still forward. Step here and I bump into you like that, right? Yeah. Have I stepped through deeper? Yeah. 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. Okay. So you gotta step really deep too. So I stepped with this foot or? No, this foot. This one. So like that. You gotta check. Yeah. So that works too. But that's not the technique. So. So I'm here. So I stepped deeper today. You wanna take my place. So here's my center. You wanna 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. That's better. Okay. But then don't need for, you straight? Yeah. Boom. It's almost 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. And there's one technique is to use your shoulder. It should be. That's for a more like combata. Yeah. Because you can use your shoulder bone. But for training, you're just gonna bump the chest. So. Okay. Like that. Okay. The 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. All right. Come on, David Wong. And this video, I'm gonna 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. 220 pounds? Look at his muscles. Look at his 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 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%. 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. 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. 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 being 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. I'm relaxing. My hand's relaxed but he's pushing harder, harder. I'm still relaxed. 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 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, if you practice being tense, like this.  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 you're relaxed, relaxed. When you're open, just open a little. You always wanna 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 during 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, okay? 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 do it correctly. So how you can practice is actually put your finger or put your hand, fingers touch your belly button and then feel it move before your hand moves. 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? Good, you got to feel it, yeah. One to 10. About a four. Four, okay. Now I'm using my hip, I mean using my Dan Tian. Yeah. 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 10, 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 wanna 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, it won't be to 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 that happened, 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 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, 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 gonna 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, 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 now I can feel his lower back just straightening up, okay? But still not enough. You want it to stick out. You push out over here, push, 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, 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 disconnect your body. So for example, I'm going to do an S curve on purpose. My spine is like, my belly's 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. I make this into a C. And then now he pushes on it. What happened? It's a 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 where 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.  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, 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. It's like press here, like I'm pretty solid here, right? Because you're pushing down to my head, I expand my chest, and then you go for the lead, not the tail. But it does actually sink your chest and expand your chest. So now there's another, not going mechanism that blends, right? So there's blending, and it's sinking more. Try to do it, see? 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, right? Then you expand a bit and you know you are found. That's good, right? No, no, no. Yeah, both shoulders coming from this side. So you contract? Yeah. Easily when we balance it, all right? Yeah. 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 use that then. Okay. Don't use this. Yeah. Use, just relax. Like when you push in here, I'm totally relaxed. I'm just using my whole structure and my body. Yeah, okay. So this is actually to touch my body, and 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. Now you just expand. Yeah. Okay. All right. I'm so new, okay. Put that into your pushing. So you're sucking in there. All righty, I'm already sucked in. Yeah. I feel the elbow. But then you need to make sure the elbow, cut the elbow. Yeah. Cut the 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. Elbow, 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 just gonna change it to here. Yeah. Okay. All right. You need to. In, cut 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. Every 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. This is bump. 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 in like that. So you gotta step really deep too. So I step with this foot or this one? No, this one. So like that.  Yeah. So that works too, but that's not the technique. So I'm gonna step deeper than that. You wanna take my place. So here's my center. You wanna be there. So my foot basically has to be here. Oh yeah. All right. Yeah. Let's just see how deep you have to go. So, so. But then don't need for it. Be straight. Boom. It's all straight. It's like one straight step. Okay. I'm trying to drop my height down. Cause I feel like that when I get here, my shoulder's here. Yeah. Don't use your shoulder. Yeah. And this one technique is to use your shoulder. It should be. That's for a more like combata. Yeah. Cause you can use your shoulder bone. Yeah. But for training, you're just gonna bump with your chest. So. Okay. Like that. Okay. This is the chest. So relax your shoulder. Don't do this. Okay. Yeah. But don't stick it out like this. I'm trying to pull it back. Yeah. So just relax. You're not stepping people down. So I feel that when I step in. So you, you don't want to step then go. Yeah. You have to go. You have to pay before I land. Okay. You see I feel. 