malvasia bianca

My Tai Chi teacher is teaching a push hands class this summer; so I figured it wouldn’t hurt for me to write up my reasons for why Tai Chi students might want to spend time on push hands.

To me, the question of whether or not to do push hands comes down to why you’re interested in Tai Chi. Of course if you both like Tai Chi and like fighting, then you’d be interested in push hands; so I don’t need to convince you! But most Tai Chi practicioners I know don’t like fighting and don’t get into physical conflicts, so that reason doesn’t apply to them.

Another reason why many people like Tai Chi is because you like the choreography of the form. This is where a lot of us started; and Tai Chi forms are beautiful, there’s a lot of depth in them. Honestly, if this is your main reason for doing Tai Chi, then I actually wouldn’t recommend that you spend time on push hands: spend your time doing the form, doing small segments of the form, having your form reviewed by your teacher and senior students, taking a video of your form and watching it.

A third reason why some people like Tai Chi is because Tai Chi has us ask what’s going on inside of our bodies, and has somewhat unusual answers to that question. Maybe you started off just learning the form, but your teacher kept on bringing up the term “Song”; at first, you thought that Song was the same as plain old relaxing, but now you’re realizing that there’s quite a bit more subtlety going on in the concept. Or maybe you’ve been hearing about how spirals are important in Tai Chi; at first you thought that was about how your hands and arms moved, but now you’re starting to feel like those spirals should be going further across and even through the middle of your body. Maybe you don’t yet understand how to use your Dantian in Tai Chi, but you’d like to.

This group of people is whom I want to target with this post. If you fall into this category, you’re probably already doing something other than just form practice: maybe you do silk reeling, maybe you do standing meditation, maybe you do qigong, maybe you’re trying to understand Peng, Lu, Ji, and An. And those are all great things to do! But push hands is a very useful tool as well.

Basically, if you want to understand what’s going on inside your body and improve its quality, what are your options? One is introspection (combined with practice): for example, you can try to exhibit Song or Peng in the context of a given position, you can then pay attention to what’s happening both inside and on the surface of your body while you’re doing that, and then you can adjust accordingly. Another very useful way to improve is with the help of a teacher: your teacher can see what you’re doing well and where you could use improvement, and can help adjust your posture and movements accordingly.

Push hands gives a third route for evaluation and improvement, because it lets you see the effect of incoming forces on you, and of you on others. For example, if you’re working on Song, what happens if somebody else is pushing on you? Does Song let you gracefully deal with that force, or do you tense up and get easily pushed over? If you’re trying to maintain Peng, does that cause incoming pushes to bounce off of you, do you naturally rotate and redirect the attacks, or does your Peng turn into muscular bracing? Without push hands practice, it’s pretty easy to fool yourself into thinking that your techniques are much better developed than they actually are.

The above three reasons aren’t the only reasons why people study Tai Chi, of course. Lots of people are doing it for health; push hands can help with that or it can hurt. In particular, if you’re working on maintaining your balance and stability, push hands can help you test and expand the range where you feel stable. (I wouldn’t recommend that you dive into push hands until you’re feeling secure doing Tai Chi forms, though.) But you don’t want to do push hands with people who will knock you over or otherwise stress your body, so find the right partners.

And if you’re doing Tai Chi for social reasons, push hands can be great for that, too. Of course when I’m doing push hands, I want to spend most of my time paying attention to my and my partner’s body. But, honestly, we spend some of our time talking even while we’re in the middle of push hands drills, and that’s good too. (A discussion during push hands is what gave me the nudge to write this post, actually.)

I don’t want to proselytize push hands: I like push hands, I’m glad I started doing push hands regularly a couple of years ago, but I could also say that about a lot of things that I spend time on. But if you are one of those people who is interested in the internals of Tai Chi in addition to or instead of the choreography of the forms, then think about working some push hands into your training: it will teach you about how your Tai Chi is progressing in ways that you can’t learn through any other mechanism.