 The three mistakes in Tai Chi are very common that people make. So one of the main advantages of learning Tai Chi is for health, for your joints, for your bones, for breathing, for relaxation and meditation. But also, we learn a concept called rooting or sinking. So as you can see in the demonstration, Will here, how much do you weigh? 220 pounds. 220 pounds? Look at his muscles. Look at his arms, holy cow. He's as big as my leg. I'm already, I'm only about 150 pounds. Look at my skinny arms. And I'm really able to resist him pushing me and I'm fairly relaxed. Without using a lot of strength, I can resist his push. And how hard were you pushing there? About 90 to 100%. 90 to 100%. He's putting all his strength in there and I'm just standing there, not using too much strength. So the key is don't fight strength with strength. Don't fight force with force. So in Tai Chi, you will teach you how to use structure, the structure of your skeletal structure, of your bones, of your joints, of your alignment and also of your mind of what the intention is in order to resist force using just structure. So one of the key things that you need to have structure. Well, there's three mistakes that people make that destroy structure in Tai Chi. And very few people that actually practice Tai Chi actually know and actually experience and know how to do this. So stay tuned and I'm gonna show you those to you. Mistake number three is not being relaxed. So a lot of people are confused about relaxation and about being placid. There's two different things. For example, if I'm being placid, he pushes and that's placid, right? There's nothing there. I'm not saying it's placid, okay? But being relaxed in concept called shong or shong in Chinese. It's being loose but relaxed but still have structure. So he's pushing, he's pushing harder, harder, harder, harder. I'm relaxed, see? My hands relax when he's pushing harder, harder. I'm still relaxed. See how I'm relaxed my arms? I'm still able to resist them, okay? So that's the difference between being shong which means loose and placid. But in English, we use the word relaxation which is very easy to misinterpret. So number one key, when you practice your tai chi, for example, practice your tai chi, your hands are always relaxed. There's only a tense state and a relaxed state. Now when we go to the gym, most people practice being tense. Use your muscles, tense up to get more power which is okay, it works. But if you practice being tense all the time, practice being tense like this, then if you're fighting against someone bigger than you, you're at a disadvantage because his force will be stronger than your force. So rather than use force, I use shong. I use relaxation. So when you practice your tai chi, make sure that your hands are not open like this because that's too much tension. Make sure your hands are not closed like this because that's too much tension. Your hands should always be in the middle. When it's relaxed, it's completely relaxed. Imagine holding an egg in your hand. When you're open, just open them slightly. Just stretch them out a little bit. When they're relaxed, relaxed. When they're open, just open a little. You always want to feel an energy ball in the palms of your hands. So it's very subtle. For example, when I do this, I'm combining two things. First of all, my hands are lifting up. At the same time, my hands are going from relaxed to slightly open, and then back to relaxed. Slightly open. It's a very minor detail, but what that does is it teaches you to, even though you're using tension, see my hands are slightly open, that I'm still in a relaxed state. So I never go from, I never go up to 100%. I go up to maybe 60 to 70% tension. Never go above that. Because once you go above that, then you start to use force. You stay below, let's say, 60% tension, then you're not using force, you're using relaxation. And the key to Tai Chi is to train yourself so that you can still use relaxation at 60%, 50%, 40%, 30%, eventually using no tension at all to be able to resist someone with force. So that's what takes the training. That's what takes the many, many hours of repetition and training, doing the push hands that we just showed you in the demonstration. Doing that for a lot that you can learn how to use relaxation. Mistake number two in Tai Chi is to not use your dan tian or not use your core, the center of gravity, to direct the movements, okay? So there's a very simple movement called followed hands. So I'm using my core to direct my body. So say I'm using just one hand. See how my core is moving in a circle to direct my arm. So the core or the dan tian leads the arms. Sun daishou, that's what I say in Chinese. The body leads the hand. So that's number two mistake. Here's how it looks like when you make the mistake. See a difference? My hand is leading my core. So there's very little power or connection when I'm moving my hand. I'm just moving my hand. I'm not even leading it with the core. Now I'll do what you're doing correctly. So how you can practice is actually put your finger or put your hand, fingers touch your belly button and then feel it move before your hand moves. But now you get the difference, okay? And the difference, you can tell. Let's see, I'm just using my hand like this. Just my hand. Okay, pain-wise, how much is that? Yeah, fill it, yeah. Okay, one to 10. About a four. Four, okay? Now I'm using my hip. I mean, using my dan tian. Yeah. How much pain, more pain is there? It brings it up to about a seven. A seven, right? And I didn't use more power, I just used my waist. And if I use more, I can get it up to 10, right? So that's the key of generating power is to use your dan tian. So let me show you a demonstration in the 24 move tai chi form. How to use the dan tian to guide your hands. So let me show you the wrong way of doing this, okay? I'm trying very hard to do it the wrong way because I practice so much the proper way. But what I'm doing is I'm leading with my hands and then I move my body. So a very basic fundamental in early tai chi if you're a beginner is to learn how to move your hips. Now when you get advanced tai chi, you actually do the opposite. You learn to move your hands before your hips. It's contradictory, isn't it? Okay, but I'll show you how to do that in the next lesson or the later lesson. And it goes with the concept that Bruce Lee taught which is to move your hands before your feet just like in fencing. You wanna move your hands before your feet. The reason is because when somebody attacks you, I don't have time to move my hip first and do a big tai chi move, right? If somebody attacks me, I have to move my hand first. So what's the difference? See, before you learn tai chi and once you learn tai chi, they move their hands first but there's no power. And then they'll practice tai chi and then they'll learn how to use the hips to get power. But they practice enough tai chi and now they'll get back to the beginning. They use their hands first, but now it comes with power. How does that happen, okay? So let me show you again. Let's see his attacking, right? I don't have time to move my hips and do a big tai chi move like in a lot of demonstrations, right? I only have time to just move my hand up, right? But there's power there, how that happened, right? I just move my hand, right? I'm not gonna move my hand and then my body. Go ahead and do it again. I move my hand and then my body. I didn't move my hip first. Here's me moving my hips first. Too slow, right? I have to go one, two. You already hit me, okay? But now I wanna do it so that I move my hand first. Okay, so how does that work? Maybe in a later lesson, I can show you how to do that. Mistake number one that you can make in tai chi is to not sink your tailbone, which means not to open your back. Now I'm gonna show Will, for example, because I'm wearing a jacket you can't see. So you see, if you take your shirt and tighten it up, your spine has a curve here, right? So most people have that curve naturally, but in tai chi, you actually don't want that curve. In tai chi, you want to get rid of that curve. So you wanna sink down the tailbone, okay? So that you can feel that this is flatter. And ideally it's actually a C, it's a couple. So what you need to do is sink your tailbone down even more, suck in your gut, and then stretch this out like this, okay? So now I can feel his lower back is straightening up, okay? But it's still not enough, you want it to stick out. You push out over here, push, push, push, push, that's better, okay? So now you can feel that it's more like a C, whereas starting about before, see how it's like an S. So you don't want that. And you can see a lot of people doing tai chi with a back like this is actually very bad for your back. And also it makes you disconnected. It disconnects your upper body with your lower body. The key to having a strong core and dan qian is to connect your upper body with your lower body. And this is the main mistake that people make by having the S curve of the spine. And what it does is disconnects your body. So for example, I'm gonna do an S curve on purpose. My spine is like, my belly's sticking out. I'm trying to, and he pushes on my hand. See, I'll automatically go back. There's no resistance. But now I stick my back out. I drop my hip and make this into a C. And then now he pushes on it. What happened? It's a different. You're more rooted. It's rooted. See, what happens when you curve your back is now that energy transfer goes straight through your spine and then into your hips and into the legs, into the knees, into the ground. When you break that connection by curving your spine, now all the energy just goes in your spine. It doesn't go to your legs. So that's why he pushes, right? That energy goes to the spine and then I go. So that's the number one mistake that you can make in Tai Chi. So when you practice your Tai Chi, make sure that you always check. Put my hand back behind my back. I see, it's straight. Is it a C? You don't want to be like this. So even when you do your moves, think about that. Think that the spine is going to be straight. One exercise you can do is to do very slow squats against the wall. So that's where the wall is against me. I want to first put my back against the wall and then see if there's any space behind my back. I see my hand behind my back. If there's a space that I can see my hand behind, then there's too much space. So I need to get rid of that space. I want all my spine to be touching the wall. Once I get that, then I can go up and down. Just go halfway and go back up, sliding my spine up and down the wall. Now, after I do that, and I'm good at it, then I can go all the way down, all the way down, keeping my spine straight and touching the wall all the way. And do it slow like this. So that's going to be very hard on your lower back, but it strengthens your lower back. It strengthens your leg. So that's one key in Tai Chi of creating connectedness. So stay tuned, I'm going to show you the bonus mistake that people make. So the bonus mistake that you can make in Tai Chi is doing it too fast. I know everybody says this, you want to do Tai Chi slow, but many people don't understand why you do Tai Chi so slow. Well, today we talked about three mistakes. Number one, relaxation. Number two, using your Dan Tian to lead your hands. And number three, having a proper spine alignment. What do all those things mean? All those things mean connectedness of your whole body, integration of your whole body. If your hand moves, your whole body moves. If your feet move, your whole body moves. Everything's connected. And the reason we do Tai Chi so slow is that we're training that connectedness. And it's impossible to train it doing it fast. That's why we do it slow. If we can do it fast and still get connectedness, then everybody would do Tai Chi fast. But the reason we do it slow is because Tai Chi doing it slow is probably the only way you can train that connectedness in your body by combining all the techniques that we learned. Relaxation, leading with the Dan Tian. And later on, how to use your breath to relax and connect your body to and your mind. So there's many aspects of learning how to connect your whole body and mind as an integrated machine. Integrated unit, in order to function totally and holistically. Okay, so when it comes in, you sink your chest. Yeah. So you press here. Like I'm pretty solid here, right? Yeah. Okay, you're pushing down to my head. You expand my chest, open and you go. And then you can have the chin. There's actually sink your chest and expand your chest. So now there's another, not going mechanism that blends, right? So there's blending and it's sinking more. Let's try and do it, see. So when you're sinking, it sinks down to the bottom. Chin is tucked, chest is in. And then you push hard as well. It's not going anywhere, right? Thank you, expand a bit. And you know, you don't bounce. You cry. No, no. Yeah. So you contract? Yeah. Easily when we bounce it hard. Because when you can try, you feel like, oh, I can push the guy, right? Yeah. You feel like you can push me, or you think you got me, right? And we don't use that then. Okay. Don't use this. Yeah. Use, just relax. Like when you push in here, Yeah. I'm totally relaxed. I'm just using my whole structure. Yeah. In my body. Okay. So this is actually touching my body. Yeah. That's you in. Yeah. So you feel like you got me, right? Yeah. But it's actually, there's more. There's more room. Yeah. All right. Just relax this whole thing. Suck in there, everything. So it feels like, oh yeah, I got you now. But you feel like now it's on your back leg, right? Yeah. Now you just expand. Yeah. Okay. All right. It's so new. Okay. Put that into your sucking in there. So I'm ready. I'm already sucked in. Yeah. Yeah, I want to make sure it's elbow. But then you need to make sure the elbow, cap the elbow. Yeah. Cap the elbow. So it's like like this. You can just. Push it up there. Okay. But you try to elbow me a little bit. You do that. Elbow, elbow me. Okay. At least I got control of the elbow. Okay. I don't, right? Then if you feel yourself moving this way, you're right there. You're going to just change it to here. Here. Okay. All right. So you need to in, cap the elbow. This is sucking in. This is sucking in. Just sucking in and then expand. Step here and I bump into you like that, right? Yeah. Every step through deeper. My feet haven't touched the ground yet and I've already made contact. Okay. So now all the momentum is going through you instead of going to the ground. Okay. Okay. You try that. I'll stand here and you just try it. Bump into it. Okay, you got to step really deep through it. So I'll step with this foot or this one. Like that. You're going to check. Yeah. So that works too, but that's not the technique. So you want to step deeper today. You want to take my place. So here's my center. You want to be there. So my foot basically has to be here. Oh yeah. All right. Yeah. Let's just see how deep you have to go. So. That's better. Okay. But then don't need for, be straight. Yeah. Boom. It's almost straight. It's like one straight step. Okay. I'm trying to drop my height down. I don't feel like that. When I get here, my shoulder's here. Yeah. Don't use your shoulder. Yeah. This one technique is to use your shoulder. So be. That's for a more combata. Yeah. Because you can use your shoulder bone. Yeah. But for training, you're just going to bump the chest. So. Okay. Like that. Okay. So relax your shoulder. Don't do this. Okay. Okay. Yeah. But don't stick it out like this. I'm trying to pull it back. Yeah. So just relax. All right. You're not stepping people down. So feel that when I step here. So you, you don't want to step then go. Yeah. You have to go. You have to pay before I land. Okay. You see I do. So before my foot even touches the ground, I'm already there. Yeah. Or at the same time. Yeah. So. Yeah. There you go. No problem. I can feel that a lot more than. Okay. But you step first. So you want to aim for behind the guy. The thing is to make a frame. Yeah. Make this round. Yeah. Sink your chest. So this is like one big, one big cup. Yeah. One big cup is gone. So. Okay. Because you stick out any part of the cup then it's just going to go in. But it won't affect the whole thing. Okay. So you make this round. Go. Okay. Yeah. So there's two ways you can sink down. Yeah. Or you can rise up. For you to sink. That's rising up. Okay. Yeah. So you go. Sink up. Yeah. Sink up. Okay. Or you can sink down. So it's like going downwards. Yeah. All right. You got it. Precious? Yeah. Same idea, right? Yeah. All right. So now you just extend this. What's that for? So now you're bringing your whole body into it. Into the plate. Yeah. So. I'm going to show you the three mistakes in Tai Chi that are very common that people make. So one of the main advantages of learning Tai Chi is for health, for your joints, for your bones, for breathing, for relaxation and meditation. But also, you learn a concept called rooting or sinking. So as you can see in the demonstration, Will here, how much do you weigh? 220 pounds. 220 pounds? Look at his muscles. Look at his arms. Holy cow. He's as big as my leg. Right? I'm only about 150 pounds. Look at my skinny arms. And I'm able to resist them pushing me. And I'm fairly relaxed. Without using a lot of strength, I can resist this push. And how hard were you pushing there? Now you're 100%. He's putting all the strength in there. And I'm just standing there, not using too much strength. So the key is don't fight strength with strength. Don't fight force with force. So in Tai Chi, you'll teach you how to use structure. The structure of your skeletal structure, of your bones, of your joints, of your alignment, and also of your mind of what the intention is in order to resist force using just structure. So what are the key things that you need to have structure? Well, there's three mistakes that people make that destroy structure in Tai Chi. And very few people that actually practice Tai Chi actually know and actually experience and know how to do this. So stay tuned and I'm gonna show you those to you. Mistake number three is not being relaxed. So a lot of people are confused about relaxation and about being placid. There's two different things. For example, if I'm being placid, he pushes and that's placid, right? There's nothing there. I'm not think it's placid, okay? But be relaxed in concept called shong, or shong in Chinese. It's being loose, but relaxed, but still have structure. So he's pushing, he's pushing harder, harder, harder, harder. I'm relaxed, see? My hand's relaxed when he's pushing harder, harder. I'm still relaxed. See how my relax my arm is? I'm still able to resist them, okay? So that's the difference between being shong, which means loose and placid. But in English, we use the word relaxation, which is very easy to misinterpret. So number one key, when you practice your tai chi, for example, practice your tai chi, your hands are always relaxed. There's only a tense state and a relaxed state. Now when we go to the gym, most people practice being tense. Use your muscles, tense up to get more power, which is okay, it works. But if you practice being tense all the time, and practice being tense like this, then if you're fighting against someone bigger than you, you're at a disadvantage because his force will be stronger than your force. So rather than use force, I use song, I use relaxation. So when you practice your tai chi, make sure that your hands are not open like this because that's too much tension. Because your hands are not closed like this because that's too much tension. Your hands should always be in the middle. When it's relaxed, it's completely relaxed. Imagine holding an egg in your hand. When you're open, just open them slightly. Just stretch them out a little bit. When they're relaxed, relaxed. When they're open, just open a little. You always wanna feel the energy ball in the palms of your hands. So it's very subtle. For example, when I do this, I'm combining two things. First of all, my hands are lifting up. At the same time, my hands are going from relaxed to slightly open. And then back to relaxed, slightly open. It's a very minor detail, but what that does is it teaches you to even though you're using tension, see my hands are slightly open, that I'm still in a relaxed state. So I never go from, I never go up to 100%. I go up to maybe 60 to 70% tension. Never go above that. Because once you go above that, then you start to use force. If you stay below, let's say 60% tension, then you're not using force, you're using relaxation. And the key to Tai Chi is to train yourself so that you can still use relaxation at 60%, 50%, 40%, 30%, eventually using no tension at all to be able to resist someone with force. So that's what takes the training. That's what takes the many, many hours and repetition and training. Doing the push hands that we just showed you in the demonstration. Doing that for a lot, you can learn how to use relaxation. Mistake number two in Tai Chi is to not use your dan tian or not use your core, the center of gravity, to direct the movements, okay? So there's a very simple movement called followed hands. So I'm using my core to direct my body. Just say I'm using just one hand. See how my core is moving in a circle to direct my arm. So the core or the dan tian leads the arms. That's what I say in Chinese. The body leads the hand. So that's number two mistake. Here's how it looks like when you make the mistake. See a difference? My hand is leading my core. So there's very little power or connection when I'm moving my hand. I'm just