tap the elbow. This is sucking in. This is sucking in. Just sucking in. And then expand. When you're picking in, just pull forward. Step here. And I bump into you with that, right? Yeah. If I step too deeper, your feet haven't touched the ground yet, and they've already made contact. Okay. So now all the momentum is going through you instead of going to the ground. Okay. Okay. You try that. I'll stand here. You just try it. So you got to step really deep. So I step with this foot or this one. So like that. You're going to check. Yeah. So that works too. But that's not the technique. So. So I'm here. So I step deeper than that. 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. All right. Yeah. See how deep you have to go. But then don't need four. You straight? Yeah. Boom. It's almost straight. It's like one straight stick. Okay. I'm trying to drop my height down. Because I feel like when I get here, my shoulder's here. Yeah. Don't use your shoulder. Yeah. And there's one technique is to use your shoulder. Should be. That's for a more combata. Yeah. Because you can use your shoulder bone. Okay. But for training, you're just going to bump with your chest. So. Okay. Like that. Okay. Just use your chest. So relax your shoulder. Don't do this. Okay. Yeah. Like that. All right. But don't stick it out like this. I'm trying to pull it back. Yeah. So just relax. Okay. Welcome. 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 your bones or 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. 320 pounds. Okay. There's muscles. There's arms. Holy cow. It's as big as my leg. Right. I'm already, I'm only about 150 pounds. Look at my skinny arms. And I'm really 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 with strength. Don't fight force with force. So in Tai Chi, we'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.  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 a concept called shong or shong in Chinese. It's being loose but relaxed but still have structure. So he's pushing. He's pushing harder, harder, harder, harder. I'm relaxed, see? My hand's relaxed but he's pushing harder, harder. I'm still relaxed you see how my relax my arm is? I'm still able to resist them. Okay, 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 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 and 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. 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 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 the 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 the same 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 the stick 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 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 but now you get the difference okay and the difference you can tell let's see I'm just using my hand like this just my hand okay pain wise how much is that you got to feel it one to ten about four four okay now I'm using my hip I mean using my Dan Tian yeah how much pain more pain is there brings it up to about a seven a 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 right 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 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 okay 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 to giant 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 you won't be learning 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 go back to the beginning they use their hands first and now it comes with power how does that happen okay so let me show you again let's see his attacking right I don't have time to move my hips and do a big Tai Chi move like in a lot of demonstrations right I only have time to just move my hand up right but there's power there how that happened yeah right I just move my hand I'm not moving 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 moving my hips first too slow right I have to go one, two you already hit me okay 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 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 okay 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 okay so now I can feel it's lower back okay but still not enough you want it to stick out so push out over here push push push that's better okay so now you can feel that it's more like a C whereas starting 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 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 is sticking out I'm trying to and he pushes on my hand push push push see I will 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 a different 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 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 you don't want to be like this so even when you do your moves think about that I think that the spine is going to be straight one exercise you can do is to do very slow squats against the wall so there's a 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 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 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 we talked 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 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 yeah so you press here like I'm pretty solid here right because you're pushing down to my back find my chest and then you go and I'm not the king so there's actually so now there's another not going mechanism that that blends so there's blending so when you're sinking it sinks down to the body and your chin is tucked chest is in and then you push hard as well it's not going anywhere and then you expand a bit and you know you're on balance just explaining both shoulders both shoulders coming so you contract yeah easily when we balance it hard because when you can try you feel like oh I can push the guy right yeah you feel like you can push me but you think you got me right so we don't don't use this yeah just relax like when you push down here yeah I'm totally relaxed I'm just using my whole structure in my body okay so this is actually to touch my body that you in yeah so you feel like you got me right because actually there's more there's more room yeah 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 yeah now you just expand yeah okay alright I'm already so new okay so let put that into your sucking in so already I'm already sucked in yeah I'm already expanding okay 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 there okay when you try to elbow me like this you do that elbow me okay at least I can control the elbow okay if I don't then if you feel yourself moving this way you're right there you can just go change it to here okay alright so you need to in cap the elbow this is sucking in this is sucking in just sucking in and then expand and I bump into you like that, right? yeah if I step too deeper yeah okay see that so my feet haven't touched the ground yet and they've already made contact okay so now all the momentum is going through you instead of going to the ground okay okay you try that I'll stand here you just try bump it like that so you gotta step really deep so I'll step with this foot or no this foot this one so like that so that works too but that's not the technique so so I'm here try to 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 alright yeah let's see how deep you have it go so but then don't need for just be straight yeah bump it's always straight it's like one straight step okay I'm trying to drop my height down because I feel like that when I get here my shoulder's here yeah don't use your shoulder yeah this one's technique is to use your shoulder so be that's where more like come back up yeah because you can use your shoulder bone yeah but for training you're just going to bump with your chest so okay like that okay so relax your shoulder don't do this okay yeah like that but don't stick it out like this I'm trying to pull it back yeah so just relax like you're not stepping people down so I feel that when I step here you don't want to step then go yeah you have to go you have to hit before I land okay so before my foot even touches the ground I'm already there yeah or the same time yeah so yeah there you go I can feel that a lot more than okay but you step first right so you want to aim aim for behind again okay another thing is to make a frame yeah make this round yeah sink your chest so this is like one big one big cup yeah one big cup is gone like that okay because you stick out any part of the cup then it's just going to go go in it won't affect the whole thing okay so you make this round you go okay yeah alright so there's two ways you can sink down yeah where you can rise up for you to sink that's rising up okay so here you go yeah rising up yeah that's rising up okay or you can sink down so it's like yeah alright you got it yeah same idea right yeah alright so now you just extend this so now you're bringing your whole body