the rum soaked fist: internal martial arts forum

1:40 to 1:50

Mark Rasmus issues an amazing, almost unbelievable comment over yielding in push hands.

Thoughts? Do you do something similar in your school?

Just doesn’t get it
Wrong from his first statement
The only thing he gets right is the order he uses the hands apart from the fact he starts on the wrong side

To my mind, you only make a statement like that (1:40 to 1:50) if you regard push hands as an activity that has no significant relationship to the rest of tai chi chuan and to the world in general. Why yield (in tuishou)? Because what you do in a (relatively) slow and gentle and friendly way in tuishou should be reasonably or fully congruent with what you do much faster when someone is trying to hit you, grab you, throw you or even stab you. So why practice this slowly at all? Because training body and mind more slowly and without real danger opens the way much better to change and development at a deeper level. (The subconscious/unconscious will still be perceiving plenty of danger, even if everything is being done in a more or less 'nice' way, so working with relaxation here can still have a transformative effect). "Slow is smooth, smooth is fast" and so on. Also it's really nice.
At the essential level the body should always be softening and 'accepting', that's the basis for both peng and lu. I won't talk any more about peng here, time is very limited, but when it comes to training tai chi reflexes, if the other guy has already got his hand on my torso, or is set to be doing that in the next fraction of a second, then I already want to be yielding (lu jin). Because the push stands for a strike, or even something pointy. I'm sure iron shirt is nice to have, if you have the time and dedication to train it accordingly, but no way would I want to use that as my primary defence against anything incoming. So yield.
(And just for the record, since you can never be sure: 'yield' does not mean 'dodge' or 'pull away' or 'retreat')

I didn't interpret what he said the same way you all are. I think he is saying that is better to practice with some resistance, as it makes it more realistic. Similar to how weights in a farmers walk can help correct posture relative to no weights.

And when he talks about yielding when there is no pressure, I personally don't think this is wrong either. Why would you yield when there is no reason to do so? That is the mind making up and doing something based on a future scenario that may or may not happen.

Mrwawa wrote:I didn't interpret what he said the same way you all are. I think he is saying that is better to practice with some resistance, as it makes it more realistic. Similar to how weights in a farmers walk can help correct posture relative to no weights.

I think you are 'interpreting' a lot more than the other thread contributors in this instance.

And when he talks about yielding when there is no pressure, I personally don't think this is wrong either. Why would you yield when there is no reason to do so? That is the mind making up and doing something based on a future scenario that may or may not happen.

An average punch will be approaching your body at a speed of, say, 10 metres or 30 feet per second. Or faster. If I don't manage to deal with it earlier in one of several ways, then I'm aiming to yield my body to the impact as much as possible. The "future scenario" of a fist (or worse) impacting on my body is just a fraction of a second in the future.
If by "a future scenario that may or may not happen" you mean that NOW we're doing push hands and MAYBE someone might actually try to hurt me SOMETIME IN THE FUTURE but that's not important for our practice today, then that's fine if - as I said at the start - you are training push hands with no connection or rationale relating to martial art. If you aim to do tai chi as a martial art - at least partly, in addition to its other benefits - then when training tuishou/push hands you need to join up the dots and see the actual picture.

You have two things correct there
First after initial slow training it is done at full speed
Secondly if the pusher is doing the pushes incorrectly or poorly you don’t yield
As I have stated previously I teach the seven pushes as set of punches to be practiced as a solo set
One thing about doing it fast is for want of a better word eating up his pushes in your arms so you don’t ward off

Hi Giles,

I didn't mean and don't define interpret as a negative. We are always engaged in interpretation of what we are seeing, hearing, and experiencing.

In my limited experience with push hands, it is geared toward developing listening and yielding skills that are based on contact. I haven't ever worked with push hands to avoid punches. Which made me think about it a little and that there seems to be little, again in my experience, in tjq oriented toward avoiding punches as one would practice in boxing.

Does anyone work explicitly on this skill in their tjq practice?

On reflection, there are a lot of defensive moves in tjq, they just use the arms to make contact with a punch and redirect. Not sure why I wasn't thinking about it.

Which made me think about it a little and that there seems to be little, again in my experience, in tjq oriented toward avoiding punches as one would practice in boxing.

Tai Chi and much other traditional Chinese martial arts focus in making contact and continue to work from contact. A good Tai Chi practitioner who has fighting experience would not trade punches and chase points in the same way as in boxers, they go straight in, make contact to his opponent and stick to him.

Does anyone work explicitly on this skill in their tjq practice?

No, but I have practiced what I described above. Through the years I have done sparring with people from different martial arts, but I've tried to get away from the common sparring mind-set and instead studied how to use Tai Chi strategy and methods in a realistic manner. I prefer to not mix punches into push hands practice, and I prefer sparring against non-Tai Chi practitioners.

Appledog wrote:

1:40 to 1:50

Mark Rasmus issues an amazing, almost unbelievable comment over yielding in push hands.

Thoughts? Do you do something similar in your school?

This is the essence of investing in loss isn't it? I feel like we just talked about this in one of John Wang's threads

In the 7PP you use it much like bobbing and weaving in boxing
It is the ultimate Roll with the punches
Although you don’t use the arms at all in this exercise it is used in the ones at follow it
Thé body leads the hands not otherwise
Imagine you are working against a knife you don’t want the body to be there if the block fails

My first and top priority in any fighting situation is to evade and neutralize attacks, i.e. get the hell out of the way of incoming force, until the opportunity to apply finishing countermeasures appears.

This may occur immediately upon first contact in some self-defense encounters, when attacked on a line, or it may occur after a series of exchanges in sportive fighting, but in either case, it is essentially yielding defensively prior to countering offensively.

What he said between 1:40 and 1:50 made perfect sense to me. I disagree that it's "amazing, almost unbelievable", or that it is a "comment over yielding" at all. He's not knocking the concept of yielding in the slightest there, IMO. (Haven't watched the entire video though)

The concept of "yielding" is "deceptive" because when you do so, the appearance of "non action" comes to mind.
As a reference point of contention, my own strategy and understanding per tuishu concept and principle is that "yielding'
is (should be) more of a stage of "tingjin" listening while interpreting ways/opportunities of "action' within the penglujiankao matrix.

Positioning is important to respond to tingjin providing one has the tools/knowhow to effectively manuever away from the brunt of the "Push"
or trap (of either hand and/or foot) of the opponent and avoidance of such.