moving my hand. I'm not even leading it with the core. Okay, now do as you're doing correctly. So how you can practice is actually put your finger or put your hand, your fingers touch your belly button and then feel it move before your hand moves. But now you get the difference, okay? And the difference, you can tell. Let's see, I'm just using my hand like this. Just my hand. Okay, pain-wise, how much is that? Good, you got it. Really, yeah. Okay, one to 10. About a four. Four, okay. Now I'm using my hip, I mean using my dan tian. Yeah. How much pain, more pain is there? About a seven. A seven, right? And I didn't use more power, I just used my waist. And if I use more, I can get it up to 10, right? So that's the key of generating power is to use your dan tian. So let me show you a demonstration in the 24 move tai chi form. I'll how to use the dan tian to guide your hand. So let me show you the wrong way of doing this, okay? I'm trying very hard to doing the wrong way because I practice so much the proper way. But what I'm doing is I'm leading with my hands and then I move my body. So a very basic fundamental in early tai chi if you're a beginner is to learn how to move your hips. Now when you get advanced tai chi, you actually do the opposite. You learn to move your hands before your hips. It's contradictory, isn't it? Okay, but I'll show you how to do that in the next lesson or in a later lesson. And it goes with the concept that Bruce Lee taught which is to move your hands before your feet just like in fencing, you wanna move your hands before your feet. The reason is because when somebody attacks you, I don't have time to move my hip first and do a big to giant tai chi move, right? If somebody attacks me, I have to move my hand first. So what's the difference? See, before you learn tai chi and once you learn tai chi they move their hands first, but there's no power. And then they practice tai chi and then they'll learn how to use the hips to get power. But they practice enough tai chi and now they'll go back to the beginning. They use their hands first, but now it comes with power. How does that happen? So let me show you again. Let's see his attacking, right? I don't have time to move my hips and do a big tai chi move like in a lot of demonstrations, right? I only have time to just move my hand up, right? But just power there, how that happened, right? I just move my hand, right? I'm not gonna move my hand and then my body. Go do it again. I move my hand and then my body. I didn't move my hip first. Just me moving my hips first. Too slow, right? I have to go one, two. You already hit me, okay? But now I wanna do it so that I move my hand first. Okay, so how does that work? Maybe in a later lesson, I can show you how to do that. Mistake number one that you can make in tai chi is to not sink your tailbone, which means not to open your back. Now I'm gonna show Will, for example, because I'm wearing a jacket you can't see. So you see, if you take your shirt and tighten it up, your spine has a curve here, right? So most people have that curve naturally, but in tai chi, you actually don't want that curve. In tai chi, you want to get rid of that curve. So you wanna sink down the tailbone, okay? So that you can feel that this is flatter. And ideally it's actually a C, it's a couple. So what you need to do is sink your tailbone down even more. Suck in your gut and then stretch this out like this, okay? So now I can feel his lower back is straightening up, okay? But it's still not enough. You want it to stick out. You push out over here, push, push, push, push. That's better, okay? So now you can feel that it's more like a C, where I started about before. See how it's like an S. So you don't want that. And you can see a lot of people doing tai chi with a back like this is actually very bad for your back and also it makes you disconnected. It disconnects your upper body with your lower body. The key to having a strong core and dan qian is to connect your upper body with your lower body. And this is the main mistake that people make by having the S curve of the spine. And what it does is disconnects your body. So for example, I'm gonna do an S curve on purpose. My spine is like my belly sticking out. And I'm trying to, and he pushes on my hand. See, I'll automatically go back. There's no resistance. But now I stick my back out. I drop my hip, I make this into a C. And then now he pushes on it. What happened? It's a different. Yeah, you're more rooted. It's rooted. See, what happens when you curve your back is now that energy transfer goes straight through your spine and then into your hips and into the legs, into the knees, into the ground. When you break that connection by curving your spine, now all the energy just goes in your spine. It doesn't go through your legs. So that's why he pushes, right? That energy goes to the spine and then I go. So that's the number one mistake that you can make in Tai Chi. So when you practice your Tai Chi, make sure that you always check. Put my hand back behind my back. I see, it's straight. Is it a C? You don't want to be like this. So even when you do your moves, think about that. Think that the spine is going to be straight. One exercise you can do is to do very slow squats against the wall. So that's the wall against me. I want to first put my back against the wall and then see if there's any space behind my back. See if I slip my hand behind my back. If there's a space that I can slip my hand behind, then there's too much space. So I need to get rid of that space. I want all my spine to be touching the wall. Once I get that, then I can go up and down. Just go halfway and go back up, sliding my spine up and down the wall. Now, after I do that and I'm good at it, then I can go all the way down, all the way down, keeping my spine straight and touching the wall all the way. And do it slow like this. So that's going to be very hard on your lower back, but it strengthens your lower back. It strengthens your leg. So that's one key in Tai Chi of creating connectedness. So stay tuned, I'm going to show you the bonus mistake that people make. So the bonus mistake that you can make in Tai Chi is doing it too fast. I know everybody says this, you want to do Tai Chi slow, but many people don't understand why you do Tai Chi so slow. Well, today we talked about three mistakes. Number one, relaxation. Number two, using your dan tian to lead your hands. Number three, having a proper spine alignment. What do all those things mean? All those things mean connectedness of your whole body, integration of your whole body. If your hand moves, your whole body moves. If your feet move, your whole body moves. Everything's connected. And the reason we do Tai Chi so slow is that we're training that connectedness and it's impossible to train it doing it fast. That's why we do it slow. If we can do it fast and still get connectedness, then everybody would do Tai Chi fast. But the reason we do it slow is because Tai Chi doing it slow is probably the only way you can train that connectedness in your body by combining all the techniques that we learned. Relaxation, leading with the dan tian and later on how to use your breath to relax and connect your body to and your mind. So there's many aspects of learning how to connect your whole body and mind as an integrated machine, integrated unit in order to function totally and holistically. Okay, so when it comes in, you sink your chest. Yeah. So you press here, like I'm pretty solid here, right? Because you're pushing it down to my back, right, they expand my chest, and then you go, I don't even have to come in. But there's actually, so now there's another, not going mechanism that blends, right? So there's blending and sinking more. I try to do it to see. So when you're sinking, it sinks down to the back. Chin is tucked, chest is in, and then you push hard as well. It's not going anywhere, right? You expand a bit and you don't have to cry. No. Come here, pull the shoulders. Yeah. Pull the shoulders, can you, please? So you contract? Yeah. Easily when we balance it hard. Because when you contract, you feel like, oh, I can push the guy, right? Yeah. You feel like you can push me, right? You think you got me, right? So we don't push the guy. Okay. Don't use this. Yeah. Use, just relax. Like when you push on here, I totally relax. I'm just using my whole structure and my body. Mm, okay. So this is actually the touching of my body. Yeah. I let you in. Yeah. So you feel like you got me, right? Yeah. There's more. There's more room. Yeah. All right. Just relax this whole thing. Suck in there, you think? So it feels like, oh yeah, I got you now. But you feel like now it's on your back leg, right? Yeah. Now you just expand. Yeah, okay. All right. It's so new. Okay. Right? Sucking in there. So I'm ready. I'm already sucked in. Yeah. Ideally I want to make sure it's elbow. But then you need to make sure the elbow, cap the elbow. Yeah. So if I go like this, you can just push it up there. Okay. But you try to elbow me like this. You do that. Elbow, elbow me. Okay. At least I can control the elbow. Okay. Like that. All right? Then if you feel yourself moving this way, you're right there. You're gonna change it to here. Yeah. Okay. All right. So you need to cap the elbow. This is sucking in. This is sucking in. Just a second and then expand. Step here and I bump into you like that, right? Yeah. Every step through deeper. My feet haven't touched the ground yet and they've already made contact. Okay. So now all the momentum is going through you instead of going to the ground. Okay. Okay. You try that. I'll stand here and you just try it. Bump it like that. So you gotta step really deep through it. So I'll step with this foot or? No, this foot. This one. So like that. You're gonna check. Yeah. So that works too. That's not the technique. So. So I'm here. I'm gonna step deeper today. You wanna take my place. So here's my center. You wanna be there. So my foot basically has to be here. Oh yeah. All right. Yeah. Let's just see how deep you have to go. So. That's better. Okay. But then don't need for it. You straight? Yeah. Bump. It's almost straight. It's like one straight step. Okay. I'm trying to drop my height down because I feel like that. When I get here, my shoulder's here. Yeah. Don't use your shoulder. Yeah. And this one technique is to use your shoulder. It should be. That's for a more combata. Yeah. Because you can use your shoulder bone. Yeah. But for training, you're just gonna bump the chest. So. The chest. So relax your shoulder. Don't do this. All right. Okay. Yeah. Like that. All right. But don't stick it out like this. I'm trying to pull it back. Yeah. So just relax. All right. All right. Come on, David Wong. In this video, I'm gonna show you the three mistakes in Tai Chi that are very common that people make. So one of the main advantages of learning Tai Chi is for health, for your joints, for your bones, for breathing, for relaxation and meditation. But also, you learn a concept called rooting or sinking. So as you can see in the demonstration, Will here, how much do you weigh? 220 pounds. 220 pounds? Look at his muscles. Look at his arms. Holy cow. He's as big as my leg. I'm already, I'm only about 150 pounds. Look at my skinny arms. And I'm able to resist and pushing me. And I'm fairly relaxed. Without using a lot of strength, I can resist this push. And how hard were you pushing there? For 100%. 100%. He's putting all the strength in there. And I'm just standing there, not using too much strength. So the key is don't fight strength with strength. Don't fight force with force. So in Tai Chi, you'll teach you how to use structure. The structure of your skeletal structure, of your bones, of your joints, of your alignment, and also of your mind of what the intention is in order to resist force using just structure. So one of the key things that you need to have structure, well, there's three mistakes that people make that destroy structure in Tai Chi. And very few people that actually practice Tai Chi actually know and actually experience and know how to do this. So stay tuned and I'm gonna show you those to you. Mistake number three is not being relaxed. So a lot of people are confused about relaxation and about being placid. There's two different things. For example, if I'm being placid, he pushes and that's placid, right? There's nothing there. I'm not being placid, okay? But be relaxed in concept called shong or shong in Chinese. It's being loose but relaxed, but still have structure. So he's pushing. He's pushing harder, harder, harder, harder. I'm relaxed, see? My hands relax when he's pushing, harder, harder. I'm still relaxed. See how he's relaxed my arm is? I'm still able to resist them, okay? So that's the difference between being shong, which means loose and placid. But in English, we use the word relaxation, which is very easy to misinterpret. So number one key, when you practice your Tai Chi, for example, practice your Tai Chi, your hands are always relaxed. There's only a tense state and a relaxed state. Now when we go to the gym, most people practice being tense. Use your muscles, tense up to get more power, which is okay, it works. But if you practice being tense on time, like practice being tense, like this, then if you're fighting against someone bigger than you, you're at a disadvantage because his force will be stronger than your force. So rather than use force, I use song. I use relaxation. So when you practice your Tai Chi, make sure that your hands are not open like this because that's too much tension. Because your hands are not closed like this because that's too much tension. Your hands should always be in the middle. When it's relaxed, it's completely relaxed. Imagine holding an egg in your hand. When you're open, just open them slightly. Just stretch them out a little bit. When you're relaxed, relaxed. When you're open, just open a little. You always wanna feel the energy ball in the palms of your hands. So it's very subtle. For example, when I do this, I'm combining two things. First of all, my hands are lifting up. At the same time, my hands are going from relaxed to slightly open. And then back to relaxed, slightly open. It's a very minor detail, but what that does is it teaches you to even though you're using tension, see my hands are slightly open, that I'm still in a relaxed state. So I never go from, I never go up to 100%. I go up to maybe 60 to 70% tension. Never go above that. Because once you go above that, then you start to use force. If you stay below, let's say 60% tension, then you're not using force, you're using relaxation. And the key to Tai Chi is to train yourself so that you can still use relaxation at 60%, 50%, 40%, 30%, eventually using no tension at all to be able to resist someone with force. So that's what takes the training. That's what takes the many, many hours and repetition and training. Doing the push hands that we just showed you in the demonstration. Doing that for a lot, that you can learn how to use relaxation. Mistake number two in Tai Chi is to not use your Dan Tian, or not use your core, the center of gravity to direct the movements, okay? So there's a very simple movement called followed hands. So I'm using my core to direct my body. So say I'm using just one hand. See how my core is moving in a circle to direct my arms. So the core or the Dan Tian leads the arms. That's what I say in Chinese. The body leads the hand. So that's number two mistake. Here's how it looks like when you make the mistake. See a difference? My hand is leading my core. So there's very little power or connection when I'm moving my hand. I'm just moving my hand. I'm not even leading it with the core. Now, do it correctly. So how you can practice is actually put your finger or put your hand and fingers touch your belly button and then feel it move before your hand moves. But now you get the difference, okay? And the difference, you can tell. Let's see, I'm just using my hand like this. Just my hand. Okay, pain-wise, how much is that? Good, you got it. Really, yeah. Okay, one to 10. About a four. Four, okay? Now I'm using my hip. I mean, using my Dan Tian. Yeah. How much pain more pain is there? It brings it up to about a seven. A seven, right? And I didn't use more power. I just used my waist. And if I use more, I can get it up to 10, right? So that's the key of generating power is to use your Dan Tian. So let me show you a demonstration in the 24 move Tai Chi form of how to use the Dan Tian to guide your hands. So let me show you the wrong way of doing this. Okay, I'm trying very hard to do it the wrong way because I practice so much the proper way. But what I'm doing is I'm leading with my hands and then I move my body. So a very basic fundamental in early Tai Chi, if you're a beginner, is to learn how to move your hips. Now, when you get advanced Tai Chi, you actually do the opposite. You learn to move your hands before your hips. It's contradictory, isn't it? Okay, but I'll show you how to do that in the next lesson or in a later lesson. And it goes with the concept that Bruce Lee taught, which is to move your hands before your feet, just like in fencing, you wanna move your hands before your feet. The reason is because when somebody attacks you, I don't have time to move my hip first and do a big to giant Tai Chi move, right? If somebody attacks me, I have to move my hand first. So what's the difference? See, before you learn Tai Chi, and once you learn Tai Chi, they move their hands first, but there's no power. And then they'll practice Tai Chi and then they'll learn how to use the hips to get power. But they've practiced enough Tai Chi and now they'll get back to the beginning. They use their hands first, but now it comes with power. How does that happen? So let me show you again. Let's see his attacking, right? I don't have time to move my hips and do a big Tai Chi move, like in a lot of demonstrations, right? I only have time to just move my hand up, right? But just power there, how that happened, right? I just move my hand, right? I'm not gonna move my hand and then my body. Go do it again. I move my hand and then my body. I didn't move my hip first. Just me moving my hips first. Too slow, right? I have to go one, two. You already hit me, okay? But now I wanna do it so that I move my hand first. Okay, so how does that work? Maybe in a later lesson, I can show you how to do that. Mistake number one that you can make in Tai Chi is to not sink your tailbone, which means not to open your back. Now I'm gonna show Will, for example, because I'm wearing a jacket you can't see. So you see, if you take your shirt and tighten it up, your spine has a curve here, right? So most people have that curve naturally. But in Tai Chi, you actually don't want that curve. In Tai Chi, you want to get rid of that curve. So you wanna sink down the tailbone, okay? So that you can feel that this is flatter. And ideally, it's actually a C, it's a couple. So what you need to do is sink your tailbone down even more. Suck in your gut and then stretch this out like this, okay? So now I can feel his lower back is straightening up, okay? But it's still not enough. You want it to stick out, you push out over here, push, push, push, that's better, okay? So now you can feel that it's more like a C, whereas starting about before, see how it's like an S. So you don't want that. And you can see a lot of people doing Tai Chi with a back like this is actually very bad for your back and also it makes you disconnected. It disconnects your upper body with your lower body. The key to having a strong core and Dan Tian is to connect your upper body with your lower body. And this is the main mistake that people make by having the S curve of the spine. And what it does is disconnect your body. So for example, I'm gonna do an S curve on purpose. My spine is like my belly sticking out. I'm trying to, and he pushes on my hand. See, I'll automatically go back. There's no resistance. But now I stick my back out. I drop my hip and make this into a C. And then now he pushes on it. What happened? It's a different. Here, you're more rooted. It's rooted. See, what happens when you curve your back is now that energy transfer goes straight through your spine and then into your hips and into the legs, into the knees, into the ground. When you break that connection by curving your spine, now all the energy just goes in your spine. It doesn't go to your legs. So that's why he pushes, right? That energy goes to the spine and then I go. So that's the number one mistake that you can make in Tai Chi. So when you practice your Tai Chi, make sure that you always check. Put my hand back behind my back. I see, it's straight. You did a C. You don't wanna be like this. So even when you do your moves, think about that. Think that the spine is gonna be straight. One exercise you can do is to do very slow squats against the wall. So that's the wall against me. I wanna first put my back against the wall and then see if there's any space behind my back. See if I slip my hand behind my back. If there's a space that I can slip my hand behind, then there's too much space. So I need to get rid of that space. I want all my spine to be touching the wall. Once I get that, then I can go up and down. Just go halfway and go back up, sliding my spine up and down the wall. Now, after I do that and I'm good at it, then I can go all the way down, all the way down, keeping my spine straight and touching the wall all the way and go as slow like this. So that's gonna be very hard on your lower back, but it strengthens your lower back. It strengthens your leg. So that's one key in Tai Chi