into it into the push yeah so three mistakes in Tai Chi alright 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 240 pounds 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 really 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 you're trying to percent 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 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 right there's nothing there I'm not saying it's placid but be relaxed in concept called shong or shong 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 when he's pushing harder I'm still relaxed you see how I'm relaxed my arms I'm still able to resist them okay 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 all the time and 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 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 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 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 followed hands so I'm using my core to direct my body the same 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 a mistake see a difference my hand is leading my core so there's very little 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 like this just my hand okay pain wise how much is that you got to feel it one to ten about a four four okay now I'm using my hip I mean using my Dan Tian how much pain more pain is there brings it up to about a seven a 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 right 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 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 so 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 okay 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 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 to giant 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 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 use your 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 a lot of demonstrations right I only have time to just move my hand up right but there's power there how does that happen yeah right I just move my hand right I'm not moving my hand and then my body go do it again I move my hand and then my body I didn't move my hip just just moving my hips first too slow right I have to go one two you already hit me okay 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 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 okay 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 okay so now I can feel it's lower back coming up okay but still not enough you want it to stick out you push out over here push push push that's better okay so now you can feel that it's more like a C whereas starting 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 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 hand push push 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 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 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 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 so that's what the wall is 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 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 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 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 we talked 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 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 yeah so you press here like I'm pretty solid here because you're pushing down to my right leg you have to expand my chest and then you go and then you have to come there's actually sink your chest and expand your chest so now there's another not going mechanism that blends right so there's blending I try to do it see when you're sinking it sinks down to the right so the chin is tucked chest is in and then you push hard as well it's not going anywhere you can expand a bit and you know where you are from so you contract? yeah easily when we balance it hard because when you can try you feel like oh I can push the guy right yeah you feel like you can push me but you think you got me right so we don't okay don't use this yeah just relax like when you push down here yeah I'm totally relaxed I'm just using my whole structure in my body okay so this is actually touching my body I let you in yeah so you feel like you got me right it's actually there's more there's more room yeah 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 yeah now you just expand yeah okay I'm already so new okay so let put that into your pushing so you're sucking everything so I'm ready I'm already sucked in yeah I'm already expanding okay 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 okay but you try to elbow me a bit just you do that elbow me okay at least I can control the elbow okay if I don't then if you feel yourself moving this way you're right there you're going to change it to here yeah okay alright so you need to in cap the elbow this is sucking in this is sucking in just sucking in and then expand go forward okay bump into you like that, right? yeah every step through deeper see that so my feet my feet haven't touched the ground yet and they've already made contact okay so now all the momentum is going through you instead of going to the ground okay okay you try that I'll stand here you just try bump into that you got to step really deep so I'll step with this foot or no this foot this one so like that you're going to check so that works too but that's not the technique so so I'm here try to 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 alright yeah let's just see how deep you have to go so that's better okay but then don't need forward just be straight yeah boom it's almost straight one straight okay 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 shoulders yeah and this one one technique is to use your shoulder so be that's where more like combato yeah because you can use a shoulder bone yeah but for training you're just going to bump into a chest so okay okay so relax your shoulder don't do this okay yeah like that alright but don't stick it out like this I'm trying to pull it back yeah so just relax okay come on David Wong and this video I'm going to show you techniques 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 so as you can see in the demonstration we'll here how much do you weigh 240 pounds 220 pounds okay there's muscles there's arms holy cow here's as big as my leg right I'm already I'm only about 150 pounds look at my skinny arms and I'm really 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% 90 to 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 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 right there's nothing there I think it's placid but being relaxed in a concept called shong or shong in Chinese it's being loose but relaxed but still have structure so he's pushing he's pushing harder harder I'm relaxed see my hands relaxed he's pushing harder I'm still relaxed see how relaxed my arm is I'm still able to resist them okay 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 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 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 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 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 followed hands so I'm using my core to direct my body the same 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 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 your fingers touch your belly button and then feel it move before your hand moves but now you get the difference okay and the difference you can tell let's see I'm just using my hand like this just my hand okay pain wise how much is that you got a belly one to ten about a 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 a seven a 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 right 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 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 contradictory isn't it okay 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 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 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 if you take this shirt and tighten it up his 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 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 it's still not enough you want it to stick out so now you can feel that it's more like a C whereas starting 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 if you 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 now he pushes on it what happened it's a different 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, 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 to the C 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 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 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 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 monkey and 