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, like 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.  It won't affect the whole thing. Okay. So you make this round. Go. Okay. Yeah. All right. So there's two ways you can sink down. Yeah. Or you can rise up. For you to sink. That's rising up. Okay. Yeah. So you go. Yeah. Rising up. Yeah. Rising up. Okay. Or you can sink down. So it's like pushes. Yeah. Same idea, right? All right. So now you just extend this. Okay. And now you're bringing your whole body into it. Into the push. Yeah. Don't push. Just like. Stop. Okay, in this video, I'm gonna show you the three mistakes in Tai Chi that are very common that people make. One of the advantages of learning Tai Chi is for health, for your joints, for your bones, for breathing, for relaxation and meditation. But also, you learn a concept called rooting or sinking. So as you can see in the demonstration, Will here, how much do you weigh? 240 pounds. 220 pounds. Look at his muscles. Look at his arms. Holy cow. He's as big as my leg. All 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? We're saying 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 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. 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 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, harder, I'm still relaxed. See how he's 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 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 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 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, the center of gravity, to direct the movements, okay? So there's a very simple movement called followed hands. So I'm using my core to direct my body. The same I'm using just one hand. See how my core is moving in a circle to direct my arms. So the core or the dan tian leads the arms. Sun dai sao, that's what I say in Chinese. The body leads the hand. So that's number two mistake. Here's how it looks like when you make the mistake. See 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 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? Good, you got to fill it, yeah. One to 10. About a four. Four, okay. Now I'm using my hip, I mean using my dan tian. Yeah. How much pain, more pain is there? It brings it up to about a seven. Seven, right? And I didn't use more power, I just used my waist. And if I use more, I can get it up to 10, 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. I'll 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 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 just power there. How'd that happen? Yeah. I just move my hand, right? I'm not, 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, 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 gonna 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 cup. 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 just straightening up, okay? But it's still not enough. You want it to stick out. You push out of here, push, 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, 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 disconnect your body. So for example, I'm gonna do an S-curve on purpose. My spine is like, my belly's 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 then now he pushes on it. What happened? It's a 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, 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. If it's straight, you did a C. You don't wanna be like this. So even when you do your moves, think about that. Think that the spine is gonna be straight. One exercise you can do is to do very slow squats against the wall. So this is the wall against me. I wanna 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 do it slow like this. So that's gonna 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 gonna 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 wanna 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. Okay, so 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 head. So I expand my chest, and then you go, and then you have to come. But there's actually a sink your chest, and expand your chest. So now there's another, not going mechanism that lends, right? So there's blending, and it's sinking more. Let's try and do it, see? So when you're sinking, it sinks down to the bottom. Chin is tucked, chest is in. And then you push hard as well. It's not going anywhere, right? Thank you, expand a bit, and you know what we all found. Chris, do you have a postures coming, please? So you contract? Yeah. Easily lose balance, so 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 do it that bad. Okay. Don't use this. Yeah. Use, just relax. Like when you push on here, I'm totally relaxed. I'm just using my whole structure, my body. Mm, okay. So this is actually touching my body, I let you in. Yeah. You feel like you got me, right? Yeah. Because actually there's more. There's more room. Yeah. All right.   Yeah. Now you just expand. Yeah, okay. All right. I'm already so new, okay. So, let's put that into your pushing.  You're ready? I'm already sucked in. Yeah. Ideally, I want to make sure it's elbow to me. But then you need to make sure the elbow, cap the elbow. Yeah. Cap the 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. Elbow, 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 can just change it to here. Yeah. Okay. All right. So you need to in, cap the elbow.  Just a second, and then expand. Step here, and I bump into you like that, right? Yeah. If I step through deeper. 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 in like that. So you gotta step really deep through it. So I step with this foot, or this one. So, like that. You gotta check, yeah. So that works too, but that's not the technique. So I'm here. So I step deeper than that. You wanna take my place, so here's my center. You wanna be there. So my foot basically has to be here. Oh yeah. All right. Yeah. Let's just see how deep you have to go. So. But then don't need for, is it straight? Yeah. Boom. Okay. 