 Welcome, I'm David Wong and 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, 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 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? About 90 to 100 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, 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 going to 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. But being relaxed in a concept called 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 I 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 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. 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. 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 arms. 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 the 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. So now you get the difference. 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? One to ten. About four. Now I'm using my hit. I mean using my dan tian. How much 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 ten, 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. 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? 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? So let me show you again. Let's see if it's attacking. 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. But there's power there. How does that happen? I just move my hand, right? I move my hand and then my body. 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. But now I want to do it so that I move my hand first. So how does that work? Maybe in a later lesson I can show you how to do that. The 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 going to 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, so that you can feel that this is flatter. And ideally, it's actually a C, it's a cup. So what you need to do is sink your tailbone down even more, suck in your gut, and then stretch this out like this. So now I can feel it's lower back, straightening up. But it's still not enough. You want it to stick out. You push out over here, push, push, push, push. That's better. 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 going to 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 different. Yeah, it's more 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. 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 with my hand back behind my back. See, if it's straight, it's 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 going 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. 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. Ask questions of things that you want to learn and things that you want to get more information on about this lesson in the comment section. And like and share with friends. So we'll see you soon in the next lesson.