of creating connectedness. So stay tuned, I'm gonna show you the bonus mistake that people make. So the bonus mistake that you can make in Tai Chi is doing it too fast. I know everybody says this, you wanna do Tai Chi slow, but many people don't understand why you do Tai Chi so slow. Well, today we talked about three mistakes. Number one, relaxation. Number two, using your Dan Tian to lead your hands. Number three, having a proper spine alignment. What do all those things mean? All those things mean connectedness of your whole body, integration of your whole body. If your hand moves, your whole body moves. If your feet move, your whole body moves. Everything's connected. And the reason we do Tai Chi so slow is that we're training that connectedness and it's impossible to train it doing it fast. That's why we do it slow. If we can do it fast and still get connectedness, then everybody would do Tai Chi fast. But the reason we do it slow is because Tai Chi doing it slow is probably the only way you can train that connectedness in your body by combining all the techniques that we learned. Relaxation, leading with the Dan Tian. And later on, how to use your breath to relax and connect your body to and your mind. So there's many aspects of learning how to connect your whole body and mind as an integrated machine, integrated unit, in order to function totally and holistically. So when it comes in, you sink your chest. So you press here, like I'm pretty solid here, right? Because you're pushing down to my head, right there. So I expand my chest, open it, you go, and then you can have to come. But there's actually, so now there's another, not going mechanism that blends. So there's blending, and it's sinking more. I'll try and do it, see. So when you're sinking, it sinks down to the bottom. Chin is tucked, chest is in. And then you push hard as well. It's not going anywhere. Then you expand a bit and you know what to do. Full shoulders? Yeah. Full shoulders coming, please. So you contract? Yeah. Easily when we balance it, all right? Yeah. Because when you can try, you feel like, oh, I can push the guy, right? Yeah. You feel like you can push me, right? You think you got me, right? So we don't, you just get there. Okay. Don't use this. Yeah. Use, just relax. Like when you push in here, I'm totally relaxed. I'm just using my whole structure, my body. Okay. So this, this is actually touching my body. I let you in. Yeah. I feel like you got me, right? Yeah. But it's actually, there's more. There's more room. Yeah. All right. Just relax this, relax this whole thing. Suck in there, everything. So it feels like, oh yeah, I got you now. But you feel like now it's on your back leg, right? Yeah. Now you just expand. Yeah. Okay. All right. I'm already so new. Okay. That into your sucking and expand. I'm ready. I'm already sucked in. Yeah. Ideally, I want to make sure it's elbow. You need to make sure the elbow, copy elbow. Yeah. Copy elbow. So if I go like this, you can just push it up there. Okay. But you try to elbow me like this. You do that. Elbow me. Okay. At least I can control the elbow. Okay. I don't. Then if you feel yourself moving this way, you're right there. You're just gonna change it to here. Yeah. Okay. All right. So you need to, in, cut the elbow. This is sucking in, this is sucking in. Just a second and then expand. Step here and I bump into you like that, right? Yeah. If I step through deeper. Yeah. Okay. See that? So my feet haven't touched the ground yet and I've already made contact. Okay. So now all the momentum is going through you instead of going to the ground. Okay. Okay. You try that. I'll stand here and you just try it. Bumping into that. So you gotta step really deep. So I'll step with this foot or this one. Okay. Like that. You're gonna check. Yeah. So that works too, but that's not the technique. So. So I'm here. So I'll step deeper today. You wanna take my place. So here's my center. You wanna be there. So my foot basically has to be here. Oh yeah. All right. Yeah. Let's just see how deep you have to go. So. But then don't need for. You straight? Yeah. Boom. It's almost straight. It's like one straight step. Okay. I'm trying to drop my height down. I feel like that. When I get here, my shoulder's here. Yeah. Don't use your shoulder. Yeah. And this one technique is to use your shoulder. Should be. That's for a more combative. Yeah. Because you can use your shoulder bone. Yeah. But for training, you're just gonna bump with your chest. So. Okay. Like that. Okay. So relax your shoulder. Don't do this. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Like that. All right. But don't stick it out like this. I'm trying to pull it back. Yeah. So just relax. You're not stepping people down. I feel that when I step in. So you don't want to step and go? Yeah. You have to go. You have to pay before I land. Okay. You see I feel that. But before my foot even touches the ground, I'm already there. Yeah. Or at the same time. Yeah. So. Yeah. There you go. I feel that a lot more than you stepped first. So you want to aim for behind the guy. The other thing is to make a frame. Yeah. Make this round. Yeah. Sink your chest. So there's like one big, one big cup. Yeah. One big cup is gone. Yeah. Okay. Because you stick out any part of the cup, then it's just going to go in. It won't affect the whole thing. Okay. So you make this round. You go. Okay. Yeah. All right. So there's two ways you can sink down. Yeah. Or you can rise up. For you to sink. That's rising up. Okay. So you can go. Yeah. Yeah. That's rising up. Okay. Or you can sink down. So it's like. Yeah. All right. You got it. Yeah. Pushes. Yeah. Same idea, right? I'm pretending I'm not even there. All right. So now you just extend this. That was. And now you're bringing your whole body into it. Into the play. Yeah. So. Okay, in this video, I'm going to show you the three mistakes in Tai Chi that are very common that people make. The main advantages of learning Tai Chi is for health, for your joints, for your bones, for breathing, for relaxation and meditation. But also, you learn a concept called rooting or sinking. So as you can see in the demonstration, we'll hear how much do you weigh? 220 pounds. 220 pounds? Look at his muscles. Look at his arms. Holy cow. He was as big as my leg. All right. I'm already, I'm only about 150 pounds. Look at my skinny arms. And I'm able to resist and pushing me. And I'm fairly relaxed. Without using a lot of strength, I can resist this push. And how hard were you pushing there? Like a hundred percent. He's putting all the strength in there. And I'm just standing there, not using too much strength. So the key is don't fight strength with strength. Don't fight force with force. So in Tai Chi, you'll teach you how to use structure, the structure of your skeletal structure, of your bones, of your joints, of your alignment, and also of your mind of what the intention is in order to resist force using just structure. So one of the key things that you need to have structure, well, there's three mistakes that people make that destroy structure in Tai Chi. And very few people that actually practice Tai Chi actually know and actually experience and know how to do this. So stay tuned and I'm gonna show you those to you. Mistake number three is not being relaxed. So a lot of people are confused about relaxation and about being placid. There's two different things. For example, if I'm being placid, he pushes and that's placid, right? There's nothing there. I'm not think it's placid, okay? But be relaxed in concept called shong, or shong in Chinese. It's being loose, but relaxed, but still have structure. So he's pushing, he's pushing harder, harder, harder. I'm relaxed, see? My hands relaxed when he's pushing. Harder, harder, I'm still relaxed. See how he's relaxed my arms? I'm still able to resist them, okay? So that's the difference between being shong, which means loose and placid. But in English, we use the word relaxation, which is very easy to misinterpret. So number one key, when you practice your Tai Chi, for example, practice your Tai Chi, your hands are always relaxed. There's only a tense state and a relaxed state. Now, when we go to the gym, most people, they practice being tense. Use your muscles, tense up to get more power, which is okay, it works. But if you practice being tense all the time, and practice being tense like this, then if you're fighting against someone bigger than you, you're at a disadvantage because his force will be stronger than your force. So rather than use force, I use shong, I use relaxation. So when you practice your Tai Chi, make sure that your hands are not open like this because that's too much tension. Because your hands are not closed like this because that's too much tension. Your hands should always be in the middle. When it's relaxed, it's completely relaxed. Imagine holding an egg in your hand. When you're open, just open them slightly, just stretch them out a little bit. When they're relaxed, relaxed. When they're open, just open a little. You always want to feel an energy ball in the palms of your hands. So it's very subtle. For example, when I do this, I'm combining two things. First of all, my hands are lifting up. At the same time, my hands are going from relaxed to slightly open. And then back to relaxed, slightly open. It's a very minor detail, but what that does is it teaches you to even though you're using tension, see my hands are slightly open, that I'm still in a relaxed state. So I never go from, I never go up to 100%. I go up to maybe 60 to 70% tension. Never go above that. Because once you go above that, then you start to use force. If you stay below, let's say 60% tension, then you're not using force, you're using relaxation. And the key to Tai Chi is to train yourself so that you can still use relaxation at 60%, 50%, 40%, 30%, eventually using no tension at all to be able to resist someone with force. So that's what takes the training. That's what takes the many, many hours of repetition and training, doing the push hands that we just showed you in the demonstration. Doing that for a lot, then you can learn how to use relaxation. Mistake number two in Tai Chi is to not use your dan tian or not use your core, the center of gravity to direct the movements, okay? So there's a very simple movement called followed hands. So I'm using my core to direct my body. So say I'm using just one hand. See how my core is moving in a circle to direct my arm. So the core or the dan tian leads the arms. Sun dai sau, that's what I say in Chinese. The body leads the hand. So that's number two, mistake. Here's how it looks like when you make the mistake. See a difference? My hand is leading my core. So there's very little power or connection when I'm moving my hand. I'm just moving my hand. I'm not even leading it with the core. Now, do as you're doing correctly. So how you can practice is actually put your finger or put your hand, fingers touch your belly button and then feel it move before your hand moves. So now you get the difference, okay? And the difference, you can tell. Let's see, I'm just using my hand like this. Just my hand. Okay, pain-wise, how much is that? Good, you gotta fill it, yeah. One to 10. About a four. Four, okay. Now I'm using my hip, I mean using my dan tian. Yeah. How much pain more pain is there? It brings it up to about a seven. A seven, right? And I didn't use more power, I just used my waist. And if I use more, I can get it up to 10, right? So that's the key of generating power is to use your dan tian. So let me show you a demonstration in the 24 move tai chi form of how to use the dan tian to guide your hands. So let me show you the wrong way of doing this. Okay, I'm trying very hard to do it the wrong way because I practice so much the proper way. But what I'm doing is I'm leading with my hands and then I move my body. So a very basic fundamental in early tai chi, if you're a beginner, is to learn how to move your hips. Now when you get advanced tai chi, you actually do the opposite. You learn to move your hands before your hips. It's contradictory, isn't it? Okay, but I'll show you how to do that in the next lesson or in a later lesson. And it goes with the concept that Bruce Lee taught, which is to move your hands before your feet, just like in fencing, you want to move your hands before your feet. The reason is because when somebody attacks you, I don't have time to move my hip first and do a big to giant tai chi move, right? If somebody attacks me, I have to move my hand first. So what's the difference? See, before you learn tai chi and once you learn tai chi, they move their hands first, but there's no power. And then they'll practice tai chi and then they'll learn how to use the hips to get power, but they practice enough tai chi and now they'll go back to the beginning. They use their hands first, but now it comes with power. How does that happen? So let me show you again. Let's see his attacking, right? I don't have time to move my hips and do a big tai chi move, like in a lot of demonstrations. I only have time to just move my hand up, right? But there's power there. How that happened, right? I just moved my hand, right? I'm not moving my hand and then my body. Go do it again. I moved my hand and then my body. I didn't move my hips first. Here's me moving my hips first. Too slow, right? I have to go one, two. You already hit me, okay? But now I wanna do it so that I move my hand first. Okay, so how does that work? Maybe in a later lesson, I can show you how to do that. Mistake number one that you can make in tai chi is to not sink your tailbone, which means not to open your back. Now I'm gonna show Will, for example, because I'm wearing a jacket you can't see. So you see, if you take your shirt and tighten it up, your spine has a curve here, right? So most people have that curve naturally. But in tai chi, you actually don't want that curve. In tai chi, you want to get rid of that curve. So you wanna sink down the tailbone, okay? So that you can feel that this is flatter. And ideally, it's actually a C, it's a couple. So what you need to do is sink your tailbone down even more, suck in your gut and then stretch this out like this, okay? So now I can feel his lower back just straightening up, okay? But still not enough. You want it to stick out, you push out over here, push, push, push, push, that's better, okay? So now you can feel that it's more like a C, where I started about before. See how it's like an S? So you don't want that. And you can see a lot of people doing tai chi with a back like this is actually very bad for your back and also it makes you disconnected. It disconnects your upper body with your lower body. The key to having a strong core and dan qian is to connect your upper body with your lower body. And this is the main mistake that people make by having the S curve of the spine. And what it does is disconnects your body. So for example, I'm gonna do an S curve on purpose. My spine is like, my belly's sticking out. I'm trying to, and he pushes on my hand. See, I'll automatically go back. There's no resistance. But now I stick my back out. I drop my hip and make this into a C. And then now he pushes on it. What happened? It's a different. Yeah, it's more rooted. It's rooted. See, what happens when you curve your back is now that energy transfer goes straight through your spine and then into your hips and into the legs, into the knees, into the ground. When you break that connection by curving your spine, now all the energy just goes in your spine. It doesn't go to your legs. So that's why he pushes, right? That energy goes to the spine and then I go. So that's the number one mistake that you can make in Tai Chi. So when you practice your Tai Chi, make sure that you always check. Put my hand back behind my back, I see. If it's straight, you do the C. You don't wanna be like this. So even when you do your moves, think about that. Think that spine is gonna be straight. One exercise you can do, is to do very slow squats against the wall. So that's the wall against me. I wanna first put my back against the wall and then see if there's any space behind my back. See if I slip my hand behind my back. If there's a space that I can slip my hand behind, then there's too much space. So I need to get rid of that space. I want all my spine to be touching the wall. Once I get that, then I can go up and down. I always go halfway and go back up, sliding my spine up and down the wall. Now after I do that, and I'm good at it, then I can go all the way down, all the way down, keeping my spine straight and touching the wall all the way. And do it slow like this. So that's gonna be very hard on your lower back, but it strengthens your lower back, it strengthens your leg. So that's one key in Tai Chi of creating connectedness. To stay tuned, I'm gonna show you the bonus mistake that people make. So the bonus mistake that you can make in Tai Chi is doing it too fast. I know everybody says this, you wanna do Tai Chi slow, but many people don't understand why you do Tai Chi so slow. Well, today we talked about three mistakes. Number one, relaxation. Number two, using your Dan Tian to lead your hands. And number three, having a proper spine alignment. What do all those things mean? All those things mean connectedness of your whole body, integration of your whole body. If your hand moves, your whole body moves. If your feet move, your whole body moves. Everything's connected. And the reason we do Tai Chi so slow is that we're training that connectedness. And it's impossible to train it doing it fast. That's why we do it slow. If we can do it fast and still get connectedness, then everybody would do Tai Chi fast. But the reason we do it slow is because Tai Chi doing it slow is probably the only way you can train that connectedness in your body by combining all the techniques that we learned. Relaxation, leading with the Dan Tian. And later on, how to use your breath to relax and connect your body to and your mind. So there's many aspects of learning how to connect your whole body and mind as an integrated machine, integrated unit, in order to function totally and holistically. When it comes in, you sink your chest. So you press here, like I'm pretty solid here, right? Because you're pushing down to my neck. So I expand my chest, and then you go, I don't even have to do it. But there's actually a good chest, an expanded chest. All right. So now there's another, not going mechanism that blends. So there's blending, I try and do it, see? So when you're sinking, it sinks down to the rock. So your chin is tucked, chest is in. And then you push hard as well. It's not going anywhere. And then you expand a bit, and you don't want to be caught. First, push your shoulders, come here, please. So you contract? Yeah. Easily when we balance it hard. Because when you can try it, you feel like, oh, I can push the guy, right? Yeah. You feel like you can push me. You think you got me, right? So we don't push the guy. Okay. All right. Don't use this. Yeah. Use, just relax. Like when you push in here, I'm totally relaxed. I'm just using my whole structure, my body. Mm, okay. So this is actually touching my body. I let you in. Yeah. So you feel like you got me, right? Yeah. It's actually, there's more. There's more room. Yeah. All right. All right. So just relax this whole thing. Suck in there, you think? So it feels like, oh yeah, I got you now. But you feel like now it's on your back leg, right? Yeah. Now you just expand. Yeah, okay. All right. I'm so new, okay. So, let's put that into your sucking in. So I'm ready. I'm already sucked in. Yeah. Yeah, we all want to make sure it's elbow. But then you need to make sure the elbow, cap the elbow. Yeah. Cap the elbow, so if I go like this, you can just push it up there. Okay. But you try to elbow me like this. You do that, elbow me. Okay. I think I control the elbow. Okay. I don't. Then if you feel yourself moving this way, you're right there. You're just going to change it to here. Yeah. Okay. All right. So you need to in, cap the elbow. So there's the new thing sucking in. This is sucking in, this is sucking in. Just sucking in and then expand. I'm going to step here and I bump into you. Like that, right? Yeah. If I step through deeper. Yeah. Okay. See that? So my feet haven't touched the ground yet and they've already made contact. So now all the momentum is going through you instead of going to the ground. Okay. Okay. You try that. I'll stand here and you just try it. Bump it in like that. So you got to step really deep. So I step with this foot or? No, this foot. This one. So like that. You got to check. Yeah. But that's not the technique. So I step deeper today. You want to take my place. So here's my center. You want to be there. So my foot basically has to be here. Oh yeah. All right. Yeah. Let's just see how deep you have to go. So. But then don't need for this. You straight? Yeah. Boom. It's almost straight. It's like one straight stick. Okay. I'm trying to drop my height down because I feel like that. When I get here, my shoulder's here. Yeah. Don't use your shoulder. Yeah. And this one technique is to use the shoulder. So be. That's where I more like combata. Yeah. Because you can use the shoulder bone. Yeah. But for training, you just going to bump the chest. So. Okay. Like that. Okay. So relax the shoulder. Don't do this. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Like that. All right. But don't stick it out like this. I'm trying to pull it back. Yeah. So just relax. Come on, David Wong. In this video, I'm going to show you the three mistakes in Tai Chi that are very common that people make. So one of the main advantages of learning Tai Chi is for health, for your joints, for your bones, for breathing, for relaxation and meditation. But also, you learn a concept called rooting or sinking. So as you can see in the demonstration, we'll hear how much do you weigh? 