Among people who do any martial arts, when they have any opinion at all about tai chi, is that it isn’t really a martial art at all. To them, saying you do tai chi as a martial art is a lot like saying you do “Combat Pilates.” A humorous (and slightly gross) video demonstrates the attitude most martial artists have toward the art:
I’ve been doing this since the 90s and even I think this is
funny!
To be fair, there is an element of truth to the charge. Very few people practice tai chi as a
martial art – most take it up for its benefits of balance, mobility, well-being
and so on, which is a perfectly good reason, certainly as we get older and have
no business getting into fights.
But for those who do train it as a martial art, it’s reasonable to ask “Why do
y’all go so slow?”
There are a number of reasons:
The slowness gently builds up lower-body and core strength, and upper body
agility
The Traditional 103-posture empty-hand form takes about 20-25 minutes to do at
the proper pace. If you were to rush
through it at “full speed,” it takes between 7 and 9 minutes. Practicing it over and over might develop
explosive power, but it won’t develop the “internal” strength necessary to do
the art properly. Plus, you’d just get
winded.
It encourages attention to detail
Tai chi can be considered a “thinking person’s martial art.” It uses structure, balance, active sensing,
timing and the mind rather than muscular power and brute strength. There is of course a trade-off, and that’s
the time it takes to get any good at it.
There are many elements to doing tai chi well, and it takes a long
time to learn them all, to say nothing of getting good at any of them at an
intuitive level. The payoff, however, is
that it’s a skill which leads to better health, balance, greater confidence and
peace-of-mind, and it can stay with you for your entire life.
It encourages awareness of ourselves, our surroundings and others
People didn’t really know how the wings of hummingbirds kept them in the air until
they were filmed in super-slow-motion.
They move too fast for us to see them in any detail. But it’s important to zoologists to see this
motion, if they want to understand their flight. In the same way, critical to tai chi is the innate
awareness of how we feel – when moving, when standing “still,” when getting
ready to move, etc. From there, we move
on to developing awareness of how our partner feels when we practice Push
Hands. We move slow to make it easier to
perceive the messages we’re receiving. We’d
no more be able to develop this sense while moving “full speed” than zoologists
can develop theories of hummingbird flight from looking at the blur of their
wings.
At some point, if we’re keen to pursue tai chi as a martial art, we will want
to begin moving faster, and we should.
But it can only come after we’re comfortable with the movements and after
we’ve begun understanding the “internal” aspects of our art. We speed things up when we’re ready. To do so earlier than this is premature.
