training with Shen Tiegen

[grzegorz]

I believe you misunderstood me Serena but that's fine.

[grzegorz]

Well I will comment because Shen's style is his own and his taiji is not your teacher's taiji. I think judging someone from a video is as ridiculous as judging someone's skill you have never met.

Not at all. It is relatively easy to tell someone's level of skill by how they do their form, the caveat being, if you know what to look for. Skilled judges will usually award points very close to each other. Of course this is intuitive, a good teacher will be able to judge the quality of a student's form, or what would he be doing as a teacher. For me, I would love to study with Shen Tiegen, sure I can see some "problems" with what he is doing but is that really such a bad thing? Nobody is perfect, and in the end it may be a problem with my understanding and not with his. But it's important to at least be able to pick these things out -- to know what to look for.

Even when I was training with Shen he always told me that my taiji will by own and not his, this is the advantage I believe MMA has over CMA, in MMA everyone knows that there isn't one size that fits all meanwhile if you show a taiji guy the Shanghai Wu fast form you will likely hear, "That's not taiji."

Assuming that the person in question (whomever, as a generalization) is actually doing taijiquan and not some other martial art in the guise of taijiquan, more common than most would care to admit, the important thing will be what size your circles are. In comparing your form to other players. A professional teacher (versus a professional martial artist) would start you off with very large and open movements, and then you would progress to something smaller and more compact. A professional martial artist, versus a professional teacher, would be more interested in getting you to conform to a particular form. This is, I feel, Taijiquan's greatest problem -- people are not being taught properly in the first place so it takes them twice as long to get any amount of skill. It discourages a lot of people. If it was presented in a slightly different way I believe a lot more people would understand what Taijiquan was about right away. Instead they are asked to copy their master by rote and only once they get that down pat can they begin to learn the inner mechanics. Of course, this is just how it has to be with public education, for many reasons (time, availability, space concerns even if nothing else).

So what you're not seeing under the hood is all the circles and applications and what not are all pretty much standard, it's just getting to that level through the form-colored glasses of your sifu will be difficult, who may be a very good martial artist, but just not a very good teacher. It's so rare to find the two in good combination.

What I was referring to comes after you had all the basics down after years and years of training.