240 pounds. 320 pounds? Okay. There's muscles. There's arms. Holy cow. It's as big as my leg. I'm already, I'm only about 150 pounds. Look at my skinny arms. And I'm able to resist and pushing me. And I'm fairly relaxed. Without using a lot of strength, I can resist this push. And how hard were you pushing there? 100%. 100%. He's putting all the strength in there. And I'm just standing there, not using too much strength. So the key is don't fight strength with strength. Don't fight force with force. So in Tai Chi, you'll teach you how to use structure. The structure of your skeletal structure of your bones, of your joints, of your alignment and also of your mind of what the intention is in order to resist force using just structure. So one of the key things that you need to have structure. Well, there's three mistakes that people make that destroy structure in Tai Chi. And very few people that actually practice Tai Chi actually know and actually experience and know how to do this. So stay tuned and I'm gonna show you those to you. Mistake number three is not being relaxed. So a lot of people are confused about relaxation and about being placid. There's two different things. For example, if I'm being placid, he pushes and that's placid, right? There's nothing there. I'm not saying it's placid, okay? But being relaxed in concept called shong or shong in Chinese. It's being loose but relaxed but still have structure. So he's pushing, he's pushing harder, harder, harder, harder. I'm relaxed, see? My hands relax when he's pushing harder, harder. I'm still relaxed. See how I'm relaxed my arm is? I'm still able to resist them, okay? So that's the difference between being shong, which means loose and placid. But in English we use the word relaxation which is very easy to misinterpret. So number one key, when you practice your Tai Chi, for example, practice your Tai Chi, your hands are always relaxed. There's only a tense state and a relaxed state. Now when we go to the gym, most people they practice being tense. Use your muscles, tense up to get more power, which is okay, it works. But if you practice being tense on time and practice being tense like this, then if you're fighting against someone bigger than you, you're at a disadvantage because his force will be stronger than your force. So rather than use force, I use shong, I use relaxation. So when you practice your Tai Chi, make sure that your hands are not open like this because that's too much tension. Make sure your hands are not closed like this because that's too much tension. Your hands should always be in the middle. When it's relaxed, it's completely relaxed. Imagine holding an egg in your hand. When you're open, just open them slightly. Just stretch them out a little bit. When they're relaxed, relaxed. When they're open, just open a little. You always want to feel an energy ball in the palms of your hands. So it's very subtle. For example, when I do this, I'm combining two things. First of all, my hands are lifting up. At the same time, my hands are going from relaxed to slightly open. And then back to relaxed, slightly open. It's a very minor detail, but what that does is it teaches you to, even though you're using tension, see my hands are slightly open, that I'm still in a relaxed state. So I never go from, I never go up to 100%. I go up to maybe 60 to 70% tension. Never go above that. Because once you go above that, then you start to use force. If you stay below, let's say, 60% tension, then you're not using force, you're using relaxation. And the key to Tai Chi is to train yourself so that you can still use relaxation at 60%, 50%, 40%, 30%, eventually using no tension at all to be able to resist someone with force. So that's what takes the training. That's what takes the many, many hours of repetition and training during the push-hands that we just showed you in the demonstration. Doing that for a lot, then you can learn how to use relaxation. Mistake number two in Tai Chi is to not use your dan tian, or not use your core, the center of gravity to direct the movements, okay? So there's a very simple movement called pilot hands. So I'm using my core to direct my body. This time I'm using just one hand. See how my core is moving in a circle to direct my arm. So the core or the dan tian leads the arms, sun dai sao, that's what I say in Chinese, the body leads the hand. So that's number two, the stick. Here's how it looks like when you make the mistake. See a difference? My hand is leading my core. So there's very little power or connection when I'm moving my hand. I'm just moving my hand. I'm not even leading it with the core. Now, do as you're doing correctly. So how you can practice is actually put your finger or put your hand, fingers touch your belly button and then feel it move before your hand moves. But now you get the difference, okay? And the difference, you can tell. Let's see, I'm just using my hand like this. Just my hand, pain-wise, how much is that? Good, you got to fill it, yeah. Okay, one to 10. About a four. Four, okay. Now I'm using my hip, I mean using my dan tian. Yeah. How much pain, more pain is there? About a seven. A seven, right? And I didn't use more power, I just used my waist. And if I use more, I can get it up to 10, right? So that's the key of generating power is to use your dan tian. So let me show you demonstration in the 24 move tai chi form. I'll how to use the dan tian to guide your hands. So let me show you the wrong way of doing this, okay? I'm trying very hard to doing the wrong way because I practice so much the proper way. But what I'm doing is I'm leading with my hands and then I move my body. So a very basic fundamental in early tai chi if you're a beginner is to learn how to move your hips. Now when you get advanced tai chi, you actually do the opposite. You learn to move your hands before your hips. It's contradictory, isn't it? Okay, but I'll show you how to do that in the next lesson or in a later lesson. And it goes with the concept that Bruce Lee taught, which is to move your hands before your feet. Just like in fencing, you wanna move your hands before your feet. The reason is because when somebody attacks you, I don't have time to move my hip first and do a big to giant tai chi move, right? If somebody attacks me, I have to move my hand first. So what's the difference? See, before you learn tai chi and once you learn tai chi, they move their hands first, but there's no power. And then they practice tai chi and then they'll learn how to use the hips to get power. But they practice enough tai chi and now they'll go back to the beginning. They use their hands first, but now it comes with power. How does that happen, okay? So let me show you again. Let's see his attacking, right? I don't have time to move my hips and do a big tai chi move, like in a lot of demonstrations, right? I only have time to just move my hand up, right? But there's power there, how that happened, right? I just move my hand, right? I'm not gonna move my hand and then my body. That's what I'll do again. I move my hand and then my body. I didn't move my hip first. Here's me moving my hips first. Too slow, right? I have to go one, two. You already hit me, okay? But now I wanna do it so that I move my hand first. Okay, so how does that work? Maybe in a later lesson, I can show you how to do that. Mistake number one that you can make in tai chi is to not sink your tailbone, which means not to open your back. Now I'm gonna show Will, for example, because I'm wearing a jacket, you can't see. So you see, if you take your shirt and tighten it up, the spine has a curve here, right? So most people have that curve naturally, but in tai chi, you actually don't want that curve. In tai chi, you want to get rid of that curve. So you wanna sink down the tailbone, okay? So that you can feel that this is flatter. And ideally, it's actually a C, it's a couple. So what you need to do is sink your tailbone down even more, suck in your gut, and then stretch this out like this, okay? So now I can feel his lower back is straightening up, okay? But still not enough, you want it to stick out. You push out over here, push, push, push, push. That's better, okay? So now you can feel that it's more like a C, whereas starting about before, see how it's like an S, so you don't want that. And you can see a lot of people doing tai chi with a back like this is actually very bad for your back and also it makes you disconnected. It disconnects your upper body with your lower body. The key to having a strong core and dan qian is to connect your upper body with your lower body. And this is the main mistake that people make by having the S curve of the spine. And what it does is disconnects your body. So for example, I'm gonna do an S curve on purpose. My spine is like, my belly's sticking out. I'm trying to, and he pushes on my hand. See, I'll automatically go back. There's no resistance. But now I stick my back out. I drop my hip and make this into a C. And then now he pushes on it. What happened? It's a different. You're more rooted. It's rooted. See, what happens when you curve your back is now that energy transfer goes straight through your spine and then into your hips and into the legs, into the knees, into the ground. When you break that connection by curving your spine, now all the energy just goes in your spine. It doesn't go through your legs. So that's why he pushes, right? That energy goes to the spine and then I go. So that's the number one mistake that you can make in Tai Chi. So when you practice your Tai Chi, make sure that you always check. Put my hand back behind my back. I see if it's straight. Is it a C? You don't wanna be like this. So even when you do your moves, think about that. Think that the spine is gonna be straight. One exercise you can do is to do very slow squats against the wall. So that's the wall against me. I wanna first put my back against the wall and then see if there's any space behind my back. See if I slip my hand behind my back. If there's a space that I can slip my hand behind, then there's too much space. So I need to get rid of that space. I want all my spine to be touching the wall. Once I get that, then I can go up and down. Just go halfway and go back up, sliding my spine up and down the wall. Now, after I do that, and I'm good at it, then I can go all the way down, all the way down, keeping my spine straight and touching the wall all the way. And do it slow like this. So that's gonna be very hard on your lower back, but it strengthens your lower back. It strengthens your leg. So that's one key in Tai Chi of creating connectedness. So stay tuned, I'm gonna show you the bonus mistake that people make. So the bonus mistake that you can make in Tai Chi is doing it too fast. I know everybody says this, you wanna do Tai Chi slow, but many people don't understand why you do Tai Chi so slow. Well, today we talked about three mistakes. Number one, relaxation. Number two, using your Dan Tian to lead your hands. And number three, having a proper spine alignment. What do all those things mean? All those things mean connectedness of your whole body, integration of your whole body. If your hand moves, your whole body moves. If your feet move, your whole body moves. Everything's connected. And the reason we do Tai Chi so slow is that we're training that connectedness. And it's impossible to train it doing it fast. That's why we do it slow. If we can do it fast and still get connectedness, then everybody would do Tai Chi fast. But the reason we do it slow is because Tai Chi doing it slow is probably the only way you can train that connectedness in your body by combining all the techniques that we learned. Relaxation, leading with the Dan Tian. And later on, how to use your breath to relax and connect your body to and your mind. So there's many aspects of learning how to connect your whole body and mind as an integrated machine, integrated unit, in order to function totally and holistically. So when it comes in, you sink your chest. So you press here, like I'm pretty solid here, right? Because you're pushing it down to my neck. So I expand my chest, and then you go, I don't even have to turn. But it does actually make your chest and expand your chest. So now there's another, not going mechanism that blends. So there's blending, and it's sinking more. I try to do it, see? So when you're sinking, it sinks down to the bottom. So your chin is tucked, chest is in. And then you push hard as well. It's not going anywhere. You expand a bit, and you know you're not coming. All right, cool, right? Yeah. First, your postures come in, please. So you contract? Yeah. Easily when it's bound to suit your heart. Because when you can try, you feel like, oh, I can push the guy, right? Yeah. You feel like you can push me, or if you think you got me, right? So we don't use that then. Okay. Don't use this. Yeah. Use, just relax. Like when you push in here, totally relax. I'm just using my whole structure, using my body. Okay. So this is actually to touch my body, or let you in. Yeah. So you feel like you got me, right? Yeah. It was actually, there's more. There's more room. Yeah. All right. Just relax this whole thing. Suck in there, you think? So it feels like, oh yeah, I got you now. But you feel like now it's on your back leg, right? Yeah. Now you just expand. Yeah, okay. All right. All right, so new, okay. So put that into your sucking things. So I'm ready, I'm already sucked in. Yeah. And I'm already expanding. Okay. You're gonna be elbowing. But then you need to make sure the elbow, cap the elbow. Yeah. Cap the elbow, so like like this, you can just push it up like that. Okay. But you try to elbow me like this. You do that. Elbow, elbow me. Okay. At least I can control the elbow. Okay. Like don't, right? Then if you feel yourself moving this way, you're right there. You're gonna just gonna change it to here. Yeah. Okay. All right. So you need to in, cap the elbow. This is sucking in, this is sucking in. Just sucking in and then expand. Step here and I bump into you like that, right? Yeah. If I step through deeper. Yeah, okay. See that? So my feet haven't touched the ground yet and I've already made contact. Okay. So now all the momentum is going through you instead of going to the ground. Okay. You try that. I'll stand here and you just try to bump into that. So you gotta step really deep. So I step with this foot or this one? No, this one. So, like that. You're gonna check, yeah. So that works too, but that's not the technique. So, please try to step deeper today. You wanna take my place, so here's my center. You wanna be there. So my foot basically has to be here. Oh yeah. All right. Yeah. Let's just see how deep you have to go. But then, don't knee forward. You straight? Yeah. Boom. It's almost straight. It's like one straight step. Okay. I'm trying to drop my height down because I feel like that when I get here, my shoulder's here. Yeah, don't use your shoulder. Yeah. And there's one technique is to use your shoulder. It should be. That's where I'm more like combative. Yeah. Because you can use your shoulder bone. Yeah. But for training, you're just gonna bump into the chest. So, I'll grab that. Okay. So relax your shoulder. Don't do this. Okay. Okay. Yeah, like that. All right. But don't stick it out like this. I'm trying to pull it back. Yeah. So just relax, like. All right. You're not stepping people down. So feel that when I step here. So don't, so you, you don't wanna step and go. Yeah. You have to go, you have to pay before I land. Okay. You see how I do it? So before my foot even touches the ground, I'm already there. Yeah, or at the same time. So. Yeah. There you go. I can feel that a lot more than you stepped first. So you wanna aim for behind the guy. Okay. Another thing is to make a frame. Yeah. Make this round. Yeah. Sink your chest. So this is like one big, one big cup. Yeah. One big cup is gone. Yeah. Okay. Because you stick out any part of the cup, then it's just gonna go in. It won't affect the whole thing. Okay. So you make this round, you go. So there's two ways you can sink down. Yeah. Or you can rise up. For you to sink, that's rising up. Okay. Yeah. So you go. Yeah. Rising up. Yeah. Rising up. Okay. Or you can sink down. So it's like going downwards. Yeah. All right. You got it. Yeah. Your pushes. Yeah. Same idea, right? All right. So now you're bringing your whole body into it. Into the push. Yeah. So. I'm gonna show you the three mistakes in Tai Chi that are very common that people make. So one of the main advantages of learning Tai Chi is for health, for your joints, for your bones, for breathing, for relaxation and meditation. But also, you learn a concept called rooting or sinking. So as you can see in the demonstration, Will here, how much do you weigh? 220 pounds. 220 pounds? Look at his muscles. Look at his arms. Holy cow. He's as big as my leg. Right? I'm already, I'm only about 150 pounds. Look at my skinny arms. And I'm able to resist them pushing me. And I'm fairly relaxed. Without using a lot of strength, I can resist this push. And how hard were you pushing there? Maybe 100%. He's putting all the strength in there. And I'm just standing there, not using too much strength. So the key is don't fight strength with strength. Don't fight force with force. So in Tai Chi, we'll teach you how to use structure, the structure of your skeletal structure, of your bones, of your joints, of your alignment, and also of your mind of what the intention is in order to resist force using just structure. So one of the key things that you need to have structure, well, there's three mistakes that people make that destroy structure in Tai Chi. And very few people that actually practice Tai Chi actually know and actually experience and know how to do this. So stay tuned and I'm gonna show you those to you. Mistake number three is not being relaxed. So a lot of people are confused about relaxation and about being placid. There's two different things. For example, if I'm being placid, he pushes and that's placid, right? There's nothing there. I'm not saying it's placid, okay? But being relaxed in a concept called shong, or shong in Chinese. It's being loose, but relaxed, but still have structure. So he's pushing. He's pushing harder, harder, harder, harder. I'm relaxed, see? My hand's relaxed, but he's pushing harder, harder. I'm still relaxed. See how he's relaxed my arm is? I'm still able to resist him. Okay, so that's the difference between being shong, which means loose and placid. But in English, we use the word relaxation, which is very easy to misinterpret. So number one key, when you practice your tai chi, for example, practice your tai chi, your hands are always relaxed. There's only a tense state and a relaxed state. Now, when we go to the gym, most people practice being tense. Use your muscles, tense up, to get more power, which is okay, it works. But if you practice being tense all the time, if you practice being tense like this, then if you're fighting against someone bigger than you, you're at a disadvantage because his force will be stronger than your force. So rather than use force, I use shong. I use relaxation. So when you practice your tai chi, make sure that your hands are not open like this because that's too much tension. Because your hands are not closed like this because that's too much tension. Your hands should always be in the middle. When it's relaxed, it's completely relaxed. Imagine holding an egg in your hand. When you're open, just open them slightly. Just stretch them out a little bit. When they're relaxed, relaxed. When they're open, just open a little. You always wanna feel the energy ball in the palms of your hands. So it's very subtle. For example, when I do this, I'm combining two things. First of all, my hands are lifting up. At the same time, my hands are going from relaxed to slightly open. And then back to relaxed. Slightly open. It's a very minor detail, but what that does is it teaches you to, even though you're using tension, see my hands are slightly open, that I'm still in a relaxed state. So I never go from, I never go up to 100%. I go up to maybe 60 to 70% tension. Never go above that. Because once you go above that, then you start to use force. You stay below, let's say, 60% tension, then you're not using force, you're using relaxation. And the key to Tai Chi is to train yourself so that you can still use relaxation at 60%, 50%, 40%, 30%, eventually using no tension at all to be able to resist someone with force. So that's what takes the training. That's what takes the many, many hours of repetition and training doing the push-hands that we just showed you in the demonstration. Doing that for a lot that you can learn how to use relaxation. Mistake number two in Tai Chi is to not use your dan tian, or not use your core, the center of gravity to direct the movements, okay? So there's a very simple movement called followed hands. So I'm using my core to direct my body. This time I'm using just one hand. See how my core is moving in a circle to direct my arm. So the core or the dan tian leads the arms. Sun daishou, that's what I say in Chinese. The body leads the hand. So that's number two mistake. Here's how it looks like when you make the mistake. See a difference? My hand is leading my core. So there's very little power or connection when I'm moving my hand. I'm just moving my hand. I'm not even leading