You Can Learn A Lot From Watching Girls
Posted: Sat Aug 25, 2012 9:30 pm
I'm actually listening to the Black Phillip show as I discovered this, so I didn't pay attention to the audio (multi-sensory-tasking), but watching Chinese girls do Chen taiji is useful because they tend to exaggerate the shen fa, which makes it more apparent for me. and they tend to be well trained since girls are smarter than boys, so I can use it as a 3D reference for what's going on in the form and steal it directly from them just by watching and following along with my qi.
You can count on the Chinese education system to make things very obvious and clear, so then you can learn by watching if you know what you are looking at. Chen style Taiji is such a great example of the Chinese education method, it can be broken down and taught to large numbers of people with consistency.
The better the player, the closer it is to being the standard. So after watching for a while you can get a sense of the standard. I see it it forms and push hands.
There is a curriculum that includes push hands and throwing techniques. You can count on people properly trained to do well in push hands competitions, which they do.
Of course I have the luxury of first hand experience with people trained in this type of system, which is vital for really getting the feel for things, but now with a solid foundation I can actually teach myself due to the high quality of internet video, as well as using text references.
Compared to 10 years ago, one could conceivably train oneself to a decent degree of skill using videos and other media, if the intelligence and talent is there to make use of these tools.