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. And this one technique is to use your shoulder. It should be. That's where I'm more like combative. Yeah. Because you can use your shoulder bone. Yeah. But for training, you're just gonna bump the chest. So. Okay. Like that. Okay. So relax your shoulder. Don't do this. Okay. 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 and this video, I'm gonna 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? 240 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 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%. 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 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. 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 think it's placid, okay? 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 relaxed, see? My hands relax when he's pushing, harder, harder. I'm still relaxed. See how I'm 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 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 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 they're relaxed, relaxed. When they're open, just open a little. You always wanna 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 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, okay? So there's a very simple movement called valid hands. So I'm using my core to direct my body. Just saying 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 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'll do what you're doing correctly. So how I 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 billion, yeah. One to 10. About a four. Four, okay. Now I'm using my hip, I mean using my dan tian. Yeah. 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 10, 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, okay? I'm trying very hard to doing the wrong way because I practice so much the proper way. But what I'm doing is I'm leading with my hands and then I move my body. So a very basic fundamental in early tai chi if you're a beginner is to learn how to move your hips. Now when you get advanced tai chi, you actually do the opposite. You learn to move your hands before your hips. It's contradictory, isn't it? But I'll show you how to do that in the next lesson or in a later lesson. And it goes with the concept that Bruce Lee taught, which is to move your hands before your feet. Just like in fencing, you wanna 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 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 don't have time to just move my hand up, right? But there's power there, how that happened, right? I just move my hand, right? I'm not gonna move 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 wanna 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 gonna 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, his 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 wanna 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 it's 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, you 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. 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 then now he pushes on it. What happened? 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, 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, it's a C. You don't want it 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 this is the wall against me. I wanna 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 in slow like this. So that's gonna 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 gonna 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 wanna 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, 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. Yeah. So you press here. Like I'm pretty solid here, right? Because you're pushing down to my neck. So expand my chest, and then you go, I don't even have to do it. So there's actually a sink your chest and expand your chest. So now there's another, not going mechanism that blends. So there's blending, try and do it, see? 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, right? So you're going to expand a bit and you're going to bounce. Really? Yeah. First, close your chest, come here, please. So you contract? Yeah. Easily when it's bound to your heart. Because when you can try, 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? So we don't need to step in. Okay. Don't use this. Yeah. Use, just relax. Like when you push in here. Yeah. I'm just using my whole structure, my body. Okay. So this is actually touching my body, that you in. So you feel like you've gotten me, right? Yeah. It's 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. Now you just expand. Yeah. Okay. I'm already so new. Okay. Put that into here. So I'm already, I'm already sucked in. Yeah. You have the elbow. But then you need to make sure the elbow, cap the elbow. Yeah. Cap the 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. Elbow, 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 gonna just gonna change it to here. Here. Okay. All right. So you need to, in, cap the elbow.  Just sucking in, and then expand. Step here, and I bump into you, like that, right? Yeah. If I step through deeper, 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 gotta step really deep through it. So I step with this foot or this one? No, this one. So, like that.  Yeah. So that works too, but that's not the technique. So. So I'm here. You gotta step deeper than that. You wanna take my place, so here's my center. You wanna be there. So my foot basically has to be here. Oh yeah. All right. Yeah. Let's just see how deep you have to go. So. That's better. Okay. But then don't need for, it's straight. Yeah. Boom. It's all straight. It's like one straight step. Okay. I'm trying to drop my height down. And I feel like that when I get here, my shoulder's here. Yeah, don't use your shoulder. Yeah. There's one technique is to use your shoulder. It should be. Best for a more like combata. Yeah. Because you can use your shoulder bone. Yeah. But for training, you just gonna bump with your chest. So. Okay. Like that. Okay. Just use your chest. So relax your shoulder. Don't do this. Okay. So. 