 sticks 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. 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? About 90 to 100%. 90 to 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 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 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 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 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. 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. Okay, 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. 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. Okay, one to 10. About a four. 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? 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 tai chi move, right? If somebody attacks me, I have to move my hand first. So what's the difference? 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, 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 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, his 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 cup. 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 him 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. 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 and to the knees and to 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 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 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. 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. Let's 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 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. 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. And then you've got to come. But there's actually sink your chest and expand your chest. So now there's another, not going mechanism that, that blends, right? So there's blending and sinking more. 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, right? And then you expand a bit and you know what I mean. Yeah. Close shoulders, come in, please. So you contract? Yeah. Easily when we balance 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, right? You think you got me, right? When we jump, you just get down. Okay. Don't use this. Yeah. Use, just relax. Like when you push on here, Yeah. I'm totally relaxed. I'm just using my whole structure. I'm just using my body. Mm, okay. So this is actually touching my body. Yeah. I let you in. Yeah. So you feel like you got me, right? Yeah. Because 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. It's so new, okay. Put that into your cushion. So you're like sucking in there. All righty, I'm already sucked in. Yeah. Ideally, I want to make sure it's elbow. But then you need to make sure the elbow, copy elbow. Yeah. Copy 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, elbow me. Okay. At least I can control the elbow. Okay. Right, well, right? Then if you feel yourself moving this way, you're right there. You're gonna just gonna change it to here. Here. Okay. All right. So you need to in, copy elbow. This is sucking in, this is sucking in. Just sucking in, and then expand. And I bump into you like that, right? Yeah. Every step through deeper. Yeah, okay. See that? So 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. You can try that. I'll stand here and you can 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, 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. 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. And 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 combata. Yeah. Because you can use your shoulder bone. Yeah. But for training, you're just gonna bump into the chest. So, 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 gonna step in deep enough. So I feel that when I step in. So you don't wanna step then go? Yeah. You have to go. You have to pay before I land. Okay. So before my foot even touches the ground, I'm already there. Yeah. Or the same time. Yeah. So. Yeah. There you go. I can do that a lot more than you step first. So you wanna aim for behind the edge. Okay. Another thing is to make a frame. Yeah. Like 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. That 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. Yeah. So you go. Yeah. Rising up. Yeah. Rising up. Okay. Or you can sink down. So it's like. Precious. Yeah. Same idea, right? All right. So now you just extend this. What's that for? So now you're bringing your whole body into it. Into the place. Okay. So. Yeah. Don't push. Just like. Stop. Okay, in this video, I'm gonna show you the three mistakes in Tai Chi that are very common that people make. 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 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? 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 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 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 relaxing. My hands relaxed but he's pushing harder, harder. I'm still relaxed. You 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 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 and 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. 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. 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 a feeling, 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? Four is 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. 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 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? 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 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 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 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, 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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. 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 what is 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 go 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? Yeah. Because you're pushing it down to my head. So expand my chest open, then you go, and then you have to come in. 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 bottom. Chin is tucked, chest is in. And then you push hard as well. It's not going anywhere, right? And you expand a bit and you know what you're about to say. Chris, do you have a brochure that's coming, please? So you contract? Yeah. Easily what was bound to suit him, all right. Because when you can try and 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 need to get 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, my body. Oh, okay. So this is actually touching my body. That's 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, 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. So, let's put that into your brochure. Sucking in things. 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. 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 don't, right? Then if you feel yourself moving this way, you're right there. You're gonna change it to here. Yeah. 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. Yeah, okay. See that? So 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. If you don't stand here, you just try it. Okay, like that. So you gotta step really deep, too. 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, 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. Sorry. So 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. Is 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 with your chest. Okay. Like that. Okay. So relax your shoulder. Don't do this. All right. Okay. Yeah. Like that. All right. Don't stick it out like this. I'm trying to pull it back. Yeah. So just relax. Okay. Welcome. 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? 220 pounds. 320 pounds? Okay, there's muscles. There's arms. Holy cow. They're as big as my leg. Right? I'm already, I'm only about 150 pounds. Look at my skinny arms. And I'm really 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 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'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 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 hands relaxed when he's pushing. Harder, harder. I'm still relaxed. See how I relax 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, 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 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. 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, 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, 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, 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? You got a billion, 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 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? 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 do it again. I move my hand and then my body. I didn't move my hip first. I just need to move 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, 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 it's still not enough. You want it to stick out, you push out of here, push, push, push, push, that's better, okay? So now you can feel that it's more like a C, where I stand 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. 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'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, I 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. 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 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. 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 too, 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. You expand my chest, and then you go, and then you don't have to turn. So there's actually sink your chest and expand your chest. So now there's another mechanism that blends. So there's blending. Try to do it to see. So when you're sinking, it sinks down to the body. The 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. Just expand. All right, good boy. Chris, close your eyes, come in, please. So you contract? Yeah. Easily lose balance soon, all right? Because when you can try, 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. 