TaoBoxer wrote:Just sounds like the same ol thing to me though...... Don't lift weights or you'll never do Taiji correctly..... I don't buy it. My first Taiji teacher was an athlete. I saw pictures of him doing the Iron Cross on the rings when he was in college. It seems like a lot of the older teachers I meet who grew up in the 1920's and 30's were all quite athletic, as the "physical culture" ethos was very strong.
Truth is most of my technique is cleaner than it ever mas been. My connections are strong and my structure is sound. I don't really talk about the Qigong we do outside of the Kwoon, but I think I'm pretty on-track with that as well. I think it would help if someone could show me exactly what it is I am missing out by becoming physically stronger and increasing my cardivascular conditioning along with my qigong/neigong/zhuan zhang?
Lewitt
Truth is I have never fully resolved the issue of how and where weight training fits into internal training. Part of me thinks the admonitions against it are well founded, and part of me thinks that if you are going to do resistance training the kettle bells and similar methods are the way to go.
Athleticism doesn't require resistance training, although modern theory seems to be that it is a good baseline for almost any exercise.
The reason I posted what I did is in the post, I know both of you, and you don't appear to have met each other. I have respect for each of your abilities, for different reasons in in different ways, bot those differences aren't relevant.
But because you don't know each other there seemed to be a misunderstanding on your part as to where Bodywork was coming from and who he is. He was in great physical condition when I met him and also seemed to possess a very practical working knowledge of internal strength.
While I have figured out some parts of the internal strength puzzle, I haven't figured out all of it, and weight training is an issue that does appear to be a dividing line. Maybe both methods can lead to effective skills, but I'd bet those skills would have a very different flavor or feeling, if you will.