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 people down. So I feel that when I step in. So you, you don't want to step and go. Yeah. You have to go. You have to pay before I land. Okay. You see I go. So before my foot even touches the ground, I'm already there. Yeah. Or at the same time. Yeah. So. Yeah. There you go. I can feel that a lot more than when you step first. So you want to aim for behind the guy. The thing is to make a frame. Yeah. Make this round. Yeah. Sink your chest. So this is like one big, one big cup. Yeah.  It won't affect the whole thing. Okay. So you make this round. You go. Okay. Yeah. So there's two ways you can sink down. Yeah. Or you can rise up. For you to sink. That's rising up. Okay. Yeah. So you go. Yeah. Yeah. Sink up. Okay. Or you can sink down. So it's like going downwards. Yeah. All right. You got it. Precious. Yeah. Same idea, right? Yeah. All right. So now you just extend this. What's that for? So now you're bringing your whole body into it. Into the foot. Yeah. So. I'm gonna 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? 240 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 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%. 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 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. 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. I'm relaxed, see? My hand's relaxed when he's pushing harder, 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 practice being tense. Use your muscles, tense up to get more power, which is okay, it works. But if you practice being tense all the time, practice being tense like this, then if you're fighting against someone bigger than you, you're at a disadvantage because his force will be stronger than your force. So rather than use force, I use shong, I use relaxation. So when you practice your tai chi, make sure that your hands are not open like this because that's too much tension. Because your hands are not closed like this because that's too much tension. Your hands should always be in the middle. 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. 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 and repetition and training, doing the push hands that we just showed you in the demonstration. Doing that for a lot that you can learn how to use relaxation. Mistake number two in Tai Chi is to not use your dan tian or not use your core, the center of gravity to direct the movements, okay? So there's a very simple movement called followed hands. So I'm using my core to direct my body. This time I'm using just one hand. See how my core is moving in a circle to direct my arm. So the core or the dan tian leads the arms. Sun dai sao, that's what I say in Chinese. The body leads the hand. So that's number two mistake. Here's how it looks like when you make the mistake. See a difference? My hand is leading my core. So there's very little power or connection when I'm moving my hand. I'm just moving my hand. I'm not even leading it with the core, okay? Now, do you see it 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? Yeah, really, yeah. One to 10. About a four. Four, okay? Now I'm using my hip. I mean, using my dan tian. Yeah. How much pain, more pain is there? 20 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 10, 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, 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 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 wanna 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. 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. I only have time to just move my hand up, right? But there's power there. How that happened, right? I just moved my hand, right? I'm not gonna move my hand and then my body. Go ahead and do it again. I moved my hand and then my body. I didn't move my hip first. Here's me moving my hips first. Too slow, right? I have to go one, two. You already hit me, okay? But now I wanna 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 gonna 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 wanna 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 now I can feel it's lower back, it's straightening up. But it's still not enough. You want it to stick out, you push out over here, push, 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 of the spine. And what it does is disconnects your body. So for example, I'm gonna do an S curve on purpose. My spine is like my belly sticking out. I'm trying to, and he pushes on my hand. See, I'll automatically go back. There's no resistance. But now I stick my back out, I drop my hip, I make this into a C, and then now he pushes on it. What happened? It's a different. Yeah, 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. 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. If it's straight, is it 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 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 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, 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, 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. I think it's when it comes in, you sink your chest. So you press here, like I'm pretty solid here, right?  But there's actually, so now there's another, not going mechanism that blends, right? 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. Chin is tucked, chest is in. And then you push hard as well. It's not going anywhere, right? Thank you to expand a bit and you don't have to cry. Both shoulders? Yeah. So you contract? Yeah. Easily when we balance it, all right? 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? So we don't do that then. Okay. All right. Don't use this. Yeah. Use, just relax. Like when you push in here, yeah, totally relax. I'm just using my whole structure here, my body. 