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 in my body. Oh, okay. So this is actually touching my body, and I let you in. Yeah. I feel like you got me, right? Yeah. Because 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. I'm already so new, okay. Put that into here. So I'm ready, I'm already sucked in. Yeah. You already 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 there. Okay. But you try to elbow me like this. You do that, 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, 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. 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, too. So I step with this foot, or? No, this foot. This one. So, like that. You're gonna check. Yeah. So that works too, you don't have to take me. So, So I'm here. You're 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. Sorry. That's better. Okay. But then, don't need for it. 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. 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. 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. 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. All right. All right. You're not stepping deep enough. So I feel that when I step in. So don't, so you, you don't want to step and go. Yeah. You have to go, you have to pay before I land. Okay. 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 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. 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 here 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. Precious? Yeah. Same idea, right? All right. So now you just extend this. 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 for your bones or breathing, relaxation and meditation, but also we 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 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? 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, nothing, 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. I'm relaxing, 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, 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. 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 to stretch them out a little bit. To relax, relaxed. When you're open, just open a little. You always want to 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 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. 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 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. Okay, 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. Okay, pain-wise, how much is that? Good, you got a feeling, 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 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, the 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, 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 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. 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 this 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 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, suck in your gut and then stretch this out like this, okay? So now I can feel his lower back straining up, okay? But it's still not enough. You want it to stick out, you push out of 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 disconnects 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, I 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. Let's see, is it 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. Let's 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 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. Because 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, right? They expand my chest, and then you go, I don't even have to turn. But there's actually, so now there's another, not going mechanism that blends. So there's blending, and it's sinking more. I try to do it to 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? It expands a bit, and you know what I'm saying. Both shoulders? Yeah. Both shoulders coming, please. So you contract? Yeah. Easily when we balance 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. You feel like you've gotten me, right? So we don't, you step in. 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 is actually touching my body. I let you in. 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, relax this whole thing. Suck in there, really. 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. Right? 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, cup the elbow. Yeah. Cup 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 going to change it to here. Yeah. Okay. All right. So you need to in, cup 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 too deeper. Yeah. 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. Bump into it like that. So you got to step really deep too. So I step with this foot or this one. No, this one. So like that. You're going to check. Yeah. So that works too, but that's not the technique. So. So I'm here. So I step deeper than that. 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, 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. Is this one technique is to use your shoulder? It should be. That's where more like combata. Yeah. Because you can use your shoulder bone. Yeah. But for training, you're just going to 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. All right. So 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, we 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. 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? 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 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. 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 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 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. 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, 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 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. Okay, 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. Let's see, I'm just using my hand like this. Just my hand. Okay, pain-wise, how much is that? You got to feel 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 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 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? 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'd that happen? Yeah. 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 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 this 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 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, suck in your gut and then stretch this out like this, okay? So now I can feel it's lower back straining 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 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 danqian 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. Push, push, push. 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, if 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 spine is going to be straight. One exercise you can do is to do very slow squats against the wall. So that's what the wall is going to be. 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. 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, right there, you expand my chest, and then you go for the lead, not the turn. So there's actually, so now there's another, not going mechanism that blends. So there's blending, and it's sinking more. I try to do it to 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. And then you expand a bit and you know what to do. Both shoulders? Yeah. Both shoulders coming, please. So you contract? Yeah. Easily when it's bound to the bottom, all right. Because when you can try, 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. 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 in my body. Okay. So this is actually touching my body, I let you in. Yeah. So you feel like you got me, right? Yeah. Because 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. I'm already so new, okay. So let, put that into your sucking and then it's done. You're ready? I'm already sucked in. Yeah. 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 there. Okay. But you try to elbow me a little bit. You do that, elbow me. Okay. At least I can control 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. 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. 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 that. So you gotta step really deep through it. So I'll step with this foot or? This one. So, like that. You're gonna check. Yeah. So that works too, but that's not the technique. 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, go. But then don't need for this. You straight? Yeah. Boom. It's almost straight. It's like one straight stick. 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. It'll be. 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 the 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. Just relax. You're not stepping people down. It's a feeling 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, I go. But before my foot even touches the ground, I'm already there. Yeah. Or the same time. Yeah. So. Yeah, there you go. No problem. I can feel that a lot more than you stepped first, right? 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, this is like 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. That's rising up. Okay. Yeah. So, you go. Yeah. That's rising up. Okay. Or you can sink down. So, it's like going down. 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. What's that for? So, now you're bringing your whole body into it. Into the plate. 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. 