it with the core. Now do as you're doing correctly. So how you can practice is actually put your finger or put your hand and your fingers touch your belly button and then feel it move before your hand moves. But now you get the difference, okay? And the difference, you can tell. Let's see, I'm just using my hand like this. Just my hand. Okay, pain-wise, how much is that? You got to fill it, yeah. Okay, one to 10. About a four. Four, okay? Now I'm using my hip. I mean using my dan tian. How much pain, more pain is there? It brings it up to about a seven. A seven, right? And I didn't use more power, I just used my waist. And if I use more, I can get it up to 10, right? So that's the key of generating power is to use your dan tian. So let me show you a demonstration in the 24 move tai chi form. I'll how to use the dan tian to guide your hands. So let me show you the wrong way of doing this, okay? I'm trying very hard to do it the wrong way because I practice so much the proper way. But what I'm doing is I'm leading with my hands and then I move my body. So a very basic fundamental in early tai chi if you're a beginner is to learn how to move your hips. Now when you get advanced tai chi, you actually do the opposite. You learn to move your hands before your hips. It's contradictory, isn't it? Okay, but I'll show you how to do that in the next lesson or in a later lesson. And it goes with the concept that Bruce Lee taught which is to move your hands before your feet just like in fencing, you want to move your hands before your feet. The reason is because when somebody attacks you, I don't have time to move my hip first and do a big tai chi move, right? If somebody attacks me, I have to move my hand first. So what's the difference? See, before you learn tai chi and once you learn tai chi, they move their hands first, but there's no power. And then they'll practice tai chi and then they'll learn how to use the hips to get power. But they've practiced enough tai chi and now they'll get back to the beginning. They use their hands first, but now it comes with power. How does that happen, okay? So let me show you again. Let's see if it's attacking, right? I don't have time to move my hips and do a big tai chi move like in a lot of demonstrations, right? I only have time to just move my hand up, right? But just power there, how that happened, right? I just moved my hand, right? I'm not gonna move my hand and then my body. Go ahead and do it again. I moved my hand and then my body. I didn't move my hip first. Just me moving my hips first. Too slow, right? I have to go one, two. You already hit me, okay? But now I wanna do it so that I move my hand first. Okay, so how does that work? Maybe in a later lesson, I can show you how to do that. Mistake number one that you can make in tai chi is to not sink your tailbone, which means not to open your back. Now I'm gonna show Will, for example, because I'm wearing a jacket, you can't see. So you see, if you take this shirt and tighten it up, your spine has a curve here, right? So most people have that curve naturally. But in tai chi, you actually don't want that curve. In tai chi, you want to get rid of that curve. So you wanna sink down the tailbone, okay? So that you can feel that this is flatter. And ideally it's actually a C, it's a couple. So what you need to do is sink your tailbone down even more. Suck in your gut and then stretch this out like this, okay? So now I can feel his lower back straining up, okay? But still not enough. You want it to stick out, you push out over here, push, push, push, that's better, okay? So now you can feel that it's more like a C, whereas starting about before, see how it's like an S, so you don't want that. And you can see a lot of people doing tai chi with a back like this is actually very bad for your back. And also it makes you disconnected. It disconnects your upper body with your lower body. The key to having a strong core and dan qian is to connect your upper body with your lower body. And this is the main mistake that people make by having the S curve of the spine. And what it does is disconnect your body. So for example, I'm gonna do an S curve on purpose. My spine is like my belly sticking out. I'm trying to, and he pushes on my hand. See, I'll automatically go back. There's no resistance. But now I stick my back out, I drop my hip, I make this into a C. And then now he pushes on it. What happened? It's a different. You're more rooted. It's rooted. See, what happens when you curve your back is now that energy transfer goes straight through your spine and then into your hips and into the legs, into the knees, into the ground. When you break that connection by curving your spine, now all the energy just goes in your spine. It doesn't go to your legs. So that's why he pushes, right? That energy goes to the spine and then I go. So that's the number one mistake that you can make in Tai Chi. So when you practice your Tai Chi, make sure that you always check. Put my hand back behind my back. I see, it's straight. You did a C. You don't wanna be like this. So even when you do your moves, think about that. Think that the spine is gonna be straight. One exercise you can do is to do very slow squats against the wall. So that's what the wall is gonna be. I wanna first put my back against the wall and then see if there's any space behind my back. See if I slip my hand behind my back. If there's a space that I can slip my hand behind, then there's too much space. So I need to get rid of that space. I want all my spine to be touching the wall. Once I get that, then I can go up and down. Just go halfway and go back up, sliding my spine up and down the wall. Now, after I do that, and I'm good at it, then I can go all the way down, all the way down, keeping my spine straight and touching the wall all the way. And do it slow like this. So that's gonna be very hard on your lower back, but it strengthens your lower back. It strengthens your leg. So that's one key in Tai Chi of creating connectedness. So stay tuned, I'm gonna show you the bonus mistake that people make. So the bonus mistake that you can make in Tai Chi is doing it too fast. I know everybody says this, you wanna do Tai Chi slow, but many people don't understand why you do Tai Chi so slow. Well, today we talked about three mistakes. Number one, relaxation. Number two, using your Dan Tian to lead your hands. Number three, having a proper spine alignment. What do all those things mean? All those things mean connectedness of your whole body, integration of your whole body. If your hand moves, your whole body moves. If your feet move, your whole body moves. Everything's connected. And the reason we do Tai Chi so slow is that we're training that connectedness. And it's impossible to train it doing it fast. That's why we do it slow. If we can do it fast and still get connectedness, then everybody would do Tai Chi fast. But the reason we do it slow is because Tai Chi doing it slow is probably the only way you can train that connectedness in your body by combining all the techniques that we learned. Relaxation, leading with the Dan Tian. And later on, how to use your breath to relax and connect your body to and your mind. So there's many aspects of learning how to connect your whole body and mind as an integrated machine, integrated unit, in order to function totally and holistically. So when it comes in, you sink your chest. So you press here, like I'm pretty solid here, right? Because you're pushing down to my back, my spine, my chest, and then you go. But there's actually, so now there's another, not going mechanism that blends, right? So there's blending, I'll try and do it, see? So when you're sinking, it sinks down to the bottom. Chin is tight, chest is in. And then you push hard as well. It's not going anywhere, right? And you expand a bit and you know you're on balance. Just explain. All right, you're cool, right? No, no, no. Both shoulders? Yeah. Both shoulders, come in, please. So you contract? Yeah. Problems are hard. Because when you can try, you feel like, oh, I can push the guy, right? Yeah. You feel like you can push me, right? You think you got me, right? So you don't push the guy in. Okay. Don't use this. Yeah. Use, just relax. Like when you push in here, you're totally relaxed. I'm just using my whole structure, my body. Mm, okay. So this is actually touching my body, I let you in. Yeah. So you feel like you got me, right? Yeah. There's more. There's more room. Yeah. All right. Just relax this whole thing. Suck in there, you think? So it feels like, oh yeah, I got you now. But you feel like now it's on your back leg, right? Yeah. Now you just expand. Yeah, okay. All right. I'm so new, okay. So, Glenn, put that into your arm already. I'm already sucked in. Yeah. I'm already expanding. Okay. Yeah, we all want to make sure it's comfortable. So you make sure the elbow, cap the elbow. Yeah. Cap the elbow, so if I go like this, you can just push it up there. Okay. But you try to elbow me like this. You do that, elbow me. Okay. At least I can control the elbow. Okay. I don't, right? Then if you feel yourself moving this way, you're right there. You're just gonna change it to here. Yeah. Okay. All right. So you need to, in, cap the elbow. This is sucking in, this is sucking in. Just sucking in, and then expand. Step here, and I bump into you like that, right? Yeah. Every step through deeper, my feet haven't touched the ground yet and they've already made contact. Okay. So now all the momentum is going through you instead of going to the ground. Okay. Okay. You try that. I'll stand here and you just try it. Bump in like that. So you gotta step really deep. So I step with this foot or this one. No, this foot. So, like that. So that works too. But that's not the technique. So, So I'm here. You gotta step deeper today. You want to take my place. So here's my center. You want to be there. So my foot basically has to be here. Oh yeah. All right. Yeah. Let's see how deep you have to go. But then, don't need for it. You straight? Yeah. Boom. It's almost straight. It's like one straight stick. Okay. I'm trying to drop my height down because I feel like that. So when I get here, my shoulder's here. Yeah, don't use your shoulder. Yeah. And this one technique is to use your shoulder. So be. Best for a more combata. Yeah. Because you can use your shoulder bone. Yeah. But for training, you just gonna bump with your chest. So, Okay. Like that. Okay. Just use your chest. So relax your shoulder. Don't do this. Okay. Yeah. Like that. All right. But don't stick it out like this. I'm trying to pull it back. Yeah. So just relax. Come on, David Wong. In this video, I'm gonna show you the three mistakes in Tai Chi that are very common that people make. So one of the main advantages of learning Tai Chi is for health, for your joints, for your bones, for breathing, for relaxation and meditation. But also, you learn a concept called rooting or sinking. So as you can see in the demonstration, we'll hear how much do you weigh? 240 pounds. 220 pounds. Look at his muscles. Look at his arms. Holy cow. They're as big as my leg. I'm already, I'm only about 150 pounds. Look at my skinny arms. And I'm able to resist them pushing me and I'm fairly relaxed. Without using a lot of strength, I can resist this push. And how hard were you pushing there? 100%. 100%. He's putting all the strength in there. And I'm just standing there, not using too much strength. So the key is don't fight strength with strength. Don't fight force with force. So in Tai Chi, you'll teach you how to use structure, the structure of your skeletal structure, of your bones, of your joints, of your alignment, and also of your mind of what the intention is in order to resist force using just structure. So one of the key things that you need to have structure, well, there's three mistakes that people make that destroy structure in Tai Chi. And very few people that actually practice Tai Chi actually know and actually experience and know how to do this. So stay tuned and I'm gonna show you those to you. Mistake number three is not being relaxed. So a lot of people are confused about relaxation and about being placid. There's two different things. For example, if I'm being placid, he pushes, and that's placid, right? There's nothing there. I'm not saying it's placid, okay? But being relaxed in a concept called shong, or shong in Chinese. It's being loose, but relaxed, but still have structure. So he's pushing, he's pushing harder, harder, harder. I'm relaxed, see? My hands relax when he's pushing harder, harder. I'm still relaxed. See how relaxed my arm is? I'm still able to resist them, okay? So that's the difference between being shong, which means loose and placid. But in English, we use the word relaxation, which is very easy to misinterpret. So number one key, when you practice your Tai Chi, for example, practice your Tai Chi, your hands are always relaxed. There's only a tense state and a relaxed state. Now, when we go to the gym, most people, they practice being tense. Use your muscles, tense up, to get more power, which is okay, it works. But if you practice being tense all the time, if you practice being tense, then if you're fighting against someone bigger than you, you're at a disadvantage because his force will be stronger than your force. So rather than use force, I use shong, I use relaxation. So when you practice your Tai Chi, make sure that your hands are not open like this because that's too much tension. Make sure your hands are not closed like this because that's too much tension. Your hands should always be in the middle. When it's relaxed, it's completely relaxed. Imagine holding an egg in your hand. When you're open, just open them slightly. Just stretch them out a little bit. When they're relaxed, relaxed. When they're open, just open a little. You always want to feel an energy ball in the palms of your hands. So it's very subtle. For example, when I do this, I'm combining two things. First of all, my hands are lifting up. At the same time, my hands are going from relaxed to slightly open and then back to relaxed. Slightly open. It's a very minor detail, but what that does is it teaches you to, even though you're using tension, see my hands are slightly open, that I'm still in a relaxed state. So I never go from, I never go up to 100%. I go up to maybe 60 to 70% tension. Never go above that. Because once you go above that, then you start to use force. If you stay below, let's say 60% tension, then you're not using force. You're using relaxation. And the key to Tai Chi is to train yourself so that you can still use relaxation at 60%, 50%, 40%, 30%, and eventually using no tension at all to be able to resist someone with force. So that's what takes the training. That's what takes the many, many hours of repetition and training. Doing the push hands that we just showed you in the demonstration. Doing that for a lot, then you can learn how to use relaxation. Mistake number two in Tai Chi is to not use your dan tian or not use your core, center of gravity, to direct the movements, okay? So there's a very simple movement called followed hands. So I'm using my core to direct my body. The same I'm using just one hand. See how my core is moving in a circle to direct my arm. So the core or the dan tian leads the arms. The sun dies out, that's what I say in Chinese. The body leads the hand. So that's number two mistake. Here's how it looks like when you make a mistake. See a difference? My hand is leading my core. So there's very little power or connection when I'm moving my hand. I'm just moving my hand. I'm not even leading it with the core. Now do as you're doing correctly. So how you can practice is actually put your finger or put your hand, your fingers touch your belly button and then feel it move before your hand moves. But now you get the difference, okay? And the difference, you can tell. Let's see, I'm just using my hand like this. Just my hand. Okay, pain-wise, how much is that? Good, you got to fill it, yeah. Okay, one to 10. About a four. Four, okay? Now I'm using my hip, I mean using my dan tian. Yeah. How much pain, more pain is there? About a seven. A seven, right? And I didn't use more power, I just used my waist. And if I use more, I can get it up to 10, right? So that's the key of generating power is to use your dan tian. So let me show you a demonstration in the 24 move tai chi form. I'll how to use the dan tian to guide your hands. So let me show you the wrong way of doing this, okay? I'm trying very hard to doing the wrong way because I practice so much the proper way. But what I'm doing is I'm leading with my hands and then I move my body. So a very basic fundamental in early tai chi if you're a beginner is to learn how to move your hips. Now when you get advanced tai chi, you actually do the opposite. You learn to move your hands before your hips. It's contradictory, isn't it? Okay, but I'll show you how to do that in the next lesson or in a later lesson. And it goes with the concept that Bruce Lee taught, which is to move your hands before your feet. Just like in fencing, you wanna move your hands before your feet. The reason is because when somebody attacks you, I don't have time to move my hip first and do a big to giant tai chi move, right? If somebody attacks me, I have to move my hand first. So what's the difference? See, before you learn tai chi and once you learn tai chi, they move their hands first, but there's no power. And then they practice tai chi and then they'll learn how to use the hips to get power. But they practice enough tai chi and now they'll go back to the beginning. They use their hands first, but now it comes with power. How does that happen? So let me show you again. Let's see if it's attacking, right? I don't have time to move my hips and do a big tai chi move, like in a lot of demonstrations, right? I only have time to just move my hand up, right? But just power there, how that happened, right? I just moved my hand, right? I'm not gonna move my hand and then my body. Go ahead and do it again. I moved my hand and then my body. I didn't move my hip first. Just me moving my hips first. Too slow, right? I have to go one, two. You already hit me, okay? But now I wanna do it so that I move my hand first. Okay, so how does that work? Maybe in a later lesson, I can show you how to do that. Mistake number one that you can make in tai chi is to not sink your tailbone, which means not to open your back. Now I'm gonna show Will, for example, because I'm wearing a jacket you can't see. So you see, if you take your shirt and tighten it up, your spine has a curve here, right? So most people have that curve naturally, but in tai chi, you actually don't want that curve. In tai chi, you want to get rid of that curve. So you wanna sink down the tailbone, okay? So that you can feel that this is flatter. And ideally it's actually a C, it's a couple. So what you need to do is sink your tailbone down even more. Suck in your gut and then stretch this out like this, okay? So now I can feel it's lower back, it's straightening up, okay, but still not enough. You want it to stick out, you push out over here, push, push, push, push, that's better, okay? So now you can feel that it's more like a C, whereas starting about before, see how it's like an S. So you don't want that. And you can see a lot of people doing tai chi with a back like this is actually very bad for your back and also it makes you disconnected. It disconnects your upper body with your lower body. The key to having a strong core and dan qian is to connect your upper body with your lower body. And this is the main mistake that people make by having the S curve of the spine. And what it does is disconnects your body. So for example, I'm gonna do an S curve on purpose. My spine is like my belly sticking out. I'm trying to, and he pushes on my hand. See, I'll automatically go back. There's no resistance. But now I stick my back out. I drop my hip and make this into a C. And then now he pushes on it. What happened? It's a different. You're more rooted. It's rooted. See, what happens when you curve your back is now that energy transfer goes straight through your spine and then into your hips and into the legs, into the knees and into the ground. When you break that connection by curving your spine, now all the energy just goes in your spine. It doesn't go to your legs. So that's why he pushes, right? That energy goes to the spine and then I go. So that's the number one mistake that you can make in Tai Chi. So when you practice your Tai Chi, make sure that you always check. Put my hand back behind my back. I see, if it's straight, you did a C. You don't wanna be like this. So even when you do your moves, think about that. Think that the spine is gonna be straight. One exercise you can do is to do very slow squats against the wall. So that's the wall against me. I wanna first put my back against the wall and then see if there's any space behind my back. See if I slip my hand behind my back. If there's a space that I can slip my hand behind, then there's too much space. So I need to get rid of that space. I want all my spine to be touching the wall. Once I get that, then I can go up and down. Just go halfway and go back up, sliding my spine up and down the wall. Now, after I do that, and I'm good at it, then I can go all the way down, all the way down, keeping my spine straight and touching the wall all the way. And do it slow like this. So that's gonna be very hard on your lower back, but it strengthens your lower back. It strengthens your leg. So that's one key in Tai Chi of creating connectedness. So stay tuned, I'm gonna show you the