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. Now you just expand. Yeah, okay. All right. It's so new, okay. Right? Sucking. So I'm ready, I'm already sucked in. Yeah. You're the elbow. 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 there. Okay. But you try to elbow me like this. You do that. Elbow, 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 gonna just change it to here. Yeah. Okay. All right. So you need to tap the elbow. This is sucking in. This is sucking in. Just sucking in and then expand. Step here and I bump into you. Like that, right? Yeah. If I step too deeper, 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 gotta step really deep through it. So I'll step with this foot or? This one. So like that. You're gonna check, yeah. So that works too, but that's not the technique. So I'll step deeper today. You wanna take my place. So here's my center. You wanna be there. So my foot basically has to be here. Oh yeah. All right. Yeah. Let's just see how deep you have to go. So. That's better. Okay. But then don't need for, you straight? Yeah. Boom. It's almost straight. 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. And this one technique is to use your shoulder. So be. That's where more like combata. Yeah. Because you can use your shoulder bone. Yeah. But for training, you're just gonna bump the chest. So. Okay. Like that. Okay. So relax your shoulder. Don't do this. Okay. 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. Thank you. All right. Okay. I'm David Wong and this video, I'm gonna show you the three mistakes in Tai Chi that are very common that people make. So one of the main advantages of learning Tai Chi is for health, for your joints, for your bones, for breathing, for relaxation and meditation. But also, we learn a concept called rooting or sinking. So as you can see in the demonstration, we'll hear how much 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? 100%. 100%. 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 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 what are the key things that you need to have structure? Well, there's three mistakes that people make that destroy structure in Tai Chi.  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. There's two different things. For example, if I'm being placid, he pushes and that's placid, right? There's nothing there, nothing's placid, okay? 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 relaxed, see? My hands relax when he's pushing, harder, harder. I'm still relaxed. See how I relax 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, if you practice being tense, like this, then, if you're fighting against someone bigger than you, you're at a disadvantage because his force will be stronger than your force. So rather than use force, I use shong. I use relaxation. So when you practice your tai chi, make sure that your hands are not open like this because that's too much tension. Because your hands are not closed like this because that's too much tension. Your hands should always be in the middle. When it's relaxed, it's completely relaxed. Imagine holding an egg in your hand. When you're open, just open them slightly. Just stretch them out a little bit. When they're relaxed, relaxed. When they're open, just open a little. You always want to feel an energy ball 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. 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, okay? So there's a very simple movement called pilot hands. So I'm using my core to direct my body. Just saying I'm using just one hand. Let's 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'll do 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. 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? Good, you got it. Really, yeah. Okay, one to 10. About a four. Four, okay. Now I'm using my hit. I mean, using my dan tian. Yeah. 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 10, 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, 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? 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 wanna move your hands before your feet. The reason is because when somebody attacks you, I don't have time to move my hip first and do a big tai chi move, right? If somebody attacks me, I have to move my hand first. So what's the difference? See, before you learn tai chi and once you learn tai chi, they move their hands first, but there's no power. And then they'll practice tai chi and then they'll learn how to use the hips to get power. But they practice enough tai chi and now they'll get back to the beginning. They use their hands first, but now it comes with power. How does that happen, okay? So let me show you again. Let's see 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 don't have time to just move my hand up, right? But just power there, how that happened, right? I just move my hand, right? I'm not gonna move 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 wanna 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 gonna 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, his 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 wanna 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 it's still not enough. You want it to stick out, you push out over here, push, push, push, push, that's better, okay? So now you can feel that it's more like a C, whereas starting about before, you can 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 tian is to connect your upper body with your lower body. And this is the main mistake that people make by having the S curve of the spine. And what it does is disconnect your body. So for example, I'm gonna do an S curve on purpose. My spine is like, my belly's 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 and make this into a C. And then now he pushes on it. What happened? It's a 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, 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. Is it a C? You don't wanna be like this. So even when you do your