PUSH SERIES #1: Double Arms Defense

Above: A still frame from the inaugural video in my new Series ‘Push’. The teaching moment for this first one is a quick tip on handling your partner’s (attempted) double arm push. The actual video appears below. Please read all the intro text before watching!

“Try try try to understand”

— Heart

Here in paid-sub section (Full Metal Maximality, (a word play on my recent book title Bare Metal Minimality), I’m starting up a new mini-series on Push Hands. This is a very tricky topic, because for some reason everybody goes nuts around anything interactive, especially when such things have even the remotest and flimsiest possible connection to combatives.

There are dozens of high level, genuinely skilled Tai Chi teachers based all over the world, who frequently put up their typical/representative “push hands” interactions with their seminar students. I respect that, and I respect them, though for the most part I’ve never touched hands with them. Anyway they’ve made big internet names for themselves in that way, and more power to them. It’s all good for the art.

But I too have a lot of experience working with and teaching push hands and kuzushi. So I thought I should show my own version. I believe it’s at least as educational, interesting, and authentic as similar short clips shown on many internet-famous teachers’ sites.

The basic framework is Fixed Step Push Hands (which is the most common setup in 90% of internet-famous Tai Chi teachers’ interactive web content). The goal is just to ‘bump’ your partner off balance. Sometimes various other little ‘implied’ work can be added, like what I call “organic qin’na” when I subtly lock up their joints instead of the normal bump-push.

Now before you ask: why do I only bump them off balance? Why don’t I blast them away 10 feet like the other teachers normally show? It’s due to Ben Lo, my most esteemed teacher. I used to blast them as far as I possibly could. Then in one training event, I carried that too far. I have explained this on a page from one of my other books, INFUSION:

Kuzushi, whether in Tai Chi or any other art, always involves two phases:

1. Take balance

2. Apply finisher

Sometimes these two stages are so perfectly coordinated in time that they may appear as one. But both exist. My emphasis in my ‘pushing’ and this Series is always on the 1st, not the 2nd. Once you’ve done the first, the 2nd is not interesting because you could do anything at that point: blast them away, take them down, push, pull, lock, strike - anything. It’s that first instant moment of energetically “knowing” them that interests me. Only the moment of “understanding energy” (董勁). If that’s not your interest you should skip this Series.

In each video, I’ll be instructing some specific or situational variation of the One Foundational Teaching of real Tai Chi, which is just: gentle, soft and 清風細雨 （light breeze, soft rain). When it comes to Tai Chi, that’s my interest and modality, for better or worse.

You can accept that or not, nothing I can do about it. Anyway you can get plenty of the “10-feet away” stuff all over the internet. You’ll see that in all such videos, the Phase 1 is happening prior to the Phase 2 finisher. Maybe some of you will enjoy my slightly more nuanced and uncommon emphasis on the first instead of the second.

All that said, inevitably any activity of this kind must be hedged round by TONS of caveats. And even with all these, there’ll be loads of misunderstandings. Anyway here are the parameters of the mini-clips that will appear in this PUSH Series:

Basically pretty much all the ‘opponents’ / partners working ‘against’ me in these clips will be people who:

• Weight Class: outweigh me by at least one, usually multiple standard weight classes

• Background: They all have some kind of significant training experience with some kind of contact, be that BJJ, wrestling, Aikido, Judo, Muay Thai, or ‘real’ karate (Japanese Kyokushin), advanced Tai Chi, etc.

• No Beginners: I’m not prejudiced but these do not make for convincing presentations. Some of them may end up appearing like beginners in these clips, only because they aren’t used to working against softness and gentility.

• Effort: If any of them seem overly ‘respectful’ in their pushing, that’s only because I’d already shown them some stuff prior to the focus clip. They were all instructed, and agreed at the outset, to make full use of their power, technique, surprise, strength, experience, or whatever (within the basic drill parameters), not to go easy on me. They are decent, skilled, courteous people but are all trying their best to blast or floor me, no matter what it looks like on video.

• Versatility: Whatever you see me do with one given partner here, I can pretty much do with any other on request.

Most importantly of all, if nothing else understand this: I am not presenting push hands / kuzushi as ring, cage, bar or street combatives. Please understand that! These at the end of the day are just sensitivity drills. Actual confrontation and conflict involves sooo much more that! It isn’t worth mentioning ‘push hands’ and ‘combatives’ in the same breath. But historically, there’s a tiny tradition of trying to link the two somehow, so I want to emphasize that I’m NOT trying to do that. I’m just showing some food for thought.

I hope I won’t need to copy and paste all the boilerplate above as the preface for every mini video in this series? We’ll see!

Practical Stuff:

1. No clip will be longer than 3 minutes

2. Most or every clip will be making a specific teaching point “show and tell”

3. For most clips, the audio of the clip itself, me speaking with the partner or attendees, will be all the explanation needed, in context

4. But I will include a written transcript for each one, possibly with some extra explanation if necessary

OK here we go with the Push #1, where I’m giving a quick pointer about how to react to a sudden double arm push. A somewhat unusual move, but it has something to teach us. I introduce the ‘problem’, show two bad reactions, and then show the correct handling of it.