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 when you 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 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 okay so when it comes in you sink your chest so you press here solid here right because you're pushing down to expand my chest and then you go there's actually sink your chest and expand your chest so now there's another mechanism that that blends so there's blending let's do it so when you're sinking it sinks down to the rock chin is tucked, chest is in and you push hard as well it's not going anywhere expand a bit both shoulders both shoulders so you contract yeah easily we're bound so hard because when you can try you feel like oh I can push together right you feel like you can push me you think you got me right don't use this 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 let you in you got me right there's actually more alright alright just relax this whole thing suck in there everything 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 put that into your sucking in I'm already sucked in ideally I want to make sure it's elbow 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 you can pull me at least I can control the elbow right then if you feel yourself moving this way you're right there 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 okay see that my feet haven't touched the ground yet and they're 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 it 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 you wanna take my place so here's my center you wanna be there 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 always straight okay I'm trying to drop my height down I feel like that when I get here my shoulders here this one technique is to use the shoulder that's where I come back up because you can use the shoulder bone but for training you're just going to bump into the chest so like that so relax the shoulder don't do this like that I'm trying to pull it back so just relax you're not stepping people down so I feel like when I step in 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 so yeah I can feel that a lot more when you step first so you want to aim before behind the guy another thing is to make a frame like this when you step on the ground sink your chest so this is like one big one big cup one big cup is going 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 so there's two ways you can sink down or you can rise up that's rising up rising up or you can sink down so it's like you got it same idea right 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 people make the main advantages of learning Tai Chi is for health, for your joints breathing, for relaxation and meditation but also you can 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 his 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 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 gonna 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 for example if I'm being placid he pushes and that's placid right there's nothing there 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, harder, harder I'm relaxed see, my hands relaxed but he's pushing harder, harder see how relaxed my arm is I'm still able to resist them okay 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 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 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 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 you stay below let's say 60% tension then you're not using force you're using relaxation 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 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 the same 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 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 here's what you're doing correctly so how you can practice is actually put your finger or put your hand fingers touch your belly button feel that 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 4 now I'm using my hit I mean using my dan tian how much pain more pain is there brings it up to 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 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 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 now they'll go 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 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 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 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 it's 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 so 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 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 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 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 make sure that you always check put my hand back behind my back 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 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 put my face 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 keeping my spine straight 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 if you 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 integration of your whole body if your hand moves your whole body moves if your feet move your whole body is connected and the reason we do Tai Chi so slow is that we are 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 3. 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 down to my neck expand my chest there's actually sink your chest and expand your chest so now there's another not going mechanism that blends so there's blending and sinking more so when you're sinking it sinks down to the body chin is tucked chest is in it's not going anywhere expand a bit 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 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 right? 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 now you just expand yeah okay alright so new okay put that into your sucking already 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 you try to elbow me elbow me at least I can control the elbow I don't right? then if you feel yourself moving this way you're gonna 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? step through deeper my feet haven't touched the ground yet and I've already made contact 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 wanna 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 that's better but then don't knee forward you straight? it's almost straight okay I'm trying to drop my height down cause I feel like when I get here my shoulder's here don't use your shoulder is this one technique to use your shoulder? that's for a more combata cause you can use your shoulder bone but for training you're just going to bump the chest so like that so relax your shoulder don't do this but don't stick it out like this I'm trying to pull it back so just relax alright 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 your bones for relaxation and meditation but also you learn a concept called rooting or sinking so as you can see in the demonstration we'll 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 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 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 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 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 relaxing, my hands relax he's pushing harder I'm still relaxed see how relaxed my arm is 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 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 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 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 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 so 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 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 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 a 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 okay, now do this I'm doing 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 okay, and the difference you can tell, let's see I'm just using my hand like this just my hand okay, 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? a 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 right, 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 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 okay, 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 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, 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 move my hand and then my body do it again I move my hand and then my body I didn't move my hip first just 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 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 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 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 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 we're at 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 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 what happened? 