moves, think about that. Think that the spine is gonna be straight. One exercise you can do is to do very slow squats against the wall. So that's what you do to the wall against me. I wanna 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 as slow like this. So that's gonna 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 gonna 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 wanna 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, 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. You press here, like I'm pretty solid here, right? Because you're pushing down to my next band, my chest. And then you go from knee to toe. So 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. Try to do it, see? So when you're sinking, it sinks down to the body. So your chin is tucked, your chest is in. And then you push hard as more. It's not going anywhere, right? Thank you to expand a bit and you know your problems. So you contract? Yeah. Easily when we balance it, all right? Because when you contract, you feel like, oh, I can push the guy, right? Yeah. You feel like you can push me, right? You think you got it.


I'm Deborah and I'm known to some of you here today and I'm actually here on staff at Ilrie as an instructional designer. Now when I give my card to people they have a look at the card and they say oh yeah okay hi Deborah and what's an instructional design? So now let's just imagine since I did work with the Iblee group for some time let's just imagine that someone from Iblee asked me this question in the early days so I say okay well listen you've got some sales agents and they don't know anything about micro insurance but they've got to go out and they've got to be able to tell people pastoralists who maybe don't even know about insurance about micro insurance about index-based insurance they've got to be able to explain concepts like satellites and how data comes from satellites they've got to be able to convince these people that all this is real and that they should actually pay real money every every year just in case something bad happens then you know there will be money paid back to them so on faith they're going to pay this money this premium and they are expecting to get a payout so this is the role of your sales agents so now I'm an instructional designer so what I'm proposing to do is I'm proposing to lock all these people in a room for about a week and lecture at them until it gets into their head okay so how long do you think I would have had the job so this is not instructional design okay instructional design instructional design basically takes us from looking at okay what is the job we have the sales agents we know what they're supposed to do and what's the current status quo this current status quo is okay so maybe they've sold insurance but not necessarily index-based insurance you have pastoralists who maybe know a little bit about insurance but probably don't and certainly don't understand the concepts around micro insurance and the indexed based model of the micro insurance and you have some logical and practical constraints I mean this is in northern Kenya this is in southern Ethiopia there are remote clients here you have to travel a long distance your sales agents won't necessarily have phone connections even to be able to call in and find out oh someone's asked me a difficult question I can't answer it what's what's what should I tell them so there are that's the analysis side of things so we follow a model basically this model adi so ADDIE this is analysis design development implementation evaluation so the analysis is let's look at the situation where do we start from and then let's design some learning activities some let's design the learning pathway that takes them from this point to the point where they can actually go out and sell the product to pastoralists reassure them answer all their questions be knowledgeable make this real for the pastoralist okay so we have point A we have point B and simple matter just designing how to get there so lock them in the room lecture at them for five days no we don't do that and what I'm going to do in this talk is I'm going to go through the steps of the adi model with one particular product that has been developed by the capacity development unit for feast so feast is the feed assessment tool feed assessment tool feast it's a systemic way systematic way of going out into a community and saying okay now obviously you need to maximize the productivity of your livestock you have certain resources at your disposal you have a certain amount of fodder that you already produced maybe you can produce more maybe there are certain varieties that might grow better here let's have a look at the community their capabilities and actually talk to them about what the situation is and how the the research organization can help them so this is this is the step away from the old model where you go out and you say okay got this wonderful technology just use this all your problems will be solved this is the agricultural innovation systems approach so feast in the analysis stage what we basically had feast were people like Alan Duncan whom I'm sure you all know here in Ethiopia and Ben LeCue you down in Kenya running around various countries to run these workshops personally so this of course is important because donors are pushing ill read to be able to prove approaches toolboxes such as feast on a larger scale okay they don't I mean it's not enough to show us that it worked with one community we want to see if it works with a range of communities we want to actual proof but scientists have to make sure that they uphold the level and the quality of research at Erie I mean that's basically what ill read about so taking these people out of their jobs and taking them to run workshops is a big time commitment what capacity development did was said okay Alan and Ben how about you become the subject matter experts we'll try and get into your head we'll look at your learning materials we'll come out and observe workshops we'll see