bonus mistake that people make. So the bonus mistake that you can make in Tai Chi is doing it too fast. I know everybody says this, you wanna do Tai Chi slow, but many people don't understand why you do Tai Chi so slow. Well, today we talked about three mistakes. Number one, relaxation. Number two, using your Dan Tian to lead your hands. Number three, having a proper spine alignment. What do all those things mean? All those things mean connectedness of your whole body, integration of your whole body. If your hand moves, your whole body moves. If your feet move, your whole body moves. Everything's connected. And the reason we do Tai Chi so slow is that we're training that connectedness. And it's impossible to train it doing it fast. That's why we do it slow. If we can do it fast and still get connectedness, then everybody would do Tai Chi fast. But the reason we do it slow is because Tai Chi doing it slow is probably the only way you can train that connectedness in your body by combining all the techniques that we learned. Relaxation, leading with the Dan Tian. And later on, how to use your breath to relax and connect your body to, and your mind. So there's many aspects of learning how to connect your whole body and mind as an integrated machine. Integrated unit, in order to function totally and holistically. When it comes in, you sink your chest. So you press here. Like I'm pretty solid here, right? Because you're pushing down to my fan, my chest. And then you go, I don't even have to come. But there's actually, so now there's another, not going mechanism that blends. Right, so there's blending. You gotta do it, see. So when you're sinking, it sinks down to the bottom. Chin is tucked, chest is in. And then you push hard as well. It's not going anywhere, right? You expand a bit and you know your balance. Just expand. All right, cool, right? All right. Both shoulders? Yeah. Both shoulders, can we, please? So you contract? Yeah. Easy with balance, all right? Yeah. Because when you can try, you feel like, oh, I can push the guy, right? Yeah. You feel like you can push me. Right, you feel you got me, right? So we don't, you don't get that. Okay. Don't use this. Yeah. Use, just relax. Like when you push in here, Yeah. I'm totally relaxed. I'm just using my whole structure, in my body. Oh, okay. So this, this is actually touching my body. Yeah. So you feel like you got me, right? Yeah. But it actually does more. It does more room. Yeah. All right. Just relax this whole thing. Suck in there, you think? So it feels like, oh yeah, I got you now. But you feel like now it's on your back leg, right? Yeah. Now you just expand. Yeah, okay. All right. I'm so new, okay. So, let, put that into your pushing. So you're like sucking in. I'm ready, I'm already sucked in. Yeah. I'm already expanding. Okay. You're gonna make sure it's elbow. But then you need to make sure the elbow, cap the elbow. Yeah. Cap the elbow, so if I go like this, you can just push it up there. Okay. But you try to elbow me like this. You do that. Elbow, elbow me. Okay. At least I got control of the elbow. Okay. I don't. Then if you feel yourself moving this way, you're, you're... Right there. You're gonna change it to here. Yeah. Okay. All right. You need to... In, cap the elbow. This is sucking in. This is sucking in. Just sucking in. And then expand. Pump into you. Like that, right? Yeah. Every step through deeper. Yeah. Okay. See that? So my feet, my feet haven't touched the ground yet and they've already made contact. Okay. So now all the momentum is going through you instead of going to the ground. Okay. Okay. You try that. I'll stand here and you just try it. Pump it like that. So you gotta step really deep through it. So I step with this foot or this one. No, this one. So, like that. You're gonna check. Yeah. So that works too. But that's not the technique. So... So I'm here. I'm gonna step deeper today. You wanna take my place. So here's my center. You wanna be there. So my foot basically has to be here. Oh yeah. All right. Yeah. Let's just see how deep you have to go. So, yeah. But then don't need for it. You straight? Yeah. Boom. Okay. It's like one straight step. Okay. I'm trying to drop my height down. And I feel like that when I get here, my shoulder's here. Yeah, don't use your shoulder. Yeah. And this one technique is to use your shoulder. It's a beat. That's where I'm more like combata. Yeah. Because you can use your shoulder bone. Yeah. But for training, you're just gonna bump with your chest. So, Okay. Like that. Okay. So relax your shoulder. Don't do this. Okay. Okay. Yeah, like that. All right. But don't stick it out like this. I'm trying to pull it back. Yeah. So just relax. You're not stepping people up. So feel that when I step here. You don't want to step and go. Yeah. You have to go. You have to pay before I land. Okay. You see how I do it. But before my foot even touches the ground, I'm already there. Yeah. For the same time. Yeah. So. Yeah. There you go. I can feel that a lot more than you think. But you step first, right? So you want to aim before and behind the goal. The other thing is to make a frame. Yeah. Make this round. Yeah. Sink your chest. So there's like one big, one big cup. Yeah. One big cup is gone. That's it. Okay. Because if you stick out any part of the cup, then it's just going to go in. It won't affect the whole thing. Okay. So you make this round. You go. Okay. Yeah. All right. So there's two ways you can sink down. Yeah. For you to sink. That's rising up. Okay. Yeah. So you go. Yeah. Yeah. That's rising up. Okay. Or you can sink down. So it's like going down. Going downwards. Yeah. All right. You got it. Do your pushes. Yeah. Same idea, right? I'm pretending I'm not even. Yeah. All right. So now you just extend this. That was. And now you're bringing your whole body into it. Into the push. Yeah. So. Make mistakes in Tai Chi. So one of the main advantages of learning Tai Chi is for health, for your joints, for your bones, for breathing, for relaxation and meditation. But also, you learn a concept called rooting or sinking. So as you can see in the demonstration, we'll hear how much do you weigh? 240 pounds. 220 pounds. Look at his muscles. Look at his arms. Holy cow. He's as big as my leg. Right? I'm already, I'm only about 150 pounds. Look at my skinny arms. And I'm able to resist and pushing me. And I'm fairly relaxed. Without using a lot of strength, I can resist this push. And how hard were you pushing there? 100%. He's putting all the strength in there. And I'm just standing there, not using too much strength. So the key is don't fight strength with strength. Don't fight force with force. So in Tai Chi, you'll teach you how to use structure. The structure of your skeletal structure, of your bones, of your joints, of your alignment, and also of your mind of what the intention is in order to resist force using just structure. So what are the key things that you need to have structure? Well, there's three mistakes that people make that destroy structure in Tai Chi. And very few people that actually practice Tai Chi actually know and actually experience and know how to do this. So stay tuned and I'm gonna show you those to you. Mistake number three is not being relaxed. So a lot of people are confused about relaxation and about being placid. There's two different things. For example, if I'm being placid, he pushes, and that's placid, right? There's nothing there. I'm not being placid, okay? But being relaxed in a concept called shong, or shong in Chinese. It's being loose, but relaxed, but still have structure. So he's pushing, he's pushing harder, harder, harder. I'm relaxed, see? My hand's relaxed when he's pushing harder, harder, I'm still relaxed. See how he's relaxed my arm is? I'm still able to resist him, okay? So that's the difference between being shong, which means loose and placid. But in English, we use the word relaxation, which is very easy to misinterpret. So number one key, when you practice your Tai Chi, for example, practice your Tai Chi, your hands are always relaxed. There's only a tense state and a relaxed state. Now, when we go to the gym, most people, they practice being tense. Use your muscles, tense up to get more power, which is okay, it works. But if you practice being tense all the time, and practice being tense like this, then if you're fighting against someone bigger than you, you're at a disadvantage because his force will be stronger than your force. So rather than use force, I use shong, I use relaxation. So when you practice your Tai Chi, make sure that your hands are not open like this because that's too much tension. Because your hands are not closed like this because that's too much tension. Your hands should always be in the middle. When it's relaxed, it's completely relaxed. Imagine holding an egg in your hand. When you're open, just open them slightly, just stretch them out a little bit. When they're relaxed, relaxed. When they're open, just open a little. You always wanna feel the energy ball in the palms of your hands. So it's very subtle. For example, when I do this, I'm combining two things. First of all, my hands are lifting up. At the same time, my hands are going from relaxed to slightly open, and then back to relaxed, slightly open. It's a very minor detail, but what that does is it teaches you to, even though you're using tension, see my hands are slightly open, that I'm still in a relaxed state. So I never go from, I never go up to 100%. I go up to maybe 60 to 70% tension. Never go above that. Because once you go above that, then you start to use force. If you stay below, let's say, 60% tension, then you're not using force, you're using relaxation. And the key to Tai Chi is to train yourself so that you can still use relaxation at 60%, 50%, 40%, 30%, eventually using no tension at all to be able to resist someone with force. So that's what takes the training. That's what takes the many, many hours of repetition and training, doing the push-hands that we just showed you in the demonstration. Doing that for a lot, then you can learn how to use relaxation. Mistake number two in Tai Chi is to not use your dan tian or not use your core, the center of gravity, to direct the movements, okay? So there's a very simple movement called bowed hands. So I'm using my core to direct my body. The same I'm using just one hand. See how my core is moving in a circle to direct my arm. So the core or the dan tian leads the arms. Sun dai sao, that's what I say in Chinese. The body leads the hand. So that's number two mistake. Here's how it looks like when you make the mistake. See a difference? My hand is leading my core. So there's very little power or connection when I'm moving my hand. I'm just moving my hand. I'm not even leading it with the core. Now I'll do it so you're doing it correctly. So how you can practice is actually put your finger or put your hand and fingers touch your belly button and then feel it move before your hand moves. But now you get the difference, okay? And the difference, you can tell. Let's see, I'm just using my hand like this. Just my hand. Okay, pain-wise, how much is that? Good, you got a billion, yeah. Okay, one to 10. About a four. Four, okay? Now I'm using my hip, I mean using my dan tian. Yeah. How much pain more pain is there? It brings it up to about a seven. A seven, right? And I didn't use more power, I just used my waist. And if I use more, I can get it up to 10, right? So that's the key of generating power is to use your dan tian. So let me show you a demonstration in the 24 move tai chi form. I'll how to use the dan tian to guide your hand. So let me show you the wrong way of doing this. Okay, I'm trying very hard to do it the wrong way because I practice so much the proper way. But what I'm doing is I'm leading with my hands and then I move my body. So a very basic fundamental in early tai chi, if you're a beginner, is to learn how to move your hips. Now when you get advanced tai chi, you actually do the opposite. You learn to move your hands before your hips. It's contradictory, isn't it? Okay, but I'll show you how to do that in the next lesson or in a later lesson. And it goes with the concept that Bruce Lee taught, which is to move your hands before your feet. Just like in fencing, you want to move your hands before your feet. The reason is because when somebody attacks you, I don't have time to move my hip first and do a big to giant tai chi move, right? If somebody attacks me, I have to move my hand first. So what's the difference? See, before you learn tai chi and once you learn tai chi, they move their hands first, but there's no power. And then they'll practice tai chi and then they'll learn how to use the hips to get power. But they practice enough tai chi and now they'll get back to the beginning. They use their hands first, but now it comes with power. How does that happen? So let me show you again. Let's see his attacking, right? I don't have time to move my hips and do a big tai chi move like in a lot of demonstrations, right? I only have time to just move my hand up, right? But there's power there. How that happened, right? I just moved my hand, right? I'm not moving my hand and then my body. Go do it again. I moved my hand and then my body. I didn't move my hip first. Here's me moving my hips first. Too slow, right? I have to go one, two. You already hit me, okay? But now I wanna do it so that I move my hand first. Okay, so how does that work? Maybe in a later lesson I can show you how to do that. Mistake number one that you can make in tai chi is to not sink your tailbone, which means not to open your back. Now I'm gonna show Will, for example, because I'm wearing a jacket you can't see. So you see, if you take your shirt and tighten it up, the spine has a curve here, right? So most people have that curve naturally, but in tai chi, you actually don't want that curve. In tai chi, you want to get rid of that curve. So you wanna sink down the tailbone, okay? So that you can feel that this is flatter. And ideally it's actually a C, it's a couple. So what you need to do is sink your tailbone down even more, suck in your gut and then stretch this out like this, okay? So now I can feel his lower back straining up, okay? But still not enough. You want it to stick out, you push out over here, push, push, push, push, that's better, okay? So now you can feel that it's more like a C where I've started about before. See how it's like an S, so you don't want that. And you can see a lot of people doing tai chi with a back like this is actually very bad for your back and also it makes you disconnected. It disconnects your upper body with your lower body. The key to having a strong core and dan qian is to connect your upper body with your lower body. And this is the main mistake that people make by having the S curve of the spine. And what it does is disconnects your body. So for example, I'm gonna do an S curve on purpose. My spine is like, my belly's sticking out. I'm trying to, and he pushes on my hand. Push, push, push. See? I'll automatically go back. There's no resistance. But now I stick my back out. I drop my hip and make this into a C and then now he pushes on it. What happened? It's a difference. You're more rooted. It's rooted. See what happens when you curve your back is now that energy transfer goes straight through your spine and then into your hips and into the legs, into the knees, into the ground. When you break that connection by curving your spine, now all the energy just goes in your spine. It doesn't go to your legs. So that's why he pushes, right? That energy goes to the spine and then I go. So that's the number one mistake that you can make in Tai Chi. So when you practice your Tai Chi, make sure that you always check. Put my hand back behind my back. I see. It's straight. You do the C. You don't wanna be like this. So even when you do your moves, think about that. Think that spine is gonna be straight. One exercise you can do is to do very slow squats against the wall. So there's a wall against me. I wanna first put my back against the wall and then see if there's any space behind my back. See if I slip my hand behind my back. If there's a space that I can slip my hand behind, then there's too much space. So I need to get rid of that space. I want all my spine to be touching the wall. Once I get that, then I can go up and down. Just go halfway and go back up, sliding my spine up and down the wall. Now, after I do that, and I'm good at it, then I can go all the way down, all the way down, keeping my spine straight and touching the wall all the way. And do it slow like this. So that's gonna be very hard on your lower back, but it strengthens your lower back. It strengthens your leg. So that's one key in Tai Chi of creating connectedness. So stay tuned, I'm gonna show you the bonus mistake that people make. So the bonus mistake that you can make in Tai Chi is doing it too fast. I know everybody says this, you wanna do Tai Chi slow, but many people don't understand why you do Tai Chi so slow. Well, today we talked about three mistakes. Number one, relaxation. Number two, using your Dan Tian to lead your hands. Number three, having a proper spine alignment. What do all those things mean? All those things mean connectedness of your whole body, integration of your whole body. If your hand moves, your whole body moves. If your feet move, your whole body moves. Everything's connected. And the reason we do Tai Chi so slow is that we're training that connectedness. And it's impossible to train it doing it fast. That's why we do it slow. If we can do it fast and still get connectedness, then everybody would do Tai Chi fast. But the reason we do it slow is because Tai Chi doing it slow is probably the only way you can train that connectedness in your body by combining all the techniques that we learned. Relaxation, leading with the Dan Tian. And later on, how to use your breath to relax and connect your body to and your mind. So there's many aspects of learning how to connect your whole body and mind as an integrated machine, integrated unit, in order to function totally and holistically. When it comes in, you sink your chest. So you press here. Like I'm pretty solid here, right? Because you're pushing it down to my head, right there. So expand my chest, and then you go, and then you don't have to turn. So there's actually a sink your chest, and expand your chest. So now there's another, not going mechanism that blends, right? So there's blending, I try to do it to see. So when you're sinking, it sinks down to the bottom. So the chin is tucked, chest is in. And then you push hard as well. It's not going anywhere, right? You expand a bit and you don't have to. So you contract? Yeah. Easily when we balance it hard. Yeah. Because when you can try it, you feel like, oh, I can push the guy, right? Yeah. You feel like you can push me, right? You think you got me, right? So we don't do it to the head. Okay. Don't use this. Yeah. Use, just relax. Like when you push on here, I'm totally relaxed. I'm just using my whole structure on my body. Mm, okay. So this is actually touching my body, I let you in. Yeah. So you feel like you got me, right? Yeah. But it actually does more. Yeah. All right. Just relax this whole thing. Suck in there, you think? So it feels like, oh yeah, I got you now. But you feel like now it's on your back leg, right? Yeah. Now you just expand. Yeah. Okay. All right. I'm already so new, okay. So let's put that into your cushion. So you're sucking in things. So I'm ready, I'm already sucked in. Yeah. And I'm already expanding. Okay. But then you need to make sure the elbow, cut the elbow. Yeah. Cut the elbow, so if I go like this, you can just push it up like that. Okay. But you try to elbow me like this. You do that, elbow me. Okay. At least I got control of the elbow. Okay. Right? Then if you feel yourself moving this way, you're right there. You're gonna just change it to here. Yeah. Okay. All right. So you need to in, cut the elbow. This is sucking in, this is sucking in. Just sucking in and then expand. Go for it. Okay. If I need to bump into you like that, right? Yeah. If I step through deeper, my feet haven't touched the ground yet and they've already made contact. Okay. So now all the momentum is going through you instead of going to the ground. Okay. Okay. You try that. I'll stand here and you just try it. Bump it like that. So you gotta step really deep. So I stepped with this foot or? No, this foot. This one. Like that. You gotta check. Yeah. So that works too, but that's not the technique. So I'm here. So let's step deeper today. You wanna take my place, so here's my center. You wanna be there. So my foot basically has to be here. Oh yeah. All right. Yeah. Let's just see how deep you have to go. So. That's better. Okay. But then don't move forward. You straight? Yeah. Boom. It's almost straight. It's like one straight step. Okay. I'm trying to drop my height down, because I feel like that when I get here, my shoulder's here. Yeah, don't use your shoulder. Yeah. And this one's technique is to use your shoulder. It should be. That's where I'm more like combative. Yeah. Because you can use your shoulder bone. Yeah. But for training, you're just gonna bump the chest. So. Okay. Like that. Okay. The chest. So relax your shoulder. Don't do this. Okay. Yeah. Like that. All right. But don't stick it out like this. I'm trying to pull it back. Yeah. Just relax. Come on, David Wong. And in this video, I'm gonna show you the three mistakes in Tai Chi that are very common that people make. So one of the main advantages of learning Tai Chi is for health, for your joints, for your bones, for breathing, for relaxation and meditation. But also, you learn a concept called rooting or sinking. So as you can see in the demonstration, we'll hear how much do you weigh? 