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