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 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 see, is it straight? is it 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 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 touching 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 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 and 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 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 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 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 expand my chest and then you go there's actually so now there's another not going mechanism that blends so there's blending it's sinking more try and do it see so when you're sinking 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 go first push so you contract yeah easy 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 but you think you got me okay don't use this just relax when you push on here I'm totally relaxed I'm just using my whole structure on my body so this is actually touching my body so you feel like you got me it's 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 ready so I'm ready I'm already sucked in ideally I want to make sure the elbow cut the elbow so if I go like this push it up you try to elbow me 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 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 every step through deeper yeah okay so 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 you try that I'll stand here and you try to try you gotta step really deep so I'll 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'll step deeper today 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 knee forward you straight boom I'm trying to drop my height down I feel like you want shoulders here don't use your shoulder the technique is to use your shoulder that's where I come back because you can use your shoulder bone if you're training you're just going to bump into your chest 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 so I feel that when I step here so you 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 same time yeah there you go I feel that a lot more you step first so you want to aim for behind the edge the thing is to make a frame 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 there's two ways you can sink down you can rise up that's rising up so you go rising up rising up or you can sink down you got it pushes same idea right so now you just extend this and now you're bringing your whole body into it into the push so don't push just like 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 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 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 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 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 shong in Chinese it's being loose but relaxed but still have structure pushing harder, harder, harder I'm relaxed see, my hands relaxed he's pushing harder, harder I'm still relaxed I'm still able to resist them okay 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 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 on time practice being tense 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 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 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 doing that for a lot that you can learn how to use relaxation mistake number 2 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 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 2 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 like this just my hand pain wise how much is that 1 to 10 4 now I'm using my hit I mean using my dan tian how much pain is there it brings it up to about 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 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 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 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 I don't have time to just move my hand up but there's 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 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 this shirt and tighten it up it's fine it 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 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, that's better 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 is to connect your upper body with your lower body and this is the main mistake that people make with 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 see I 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 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 through 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 it's straight you do the 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 so that's what the wall is going to be 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 if 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 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 your whole body moves if your feet move everything is connected and the reason we do Tai Chi so slow is that we are 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 learn 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 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 so when you're sinking it sinks down to the bottom so the chin is tucked chest is in and then you push hard as you want it's not going anywhere you can expand a bit and you don't want to be too close so you contract easily moves balance so 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 okay don't use this just relax like 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 it actually does more it's more moving 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 learn something new okay already I'm already sucked in ideally I want to make sure it's elbow but then you need to make sure the elbow cut the elbow so if I go like this you can just push it up there but you try to elbow me a bit elbow me at least I can control the elbow if I don't right then if you feel yourself moving this way you can just change it to here so you need to in cut the elbow suck it in just suck in and then expand step here and I bump into you like that right yeah okay 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 you try that 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 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 see how deep it goes so but then don't need for you straight boom it's almost straight okay I'm trying to drop my height down because I feel like that when I get here my shoulders here and this one technique is to use the shoulder that's for a more combative because you can use the shoulder bone but for training you're just going to bump the chest like that so relax the shoulder don't do this like that don't stick it out like this I'm trying to pull it back so just relax 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 so as you can see in the demonstration Will here, 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 and how hard were you pushing there? 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 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, right? there's nothing there I think it's placid but being relaxed in concept called shong 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 are relaxed but he's pushing harder, harder I'm still relaxed I'm still able to resist him okay 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 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 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 when you're relaxed, it's completely relaxed imagine holding an egg in your hand when you're open just open them slightly just scratch them out a little bit when you're 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 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 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 training, doing the push hands that we just showed you in the demonstration doing that but 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 so I'm using my core to direct my body, the same 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 a 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 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 more pain is there 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 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 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 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 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 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 I have to go one, two you already hit me but now I want to do it 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, 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 more