Learning the Form
“Warm Up” Exercises
Even before people get taught the first move of the set, it’s common to learn some ‘warm up’ exercises. It’s important to take these seriously, because a good teacher is using them to do several things.
First, they are looking at the individual students to get a feel for what they can and cannot do physically. Second, they are trying to raise the basic strength and flexibility level of the student to a point where they will have a greater chance of learning at least a semblance of the way any particular move should be made. Third, they are gaining ‘muscle memory’ of specific types of moves that get repeated over and over again in the set. Finally, they are learning a wide variety of exercises that the student can carry with her over the rest of her life and which she should be able to apply to specific health problems as they arise.
Chinese martial arts generally place a great emphasis on the strength of stance and the fluidity of footwork. In order to make any progress in the art, therefore, it is necessary to have strong leg muscles and flexible hip joints. These are two things that the modern sedentary lifestyle of most modern Western-style people lack. When I started doing taijiquan, it was obvious to teachers that I was stiff and weak. To that end, it was suggested that I should do two hundred deep knee bends a day.
As you might imagine, this was quite the ordeal. Unfortunately, that’s about all I remember about the experience---it was about 40 years ago---so all I’m going to say is that somehow I got through this stage. I literally don’t remember if I actually did 200 deep knee bends a day, every day in a row. But from the vantage point of where I am now, I suspect I took days off to allow my agonizing muscles an opportunity to heal. I have hurt myself too often trying to ‘over do it’, so now I am very much of the opinion that ‘the slower I go, the faster I get there’. Having said the above, seeking ‘excellence’ in martial arts does require a sort of masochistic extremism that probably is beyond what is best or even useful for the vast majority of people.
Beyond the actual strength and flexibility of the moves, there is also the issue of activating muscles and nerves that an individual person’s brain doesn’t have the ability to control. I suspect this is an issue of what neurologists call ‘neuroplasticity’. The human brain is something of a ‘general-purpose CPU (Central Processing Unit)’. That is to say, it some ways it is just like the machine I’m using to write this essay.
The computer I’m using is capable of running more than one operating system (I’m currently using Linux Debian Book Worm) and it allows me to use a suite of different applications for specific tasks, such as word processing (I’m using the one from LibreOffice). I bought this desktop computer from a reseller, who probably purchased it from a company that buys hundreds of computers for their employees and resells old ones to small retailers. And when it was in use there, I suspect it was running a version of Windows and the MS Office word processor, Microsoft Word.
To extend this analogy, when I made the choice to switch from associating myself with a Western culture dominated by Christianity and became a Daoist, it was like changing my operating system from Windows to Linux. And when I decided to learn taijiquan instead of doing dancercise, it was like I started using the LibreOffice word processor instead of Microsoft Word. This change in both the operating system and bodily movement apps will have a significant impact on both the mental and physically-embodied programming in a person’s body. In my case, this involved years of learning how to make subtly different movements by muscles in my parts of my body---especially the way the legs, spine, and, hips move together.
On a practical level, this involved a lot of effort trying to change the way I move in certain situations. This literally involves forcing a specific muscle group that you have no control over to start to move on command. And that often involves developing mental tricks to get a certain type of movement to actually happen.
For example, for a long time I had to learn to push my knees over my feet in particular types of moves. And part of the way I learned to do this was to envision a giant fluffy pillow between my knees which I was holding in place---without crushing---while I did my moves. What I believe was happening was probably some combination of both changes to the ‘software’ (ie: the way my brain ‘thinks’) and the ‘wetware’ (ie: physical body) in my brain/body connection. It’s possible to just learn the set on its own, but learning a host of exercise moves allows the student one more way to explore the different areas in which she can use her consciousness to ‘rewire’ the interface between the brain and body.
Another example of this sort of thing are the so-called ‘reeling silk exercises’. These are holistic exercises that emphasize improved balance and muscle co-ordination through performing extremely complex exercises. One that I practiced for quite a while involved drawing an imaginary yin-yang symbol in the air with first one hand, then both hands, then both hands and one foot on the ground, then both hands and a foot in the air. After much effort, I was able to actually do this---but it required a great deal of concentration and balance, (which alas disappeared when I damaged one of my legs cycling).
Learning all these different exercises is also useful for creating a toolbox that the student will be able to reach into in order to deal with the aches and pains of aging. Over my life I’ve often found myself developing pain in various places and what I’ve found myself doing over and over again is finding some sort of exercise that will deal with the problem.
Let me cite a few examples.
I started developing aching pain in my knees after about ten years at my old job, which involved a lot of walking on concrete. After some experimentation, I found that if I did hamstring stretches the pain pretty much immediately disappeared. I added them to my daily regime and problem solved.
Another time I developed an itching hot pain in my arm pits after I got serious about writing and started spending more and more time on a keyboard. At first, I thought it was some sort of skin infection. But after some failed attempts with over-the-counter anti-fungal ointments, it occurred to me that I might be having arthritis issues in my shoulder joint. I added a relevant stretching routine to the day’s work out---problem solved. (I also got a more ergonomic keyboard, a joystick mouse, and, sit on a ‘kneeler’ chair. But though they were helpful, the added exercises finally resolved the issue.)
Probably the biggest health issue resolution for me, however, was the elimination of migraine headaches by doing regular taijiquan. I hadn’t really suffered much from these compared to some people, but they were still something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. These had been an issue for years before I started learning the art, but after I started doing the form I met someone who did suffer mightily from this ailment. She said that doing taijiquan every day had dramatically reduced the pain and frequency. At that point it occurred to me that it had been a very long time since I’d had one myself. At a later date, for a reason that escapes me now, I went a long time without doing any taijiquan and was treated to the return of migraines---which went away when I started regular practice again.
This health benefit issue is pretty important to taijiquan. There was a saying in my school that only sick people stay with it. That’s because unless you are suffering from something and see a real improvement from the practice, it’s very hard for most people to see the value in what tend to be a lot of quite hard-to-learn and hard-to-perfect exercises. If you are already feeling well, taking yoga or joining something fun like joining a pickleball league or softball team would seem to have a much better cost/benefit ratio.