how you manage to train other researchers to be able to go out to communities and run the feast approach and if we can document this if we can prepare learning materials if we can prepare learning activities that are good enough to be able to support someone who isn't Alan or Ben who doesn't have their breadth of experience perhaps but with that support they can present a course to the same level or a similar level of quality so the actual feast toolkit they the feast when you go out to the community what you do is you select people to participate in a focus group discussion and in that focus group discussion you talk about the all the various aspects that contribute to livestock productivity and fodder availability the data that you get from that focus group discussion you put into a software application and you then that sort of steps you through the software application produces graphs and the graphs sort of lead you towards an analysis so what could we do to help okay so the software application a capacity development worked with the scientists to improve that software application so it was a little easier for people to understand and the focus group discussions for the focus group discussions they produced an interview guideline so that someone who was new perhaps to running these focus groups would be able to do it the same way that everyone else had done a checklist for workshops what do you have to do a day before what do you have to do four weeks before what do you have to do two months before to make sure that this intervention is going to work and then produced also e-learning modules so what I'm going to do today is take you through some examples of these e-learning modules so you can see there are a series of videos that show you how to use a software and other videos that actually paint the background and explain why you do things and why you do them the way that has been suggested and we also of course analyzed because we're fortunate enough that Ellen and Ben have been running these things for a long time we were able to analyze where were the where were the pain points where people didn't understand things so where there were things like the sampling strategy you go into a community sorry and you invite people to come in for a focus group it's no use inviting just the the five men that you meet down the street that's not going to be representative of the community you have to have women you have to have men you have to have large holding farmers you have to have people who only have a hectare of land to work on in order to be able to know that the solution you're providing is a solution for the whole community that was difficult for people sampling so the the designers actually developed a game to help them with that this is the what it looks like what the feast online e-learning materials look like on the LMS we have the feast modules on the learning management system LMS learning dot illy dot org we have to remember this learning dot illy dot all because that's the illy LMS so if any of you are interested in putting up e-learning courses this is available for you this is not just for captive we this is something that we hope that people from all over illy and other CG partners will want to do so let's have a look in more detail at what's on our LMS so on the right hand side you can see the feast and we've zoomed out a bit so that you can see all of the modules that are part of this e-learning course for feast feast stands for feed assessment tool right one correct answer over here so you see interactive learning works good works well okay so you have your feed assessment tool you have your e-learning modules and on the left hand side you can see one of the videos so we have a series of short very short videos that people watch and come to grips with material at the end of a series of these very short videos you'll have some quiz questions so that people will be able to understand for themselves did I actually comprehend that material am I remembering it will I be able to use this when I go out to the field so it's it's feedback for the user and of course it's also feedback for us because it's on an LMS so we can have a look at what you answered for the quiz questions did you all get zero out of ten in which case we'd better panic and go back out and organize another workshop for you so the LMS has the advantage that we get information very fine granular information you know what did she ferro answer to that question so what school did Abdullah get for this course if he got zero we assume that he was playing computer games at the same time so we would want to do something about contacting Abdullah's supervisor right so here we have one of the videos as an example activities in a farmer-centered diagnosis explain the importance of involving farmers in the process describe your role as a feast facilitator summarize how the feed assessment tool is employed in a farmer-centered diagnosis during this course we will introduce many new concepts and unfamiliar terms to help we will define key terms at the beginning of each lesson do not worry these terms don't make sense at first we will discuss each of them in detail shortly key terms for this lesson include farmer-centered diagnosis okay so that's an example as you can see this is a very structured way of learning so terminology is defined the objectives are outlined people know what to expect and the course proceeds in a very structured format now as I said there are also some concepts that people know that the scientists know from their experience in the field that people have problems with so for those sorts of things the designers actually worked on some interactive activities to give people a chance to try things out in practice while it wasn't really critical they weren't actually in the field they weren't going to make a mistake with the community so this is an example where it gives you an introduction this is a community next and the activity is to select eight farmers from a community where there are only 17 people of