220 pounds. 220 pounds? Okay. His muscles. Holy cow. He's as big as my leg. Right? I'm already, I'm only about 150 pounds. Look at my skinny arms. And I'm able to resist and pushing me. And I'm fairly relaxed. Without using a lot of strength, I can resist this push. And how hard were you pushing there? 400%. 900%. He's putting all the strength in there. And I'm just standing there. Not using too much strength. So the key is, don't fight strength with strength. Don't fight force with force. So in Tai Chi, you'll teach you how to use structure. The structure of your skeletal structure, of your bones, of your joints, of your alignment, and also of your mind of what the intention is in order to resist force using just structure. So what are the key things that you need to have structure? Well, there's three mistakes that people make that destroy structure in Tai Chi. And very few people that actually practice Tai Chi actually know and actually experience and know how to do this. So stay tuned and I'm gonna show you those to you. Mistake number three is not being relaxed. So a lot of people are confused about relaxation and about being placid. There's two different things. For example, if I'm being placid, he pushes and that's placid, right? There's nothing there. I'm not saying it's placid, okay? But being relaxed in concept called shong, or shong in Chinese. It's being loose, but relaxed, but still have structure. So he's pushing. He's pushing harder, harder, harder, harder. I'm relaxed, see? My hand's relaxed, but he's pushing harder, harder. I'm still relaxed. See how I'm relaxed my arm is? I'm still able to resist them, okay? So that's the difference between being shong, which means loose and placid. But in English, we use the word relaxation, which is very easy to misinterpret. So number one key, when you practice your tai chi, for example, practice your tai chi, your hands are always relaxed. There's only a tense state and a relaxed state. Now when we go to the gym, most people practice being tense. Use your muscles, tense up to get more power, which is okay, it works. But if you practice being tense on time, practice being tense, then if you're fighting against someone bigger than you, you're at a disadvantage because his force will be stronger than your force. So rather than use force, I use shong. I use relaxation. So when you practice your tai chi, make sure that your hands are not open like this because that's too much tension. Because your hands are not closed like this because that's too much tension. Your hands should always be in the middle. When it's relaxed, it's completely relaxed. Imagine holding an egg in your hand. When you're open, just open them slightly. Just stretch them out a little bit. When they're relaxed, relaxed. When they're open, just open a little. You always wanna feel an energy ball in the palms of your hands. So it's very subtle. For example, when I do this, I'm combining two things. First of all, my hands are lifting up. At the same time, my hands are going from relaxed to slightly open. And then back to relaxed, slightly open. It's a very minor detail, but what that does is it teaches you to, even though you're using tension, see my hands are slightly open, that I'm still in a relaxed state. So I never go from, I never go up to 100%. I go up to maybe 60 to 70% tension. Never go above that. Because once you go above that, then you start to use force. You stay below, let's say, 60% tension, then you're not using force. You're using relaxation. And the key to Tai Chi is to train yourself so that you can still use relaxation at 60%, 50%, 40%, 30%, eventually using no tension at all to be able to resist someone with force. So that's what takes the training. That's what takes the many, many hours and repetition and training during the push hands that we just showed you in the demonstration. Doing that for a lot that you can learn how to use relaxation. Mistake number two in Tai Chi is to not use your Dan Tian or not use your core, the center of gravity, to direct the movements. So there's a very simple movement called followed hands. So I'm using my core to direct my body. So say I'm using just one hand. See how my core is moving in a circle to direct my arm. So the core or the Dan Tian leads the arms. Sun Dai Sao, that's what I say in Chinese. The body leads the hand. So that's number two mistake. Here's how it looks like when you make the mistake. See a difference? My hand is leading my core. So there's very little power or connection when I'm moving my hand. I'm just moving my hand. I'm not even leading it with the core. Now, do you see it doing correctly? So how you can practice is actually put your finger or put your hand, fingers touch your belly button and then feel it move before your hand moves. But now you get the difference, okay? And the difference you can tell. Let's see, I'm just using my hand like this. Just my hand. Okay, pain-wise, how much is that? Yeah, really, yeah. One to 10. About a four. Four, okay. Now I'm using my hip. I mean, using my dan tian. Yeah. How much pain, more pain is there? 20 to about a seven. A seven, right? And I didn't use more power, I just used my waist. And if I use more, I can get it up to 10, right? So that's the key of generating power is to use your dan tian. So let me show you a demonstration in the 24 move tai chi form. How to use the dan tian to guide your hands. So let me show you the wrong way of doing this. Okay, I'm trying very hard to do it the wrong way because I practice so much the proper way. But what I'm doing is I'm leading with my hands and then I move my body. So a very basic fundamental in early tai chi, if you're a beginner, is to learn how to move your hips. Now, when you get advanced tai chi, you actually do the opposite. You learn to move your hands before your hips. It's contradictory, isn't it? Okay, but I'll show you how to do that in the next lesson, or the later lesson. And it goes with the concept that Bruce Lee taught, which is to move your hands before your feet, just like in fencing, you wanna move your hands before your feet. The reason is because when somebody attacks you, I don't have time to move my hip first and do a big tai chi move, right? If somebody attacks me, I have to move my hand first. So what's the difference? See, before you learn tai chi, once you learn tai chi, they move their hands first, but there's no power. And then they practice tai chi, and then they'll learn how to use the hips to get power. But they practice enough tai chi, and now they'll get back to the beginning. They use their hands first, but now it comes with power. How does that happen, okay? So let me show you again. Let's see his attacking, right? I don't have time to move my hips and do a big tai chi move like in a lot of demonstrations, right? I only have time to just move my hand up, right? But there's power there, how that happened, right? I just moved my hand, right? I'm not gonna move my hand and then my body. Go ahead and do it again. I moved my hand and then my body. I didn't move my hip first. Just me moving my hips first. Too slow, right? I have to go one, two. You already hit me, okay? But now I wanna do it so that I move my hand first. Okay, so how does that work? Maybe in a later lesson, I can show you how to do that. Mistake number one that you can make in tai chi is to not sink your tailbone, which means not to open your back. Now I'm gonna show Will, for example, because I'm wearing a jacket, you can't see. So you see, if you take your shirt and tighten it up, the spine has a curve here, right? So most people have that curve naturally. But in tai chi, you actually don't want that curve. In tai chi, you want to get rid of that curve. So you wanna sink down the tailbone, okay? So that you can feel that this is flatter. And ideally, it's actually a C, it's a couple. So what you need to do is sink your tailbone down even more, sucking your gut, and then stretch this out like this, okay? So now I can feel it's lower back, it's straightening up, okay, but it's still not enough. You want it to stick out, you push out over here, push, push, push, push, that's better, okay? So now you can feel that it's more like a C, where I started about before. See how it's like an S, so you don't want that. And you can see a lot of people doing tai chi with a back like this, it's actually very bad for your back and also it makes you disconnected. It disconnects your upper body with your lower body. The key to having a strong core and dan tian is to connect your upper body with your lower body. And this is the main mistake that people make by having the S curve of the spine. And what it does is disconnects your body. So for example, I'm gonna do an S curve. Purpose, my spine is like, my belly's sticking out. I'm trying to, and he pushes on my hand. See, I'll automatically go back. There's no resistance. But now I stick my back out. I drop my hip and make this into a C. And then now he pushes on it. What happened? It's a different. Yeah, you're more rooted. It's rooted. See, what happens when you curve your back is now that energy transfer goes straight through your spine and then into your hips and into the legs, into the knees and into the ground. When you break that connection by curving your spine, now all the energy just goes in your spine. Doesn't go to your legs. So that's why he pushes, right? That energy goes into spine and then I go. So that's the number one mistake that you can make in Tai Chi. So when you practice your Tai Chi, make sure that you always check. Put my hand back behind my back. I see if it's straight, is it a C? You don't want to be like this. So even when you do your moves, think about that. Think that the spine is going to be straight. One exercise you can do is to do very slow squats against the wall. So that's the wall against me. I want to first put my back against the wall and then see if there's any space behind my back. See if I slip my hand behind my back. If there's a space that I can slip my hand behind, then there's too much space. I need to get rid of that space. I want all my spine to be touching the wall. Once I get that, then I can go up and down. Just go halfway and go back up, sliding my spine up and down the wall. Now after I do that, and I'm good at it, then I can go all the way down, all the way down, keeping my spine straight and touching the wall all the way. And do it slow like this. So that's going to be very hard on your lower back, but it strengthens your lower back. It strengthens your leg. So that's one key in Tai Chi of creating connectedness. So stay tuned, I'm going to show you the bonus mistake that people make. So the bonus mistake that you can make in Tai Chi is doing it too fast. I know everybody says this, you want to do Tai Chi slow, but many people don't understand why you do Tai Chi so slow. Well, today we talked about three mistakes. Number one, relaxation. Number two, using your Dan Tian to lead your hands. And number three, having a proper spine alignment. What do all those things mean? All those things mean connectedness of your whole body, integration of your whole body. If your hand moves, your whole body moves. If your feet move, your whole body moves. Everything's connected. And the reason we do Tai Chi so slow is that we're training that connectedness. And it's impossible to train it doing it fast. That's why we do it slow. If we can do it fast and still get connectedness, then everybody would do Tai Chi fast. But the reason we do it slow is because Tai Chi doing it slow is probably the only way you can train that connectedness in your body by combining all the techniques that we learned. Relaxation, leading with the Dan Tian. And later on, how to use your breath to relax and connect your body to and your mind. So there's many aspects of learning how to connect your whole body and mind as an integrated machine, integrated unit, in order to function totally and holistically. So when it comes in, you sink your chest. So you press here, like I'm pretty solid here, right? Because you're pushing it down to my head. So expand my chest, then you go for the lead, not the tail. So there's actually an expanded chest. So now there's another, not going mechanism that blends. So there's blending. Try to do it, see? So when you're sinking, it sinks down to the bottom. Chin is tucked, chest is in. And then you push hard as well. It's not going anywhere. You expand a bit and you know your balance. No, no, no. Chris, your posture is coming, please. So you contract? Yeah. Easily when we balance it, all right? Yeah. Because when you can try, you feel like, oh, I can push the guy, right? Yeah. You feel like you can push me. Right? You think you got me, right? Yeah. Okay. Don't use this. Yeah. Use, just relax. Like when you push in here, I'm totally relaxed. I'm just using my whole structure and my body. Okay. So this is actually touching my body. Yeah. So you feel like you got me, right? Yeah. Because actually there's more. There's more room. Yeah. All right. All right. So just relax this whole thing. Suck in there, everything. So it feels like, oh yeah, I got you now. But you feel like now it's on your back leg, right? Yeah. Now you just expand. Yeah. Okay. All right. There's something new. Okay. Right? So, Glenn, put that into your, so you're like sucking in and expand. So I'm ready, I'm already sucked in. Yeah. And I'm already expanding. Okay. Ideally I want to make sure it's elbow. But then you need to make sure the elbow, cut the elbow. Yeah. Cut the elbow, so if I go like this, you can just push it up a little bit. Okay. But you try to elbow me a little bit. You do that. Elbow, elbow me. Okay. At least I can control the elbow. Okay. I don't, right? Then if you feel yourself moving this way, right there. You're gonna just gonna change it to here. Yeah. So you need to in, cut the elbow. This is sucking in, this is sucking in, just sucking in and then expand. Step here and I bump into you with that, right? Yeah. Every step through deeper. So my feet haven't touched the ground yet and I've already made contact. Okay. So now all the momentum is going through you instead of going to the ground. Okay. Okay. You try that. Stand here and you just try to bump into that. So you gotta step really deep through it. So I step with this foot or this one? No, this one. So, like that. You're gonna check. Yeah. So that works too, but that's not the technique. So, So I'm here. You gotta step deeper than that. You wanna take my place. So here's my center. You wanna be there. So my foot basically has to be here. Oh yeah. All right. Yeah. Let's just see how deep you have to go. So. That's better. Okay. D4 is straight? Yeah. Boom. It's almost straight. It's like one straight step. Okay. I'm trying to drop my height down because I feel like that when I get here, my shoulder's here. Yeah, don't use your shoulder. Yeah. And this one technique is to use your shoulder. It should be. That's for a more combata. Yeah. Because you can use your shoulder bone. Yeah. But for training, you're just gonna bump into your chest. So, Okay. Like that. Okay. So relax your shoulder. Don't do this. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Like that. All right. But don't stick it out like this. I'm trying to pull it back. Yeah. So just relax. All right. You're not stepping people down. So I feel that when I step in. So you don't want to step then go? Yeah. You have to go. You have to pay before I land. Okay. You see how I go. So before my foot even touches the ground, I'm already there. Yeah. Or the same time. Yeah. So. Yeah. I do that a lot more than, Okay. But you step first, right? So you want to aim for behind the guy. Okay. Another thing is to make a frame. Yeah. Make this round. Yeah. Sink your chest. So this is like one big, one big cup. Yeah. One big cup is gone. So. Okay. Because you stick out any part of the cup, then it's just gonna go in. It won't affect the whole thing. Okay. So you make this round. So. Okay. Yeah. So there's two ways. You can sink down. Yeah. Or you can rise up. Or you sink. That's rising up. Okay. Yeah. So you go. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Or you can sink down. So it's like. Yeah. All right. You got it. Your pushers. Yeah. Same idea, right? You're pretending I'm not even there. Yeah, all right. So now you just extend this. What's that? You're bringing your whole body into it? Into a push. Yeah. So. Don't push. Just like. Okay, in this video, I'm gonna show you the three mistakes in Tai Chi that are very common. One of the advantages of learning Tai Chi is for health, for your joints, for your bones, for breathing, for relaxation and meditation. But also, you learn a concept called rooting or sinking. So as you can see in the demonstration, we'll hear how much you weigh. 425. 320 pounds. Look at his muscles. Look at his arms. Look at his cow. He's as big as my leg, right? I'm already, I'm only about 150 pounds. Look at my skinny arms. And I'm able to resist them pushing me. And I'm fairly relaxed. Without using a lot of strength, I can resist this push. And how hard were you pushing there? 100%. He's putting all the strength in there. And I'm just standing there, not using too much strength. So the key is don't fight strength with strength. Don't fight force with force. So in Tai Chi, you'll teach you how to use structure, the structure of your skeletal structure, of your bones, of your joints, of your alignment, and also of your mind of what the intention is in order to resist force using just structure. So one of the key things that you need to have structure, well, there's three mistakes that people make that destroy structure in Tai Chi. And very few people that actually practice Tai Chi actually know and actually experience and know how to do this. So stay tuned and I'm gonna show you those to you. Mistake number three is not being relaxed. So a lot of people are confused about relaxation and about being placid. There's two different things. For example, if I'm being placid, he pushes, and that's placid, right? There's nothing there, nothing, it's placid, okay? But being relaxed in a concept called shong, or shong in Chinese, it's being loose by relaxed, but still have structure. So he's pushing, he's pushing harder, harder, harder, harder. I'm relaxed, see? My hand's relaxed, but he's pushing harder, harder. I'm still relaxed. See how I'm relaxed my arm is? I'm still able to resist them, okay? So that's the difference between being shong, which means loose and placid. But in English, we use the word relaxation, which is very easy to misinterpret. So number one key, when you practice your tai chi, for example, practice your tai chi, your hands are always relaxed. There's only a tense state and a relaxed state. Now, when we go to the gym, most people, they practice being tense. Use your muscles, tense up, to get more power, which is okay, it works. But if you practice being tense all the time, practice being tense, then if you're fighting against someone bigger than you, you're at a disadvantage because his force will be stronger than your force. So rather than use force, I use shong, I use relaxation. So when you practice your tai chi, make sure that your hands are not open like this because that's too much tension. Because your hands are not closed like this because that's too much tension. Your hands should always be in the middle. When it's relaxed, it's completely relaxed. Imagine holding an egg in your hand. When you're open, just open them slightly. Just stretch them out a little bit. When they're relaxed, relaxed. When they're open, just open a little. You always wanna feel the energy ball in the palms of your hands. So it's very subtle. For example, when I do this, I'm combining two things. First of all, my hands are lifting up. At the same time, my hands are going from relaxed to slightly open. And then back to relaxed, slightly open. It's a very minor detail, but what that does is it teaches you to, even though you're using tension, see my hands are slightly open, that I'm still in a relaxed state. So I never go from, I never go up to 100%. I go up to maybe 60 to 70% tension. Never go above that. Because once you go above that, then you start to use force. If you stay below, let's say 60% tension, then you're not using force, you're using relaxation. And the key to Tai Chi is to train yourself so that you can still use relaxation at 60%, 50%, 40%, 30%, eventually using no tension at all to be able to resist someone with force. So that's what takes the training. That's what takes the many, many hours of repetition and training during the push hands that we just showed you in the demonstration. Doing that for a lot that you can learn how to use relaxation. Mistake number two in Tai Chi is to not use your dan tian or not use your core, the center of gravity to direct the movements, okay? So there's a very simple movement called followed hands. So I'm using my core to direct my body. This time I'm using just one hand. See how my core is moving in a circle to direct my arm. So the core or the dan tian leads the arms, sun dai sao, that's what I say in Chinese, the body leads the hand. So that's number two mistake. Here's how it looks like when you make the mistake. See a difference? My hand is leading my core. So there's very little power or connection when I'm moving my hand. I'm just moving my hand. I'm not even leading it with the core. Now, do you see it doing correctly? So how you can practice is actually put your finger or put your hand and