Formosa Neijia wrote:Heng and ha breathing are a vital part of the Yang family secret manuscripts translated by Chen Kung and they are as forceful as you can get so there goes the idea of taiji not having forceful breathing methods.
Sure.
You have to work with the breath DIRECTLY at some point.
If you work with breathing patterns, power breathing, you need to do it through special exercises and have good instruction.
I enjoy breath work of different kinds. My friend, a Hunggar lineage holder, taught me the Hunggar Dragon form which is essentially a short and condensed version of the Iron Wire set. Very powerful, based on breathing and sounds. The Neigong in a tai chi form is not designed in the same way. The internal practice is different.
It's not all hippy-dippy "natural" and just gonna happen on its own no matter how long you practice. The idea is to extend the inhales and the exhales causing you to breath fewer times per minute combined with relaxation that leads to greater efficiency in your moves because you're forcing the cells to work the same with less O2. Think of doing the same movements but breathing slower as you get better. The health benefits to this are enormous.
Well, it doesn’t just happen by itself in a hippy-wise manner, you need to practice correctly. The long Yang form is designed to do exactly what you propose here. Very relaxed and slow movement will make the breath slow, deep and full. You will really have what we could call whole body, or at least whole torso breathing. In faster forms like Chen and Sun styles, it’s very hard to relax deeply enough to reach this kind of full breathing.
Same applies to moving faster. You have to learn how to breath when moving fast, it's not the same breathing as moving slow, and it's its own training. This is one of the secrets to the fast form. Breath is a vital part of qi. In order to feel more qi, you must expand your breathing by increasing lung capacity and efficiency at the cellular level.
Yes, this training is also different. So I see no real point comparing traditional slow Yang form training with fast form. However, fast form also requires calmness and relaxation. It’s hard to achieve this in faster form, or “small/fast frame” if you haven’t already learned to control your breath by calming down your mind and relax.
This last part is exactly why someone might want a harder edge to their taiji when solo training -- so they can develop their ability to move quickly and increase lung capacity leading to more qi/health which in turn helps in a fighting situation. People have been combining arts for years probably because they get tired of the dogmatism of "you can't do that, that's not REAL ________" and see how another art might contribute to their practice.
Two good points here, though I am not sure if I would agree completely. I wouldn’t see it necessary to add any “hard edge” in order to be able to move quickly and increase lung capacity.Testing and learning different arts is ok. Combining things is also ok if you can balance them properly. It’s good to learn
about other arts, but it’s not necessary to combine arts.
Take a deeper look and you'll see Yang style's heng/ha training is similar to white cranes breathing.
I am not totally convinced. Similar maybe to sounds practice. But I don’t really see the neigong in Hakka arts and in northern IMA as comparable, as there are principles and ideas with quite strong differences. I can see tai chi and White Crane practiced together, side by side, but there will be some conflicting ideas if you try to combine them.