course it's going to be more complex but as we said this is a simulation and previous the the variables that are likely to influence the outcomes or what we hear in the focus group discussion are gender ethnicity farm size and location so we have to bear those in mind next and in the community that we're facing we're told that there are three ethnic groups the red tribe the blue tribe and the gold tribe there are slightly more women than men and they raise cattle goats and chickens next so what the activity is you will actually see actually we go next here's your community here's your 17 people if we click on one of these people we will see something about them we'll see that they're from the blue tribe because the figure is blue here's some information about them and if you select if you click the select button then they will become part of your sample and the idea is that Abdullah is going to go through here and he's going to select the seven people and he's going to do it at random so you can see in the intro it's actually giving you enough information to be able to I'm sorry it's eight people Abdullah keep going it's going to give you enough information about I've got a small holding or I've got a large holding I'm from a gold tribe I'm from the red tribe I'm female I'm male and then once you've made your selection of course you can you don't have to do this as he's doing it if you think you've made a mistake you could just click on one it would go back and you could choose somebody else to be part of your sample you then submit your selection and it says oh dear in terms of ethnic groups and farm size you your sample was completely biased and you're not going to have a productive focus group discussion okay so this is a nice way to go through and learn a skill and of course if you're not doing this in front of an entire workshop it's a lot less embarrassing you can do it at home and you can do it multiple times so let's go on sorry we have to go back to the PowerPoint okay I also mentioned that there was there were videos that told you how to use the software and we'll just have a brief look at one of those because I'm running out of time after installing and registering the feast data application the first thing you will see upon launching the program is the home menu you may select from the following options enter data view reports statistics and units of measurement printable data collection forms import export data user manual exit okay and edit info before we delve into the main features of the application okay so that was a very short intro but I'm sure you've all used thousands of these things on YouTube so you know what a software application video tutorial looks like this is something you might not have seen this is a whiteboard animation and you don't mention these on the first day all over the world small holder farmers often struggle to provide enough quality feed for their livestock that's why our scientists created a set of electronic forms known as the feed assessment tool or feast to help development workers collect and analyze data about local feed resources then identify promising interventions to improve farmers access to quality feed the designers packed feast with power through reports and utilities for calculating the composition of livestock feed nutritional content of animals diets herd composition farmers household income so a whiteboard animation is a very good way to introduce a topic that gives a rapid synopsis of a topic if you can put that on a website of course people might be interested in going to your LMS so now I'm asking questions here in an interactive format of course in an e-learning course we can't do that but we have a number of quiz questions a number of different formats for quiz questions that we can ask and you can see here that this is a format where you actually have to join match from left to right match the products with the amount of money that you can get out of those here's another format where you get to choose the word that completes the sentence so there are approximately 500 what and you can select from be in thousand or million are there approximately 500 be in small holder farmers responsible for feeding let's have a look if you click right in the middle Abdullah and we chose the wrong answer for one of those and in the question or the quiz question actually tells you okay well you got it partially right but actually the full answer is this so this is this is the way that you use quiz questions actually is a learning tool so it's not just saying yes you got it right or no you got it wrong which is motivational but it's also telling you why you did or you didn't get it right or wrong so it's also using quiz questions as a learning tool and I almost out of time okay so I'll skip through this and I just want to introduce this little device which Tigist is going to show around to you it's the device that of course we mentioned or it I mentioned on the first day because not all of our people have access to the online LMS but we would still like to know have they understood the materials did they do well on the quiz did they find interesting enough to complete the modules of course as the framework sorry as the framework for Capdev shows you it's very important to us to actually do research on capacity development and to monitor and evaluate so we want to know how well the materials are working and of course if we're working with you and we're working on developing a course with you in the future you will also want to know how well people did with your with your course are they really understanding it or not are they getting the quiz questions right which ones aren't they getting right so the offline player that Tigist is showing you all here and pictured on the screen is a solution to that where people can do the course they can watch all those videos they can do those interactive activities they can do those quiz questions that you saw previously and then when they sync with the server we can get all the results so thank you very much