your fingers touch your belly button and then feel it move before your hand moves. But now you get the difference, okay? And the difference, you can tell. Let's see, I'm just using my hand like this. Just my hand. Okay, pain-wise, how much is that? Good, you got it. Yeah, it's good. Okay, one to 10. About a four. Four, okay? Now I'm using my hip, I mean using my dan tian. Yeah. How much pain, more pain is there? It brings it up to about a seven. A seven, right? And I didn't use more power, I just used my waist. And if I use more, I can get it up to 10, right? So that's the key of generating power is to use your dan tian. So let me show you a demonstration in the 24 move tai chi form. I'll how to use the dan tian to guide your hands. So let me show you the wrong way of doing this, okay? I'm trying very hard to do it the wrong way because I practice so much the proper way. But what I'm doing is I'm leading with my hands and then I move my body. So a very basic fundamental in early tai chi if you're a beginner is to learn how to move your hips. Now when you get advanced tai chi, you actually do the opposite. You learn to move your hands before your hips. It's contradictory, isn't it? Okay, but I'll show you how to do that in the next lesson or in a later lesson. And it goes with the concept that Bruce Lee taught which is to move your hands before your feet. Just like in fencing, you want to move your hands before your feet. The reason is because when somebody attacks you, I don't have time to move my hip first and do a big tai chi move, right? If somebody attacks me, I have to move my hand first. So what's the difference? See, before you learn tai chi and once you learn tai chi, they move their hands first, but there's no power. And then they practice tai chi and then they'll learn how to use the hips to get power. But they practice enough tai chi and now they'll get back to the beginning. They use their hands first, but now it comes with power. How does that happen, okay? So let me show you again. Let's see if it's attacking, right? I don't have time to move my hips and do a big tai chi move like in a lot of demonstrations, right? I only have time to just move my hand up, right? But there's power there, how that happened, right? I just moved my hand, right? I'm not gonna move my hand and then my body. Go ahead and do it again. I moved my hand and then my body. I didn't move my hip first. Just me moving my hips first. Too slow, right? I have to go one, two. You already hit me, okay? But now I wanna do it so that I move my hand first. Okay, so how does that work? Maybe in a later lesson, I can show you how to do that. Mistake number one that you can make in tai chi is to not sink your tailbone, which means not to open your back. Now I'm gonna show Will, for example, because I'm wearing a jacket, you can't see. So you see, if you take your shirt and tighten it up, your spine has a curve here, right? So most people have that curve naturally, but in tai chi, you actually don't want that curve. In tai chi, you want to get rid of that curve. So you wanna sink down the tailbone, okay? So that you can feel that this is flatter. And ideally, it's actually a C, it's a couple. So what you need to do is sink your tailbone down even more. Suck in your gut and then stretch this out like this, okay? So now I can feel his lower back is straightening up, okay? But it's still not enough. You want it to stick out, you push out over here, push, push, push, push, that's better, okay? So now you can feel that it's more like a C, whereas starting about before, see how it's like an S. So you don't want that. And you can see a lot of people doing tai chi with a back like this is actually very bad for your back and also it makes you disconnected. It disconnects your upper body with your lower body. The key to having a strong core and dan tian is to connect your upper body with your lower body. And this is the main mistake that people make by having the S curve of the spine. And what it does is disconnects your body. So for example, I'm gonna do an S curve on purpose. My spine is like my belly sticking out. I'm trying to, and he pushes on my hand. See, I'll automatically go back. There's no resistance. But now I stick my back out. I drop my hip and make this into a C. And then now he pushes on it. What happened? It's a different. You're more rooted. It's rooted. See, what happens when you curve your back is now that energy transfer goes straight through your spine and then into your hips and into the legs, into the knees and into the ground. When you break that connection by curving your spine, now all the energy just goes in your spine. It doesn't go to your legs. So that's why he pushes, right? That energy goes to the spine and then I go. So that's the number one mistake that you can make in Tai Chi. So when you practice your Tai Chi, make sure that you always check. Put my hand back behind my back. I see, it's straight. You did a C. You don't wanna be like this. So even when you do your moves, think about that. Think that the spine is gonna be straight. One exercise you can do is to do very slow squats against the wall. So that's what the wall is gonna be. I wanna first put my back against the wall and then see if there's any space behind my back. See if I slip my hand behind my back. If there's a space that I can slip my hand behind, then there's too much space. So I need to get rid of that space. I want all my spine to be touching the wall. Once I get that, then I can go up and down. Just go halfway and go back up, sliding my spine up and down the wall. Now, after I do that, and I'm good at it, then I can go all the way down, all the way down, keeping my spine straight and touching the wall all the way. And go as slow like this. So that's gonna be very hard on your lower back, but it strengthens your lower back. It strengthens your leg. So that's one key in Tai Chi of creating connectedness. So stay tuned, I'm gonna show you the bonus mistake that people make. So the bonus mistake that you can make in Tai Chi is doing it too fast. I know everybody says this, you wanna do Tai Chi slow, but many people don't understand why you do Tai Chi so slow. Well, today we talked about three mistakes. Number one, relaxation. Number two, using your Dan Tian to lead your hands. Number three, having a proper spine alignment. What do all those things mean? All those things mean connectedness of your whole body, integration of your whole body. If your hand moves, your whole body moves. If your feet move, your whole body moves. Everything's connected. And the reason we do Tai Chi so slow is that we're training that connectedness. And it's impossible to train it doing it fast. That's why we do it slow. If we can do it fast and still get connectedness, then everybody would do Tai Chi fast. But the reason we do it slow is because Tai Chi doing it slow is probably the only way you can train that connectedness in your body by combining all the techniques that we learned. Relaxation, leading with the Dan Tian. And later on, how to use your breath to relax and connect your body to and your mind. So there's many aspects of learning how to connect your whole body and mind as an integrated machine, integrated unit, in order to function totally and holistically. When it comes in, you sink your chest. You press here, like I'm pretty solid here, right? Because you're pushing it down to my chest, expand my chest, and then you go from knee to toe. But there's actually sink your chest and expand your chest. So now there's another, not going mechanism that blends, right? So there's blending, and it's sinking more. Try and do it, see? So when you're sinking, it sinks down to the body. So the chin is tucked, chest is in. And then you push hard as well. It's not going anywhere, right? Make it expand a bit. And you know what you want from us? Yeah. Close your shoulders, please. So you contract? Yeah. Easily when we balance it, all right? Yeah. Because when you can try and you feel like, oh, I can push the guy, right? Yeah. You feel like you can push me, but you think you got me, right? So we don't do anything about that. Okay. Don't use this. Yeah. Use, just relax. Like when you push in here, I'm totally relaxed. I'm just using my whole structure and my body. Yeah, okay. So this is actually touching my body. Yeah. So you feel like you got me, right? Yeah. Because actually there's more. There's more room. Yeah. All right. All right. So just relax this whole thing. Suck in there, you think? So it feels like, oh yeah, I got you now. But you feel like now it's on your back leg, right? Yeah. Now you just expand. Yeah, okay. All right. It's so new, okay. So let's put that into your cushion. Sucking in and expand. So I'm ready, I'm already sucked in. Yeah. And I'm already expanding. Okay. You're gonna be elbowing. But then you need to make sure the elbow, cap the elbow. Yeah. Cap the elbow, so if I go like this, you can just push it up there. Okay. But you try to elbow me like this. You do that. Elbow, elbow me. Okay. At least I can control the elbow. Okay. I do it, right? Then if you feel yourself moving this way, you're right there. You can just change it to here. Yeah. Okay. All right. So you need to in, cap the elbow. Is this sucking in? Is this sucking in? Just sucking in and then expand. I'm David Wong and in this video, I'm gonna show you the three mistakes in Tai Chi that are very common that people make. So one of the main advantages of learning Tai Chi is for health, for your joints, for your bones, for breathing, for relaxation and meditation. But also, you learn a concept called rooting or sinking. So as you can see in the demonstration, we'll hear how much do you weigh? 240 pounds. 320 pounds. Look at his muscles. Look at his arms. Holy cow. He's as big as my leg, right? I'm already, I'm only about 150 pounds. Look at my skinny arms. And I'm able to resist and pushing me. And I'm fairly relaxed. Without using a lot of strength, I can resist this push. And how hard were you pushing there? 200%, he's putting all the strength in there. And I'm just standing there, not using too much strength. So the key is don't fight strength with strength. Don't fight force with force. So in Tai Chi, we'll teach you how to use structure, the structure of your skeletal structure, of your bones, of your joints, of your alignment and also of your mind of what the intention is in order to resist force using just structure. So one of the key things that you need to have structure, well there's three mistakes that people make that destroy structure in Tai Chi. And very few people that actually practice Tai Chi actually know and actually experience and know how to do this. So stay tuned and I'm gonna show you those to you. Mistake number three is not being relaxed. So a lot of people are confused about relaxation and about being placid. There's two different things. For example, if I'm being placid, he pushes and that's placid, right? There's nothing there. I'm not being placid, okay? But be relaxed in concept called shong, or shong in Chinese. It's being loose but relaxed but still have structure. So he's pushing, he's pushing harder, harder, harder. I'm relaxed, see? My hands relaxed when he's pushing, harder, harder. I'm still relaxed. See how I'm relaxed my arms? I'm still able to resist them, okay? So that's the difference between being shong, which means loose and placid. But in English, we use relaxation, which is very easy to misinterpret. So number one key, when you practice your tai chi, for example, practice your tai chi, your hands are always relaxed. There's only a tense state and a relaxed state. Now, when we go to the gym, most people practice being tense. Use your muscles, tense up, to get more power, which is okay, it works. But if you practice being tense all the time, if you practice being tense, like this, then if you're fighting against someone bigger than you, you're at a disadvantage because his force will be stronger than your force. So rather than use force, I use shong. I use relaxation. So when you practice your tai chi, make sure that your hands are not open like this because that's too much tension. Make sure your hands are not closed like this because that's too much tension. Your hands should always be in the middle. When it's relaxed, it's completely relaxed. Imagine holding an egg in your hand. When you're open, just open them slightly. Just stretch them out a little bit. When you're relaxed, relaxed. When you're open, just open a little. You always want to feel an energy ball in the palms of your hands. So it's very subtle. For example, when I do this, I'm combining two things. First of all, my hands are lifting up. At the same time, my hands are going from relaxed to slightly open, and then back to relaxed. Slightly open. It's a very minor detail, but what that does is it teaches you to, even though you're using tension, see my hands are slightly open, that I'm still in a relaxed state. So I never go from, I never go up to 100%. I go up to maybe 60 to 70% tension. Never go above that, because once you go above that, then you start to use force. If you stay below, let's say, 60% tension, then you're not using force, you're using relaxation. And the key to Tai Chi is to train yourself so that you can still use relaxation at 60%, 50%, 40%, 30%, eventually using no tension at all to be able to resist someone with force. So that's what takes the training. That's what takes the many, many hours of repetition and training, doing the push-hands that we just showed you in the demonstration. Doing that for a lot, then you can learn how to use relaxation. Mistake number two in Tai Chi is to not use your Dan Tian, or not use your core, the center of gravity to direct the movements, okay? So there's a very simple movement called bowed hands. So I'm using my core to direct my body. So say I'm using just one hand. See how my core is moving in a circle to direct my arm. So the core or the Dan Tian leads the arms. Sun Dai Sao, that's what I say in Chinese. The body leads the hand. So that's number two, the stick. Here's how it looks like when you make the stick. See a difference? My hand is leading my core. So there's very little power or connection when I'm moving my hand. I'm just moving my hand. I'm not even leading it with the core. Now, do as you're doing correctly. So how you can practice is actually put your finger or put your hand and fingers, touch your belly button and then feel it move before your hand moves. But now you get the difference, okay? And the difference, you can tell. So let's see, I'm just using my hand like this. Just my hand. Okay, pain-wise, how much is that? Good, you got to feel it, yeah. One to 10. About a four. Four, okay? Now I'm using my hit, I mean using my Dan Tian. Yeah. How much pain, more pain is there? It brings it up to about a seven. A seven, right? And I didn't use more power, I just used my waist. And if I use more, I can get it up to 10, right? So that's the key of generating power is to use your Dan Tian. So let me show you a demonstration in the 24 move Tai Chi form of how to use the Dan Tian to guide your hands. So let me show you the wrong way of doing this, okay? I'm trying very hard to do it the wrong way because I practice so much the proper way. But what I'm doing is I'm leading with my hands and then I move my body. So a very basic fundamental in early Tai Chi if you're a beginner is to learn how to move your hips. Now when you get advanced Tai Chi, you actually do the opposite. You learn to move your hands before your hips. It's contradictory, isn't it? Okay. But I'll show you how to do that in the next lesson or in a later lesson. And it goes with the concept that Bruce Lee taught, which is to move your hands before your feet. Just like in fencing, you wanna move your hands before your feet. The reason is because when somebody attacks you, I don't have time to move my hip first and do a big to giant Tai Chi move, right? If somebody attacks me, I have to move my hand first. So what's the difference? See, before you learn Tai Chi and once you learn Tai Chi, they move their hands first, but there's no power. And then they practice Tai Chi and then they'll learn how to use the hips to get power. But they practice enough Tai Chi and now they'll get back to the beginning. They use their hands first, but now it comes with power. How does that happen? Okay. So let me show you again. Let's see if it's attacking, right? I don't have time to move my hips and do a big Tai Chi move, like in a lot of demonstrations, right? I only have time to just move my hand up, right? But there's power there. How that happened, right? I just move my hand, right? I'm not moving my hand and then my body. Go do it again. I move my hand and then my body. I didn't move my hip first. Just me moving my hips first. Too slow, right? I have to go one, two. You already hit me, okay? But now I want to do it so that I move my hand first. Okay, so how does that work? Maybe in a later lesson, I can show you how to do that. Mistake number one that you can make in Tai Chi is to not sink your tailbone, which means not to open your back. Now I'm gonna show Will, for example, because I'm wearing a jacket, you can't see. So you see, if you take your shirt and tighten it up, your spine has a curve here, right? So most people have that curve naturally, but in Tai Chi, you actually don't want that curve. In Tai Chi, you want to get rid of that curve. So you want to sink down the tailbone, okay? So that you can feel that this is flatter. And ideally, it's actually a C, it's a couple. So what you need to do is sink your tailbone down even more, sucking your gut, and then stretch this out like this, okay? So now I can feel his lower back is straightening up, okay? But it's still not enough. You want it to stick out, you push out over here, push, push, push, push, that's better, okay? So now you can feel that it's more like a C where I started about before. See how, see how it's like an S. So you don't want that. And you can see a lot of people doing Tai Chi with a back like this is actually very bad for your back and also it makes you disconnected. You disconnect your upper body with your lower body. The key to having a strong core and Dan Qian is to connect your upper body with your lower body. And this is the main mistake that people make by having the S curve of the spine. And what it does is disconnect your body. So for example, I'm going to do an S curve on purpose. My spine is like, my belly's sticking out. I'm trying to, and he pushes on my hand. See, I'll automatically go back. There's no resistance. But now I stick my back out. I drop my hip and make this into a C. And then now he pushes on it. What happened? It's a different, it's more rooted. It's rooted. See what happens when you curve your back is now that energy transfer goes straight through your spine and then into your hips and into the legs, into the knees, into the ground. When you break that connection by curving your spine, now all the energy just goes in your spine. It doesn't go to your legs. So that's why he pushes, right? That energy goes to the spine and then I go. So that's the number one mistake that you can make in Tai Chi. So when you practice your Tai Chi, make sure that you always check. Put my hand back behind my back. I see, it's straight. You do the C. You don't want to be like this. So even when you do your moves, think about that. Think that the spine is going to be straight. One exercise you can do is to do very slow squats against the wall. So that's the wall against me. I want to first put my back against the wall and then see if there's any space behind my back. See if I slip my hand behind my back. If there's a space that I can slip my hand behind, then there's too much space. So I need to get rid of that space. I want all my spine to be touching the wall. Once I get that, then I can go up and down. Just go halfway and go back up, sliding my spine up and down the wall. Now, after I do that and I'm good at it, then I can go all the way down, all the way down, keeping my spine straight and touching the wall all the way. And do it slow like this. So that's going to be very hard on your lower back, but it strengthens your lower back. It strengthens your leg. So that's one key in Tai Chi of creating connectedness. So stay tuned, I'm going to show you the bonus mistake that people make. So the bonus mistake that you can make in Tai Chi is doing it too fast. I know everybody says this, you want to do Tai Chi slow, but many people don't understand why you do Tai Chi so slow. Well, today we talked about three mistakes. Number one, relaxation. Number two, using your Dan Tian to lead your hands. And number three, having a proper spine alignment. What do all those things mean? All those things mean connectedness of your whole body. Integration of your whole body. If your hand moves, your whole body moves. If your feet move, your whole body moves. Everything's connected. And the reason we do Tai Chi so slow is that we're training that connectedness. And it's impossible to train it doing it fast. That's why we do it slow. If we can do it fast and still get connectedness, then everybody would do Tai Chi fast. But the reason we do it slow is because Tai Chi doing it slow is probably the only way you can train that connectedness in your body by combining all the techniques that we learned. Relaxation, leading with the Dan Tian. And later on, how to use your breath to relax and connect your body to and your mind. So there's many aspects of learning how to connect your whole body and mind as an integrated machine. Integrated unit in order to function totally and holistically.