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. All 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? All right, 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'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. I'm relaxed, see? My hands relax me, 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 on 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 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 scratch them out a little bit. When they're relaxed, relaxed. When they're open, just open a little. You always want to 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, 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 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 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. Okay, pain-wise, how much is that? Good, yeah, 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 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? 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 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 moved my hand, right? I'm not gonna move my hand and then my body. Go through 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, his 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 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 that 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 will 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 and 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 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 put my hand back behind my back. I see. If it's straight, it is 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. 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 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 Dantian 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 Dantian. 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. I expand my chest, and then you go. And then you don't have to come. So there's actually, take your chest and expand your chest. So now there's another, not going mechanism that blends. So there's blending. I try to do it to 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. You expand a bit and you don't know a problem. So you contract? Yeah. Easily when we balance 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. You think you got me, right? So we don't use the pen. Okay. Don't use this. Yeah. Use, just relax. Like when you push on here, you're totally relaxed. I'm just using my whole structure and my body. Okay. So this is actually to touch my body. I let you in. 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. I'm so new, okay. So let's put that into your sucking in. We're ready. I'm already sucked in. Yeah. But then you need to make sure the elbow, tap the elbow. Yeah. Tap 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, elbow me. Okay. At least I can control the elbow. Okay. Like that. Then if you feel yourself moving this way, you're right there. You're gonna change it to here. Here. Okay. All right. So you need to in, tap 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. 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. Bump it like that. So you gotta step really deep through it. So I step with this foot or this one. Like that. You're gonna check, yeah. So that works too, but that's not the technique. So I'm here. So I 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. Sorry. But then don't move forward. Be straight. Boom. It's almost straight. It's like one straight step. Okay. I'm trying to drop my height down. Cause I feel like that when I get here my shoulder's here. Yeah. Don't use your shoulder. Yeah. There's one technique is to use your shoulder. It should be. That's for a more like combata. Yeah. Cause you can use your shoulder bone. Yeah. But for training, you're just gonna bump with your chest. So. Okay. Like that. Okay. This is the chest. So relax your shoulder. Don't do this. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Don't stick it out like this. I'm trying to pull it back. Yeah. So just relax. Okay. 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 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 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? 100%. 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, 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 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, but 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, and 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 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. I 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 pilot 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, 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 this 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. Let's see, I'm just using my hand like this. Just my hand, pain-wise, how much is that? 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? 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 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? 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 tai chi move, right? If somebody attacks me, I have to move my hand first. So what's the difference? 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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. Purpose, my spine is like, my belly's sticking out. I'm trying to, and he pushes on my hand. See, I will 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 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 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. 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 spine is going to be straight. One exercise you can do is to do very slow squats against the wall. So that's what the wall is going to be. 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. 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 expand my chest and then you go for the lead not to come. But there's actually a good chest, an expanded chest. So now there's another mechanism that blends. So there's blending. I'll try to do it. So when you're sinking, it sinks down to the body. The chin is tight, chest is in. And then you push hard as more. It's not going anywhere. Then you expand a bit and you know what we're all for. All right, let's do it. First, push your shoulders. 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 on here, I'm totally relaxed. I'm just using my whole structure, my body. Yeah, okay. So this is actually touching my body. 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. It's so new. Okay. Right? Put that into here. So I'm ready, I'm already sucked in. Yeah. I'm already expanding. Okay. You have the elbow. But then you need to make sure the elbow, tap the elbow. Yeah. Tap 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 go, right? Then if you feel yourself moving this way, you're, you're. Right there. You're going to change it to here. Yeah. Okay. All right. You need to. In, tap 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, yeah? 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, you just try it. Bump it like that. So you got to step really deep through it. So I step with this foot, or this one. So, like that. You're going to check, yeah. So that works too, but that's not the technique. So. So I'm here. I'm going 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. But then don't need for, just be straight. Yeah. Boom. Boom 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. To beat. That's where I'm more like combata. Yeah. Because you can use your shoulder bone. Yeah. But for training, you're just going to 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. I'm trying to pull it back. Yeah. So just relax. You're not stepping people down. So I feel that when I step in. So don't, 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 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 can feel that a lot more than, but you step first then. So you want to aim, 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. Cause you stick out any part of the cup, then it's just going to go, go in. It won't affect the whole thing. Okay. So you make this round, you 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. Yeah. Rising up. Yeah. Rising up. Okay. Or you can sink down. So it's like going downwards. Yeah. It's going downwards. All right. You got it. To your pushes. Yeah. Same idea, right? I'm pretending I'm not even there. Yeah. All right. So now you just extend this. So now you're bringing your whole body into it. Into the push. 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, we'll hear how much do you weigh? 225. 225 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 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? 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 think it's placid, okay? But be 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 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. 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. So there's a very simple movement called pilot 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 it 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 Don 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 Don Tian. So let me show you a demonstration in the 24 move Tai Chi form of how to use the Don 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 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, most people 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 is 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 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 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, 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 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, suck in your gut, and then stretch this out like this, okay? So now I can feel it's 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, 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. 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 danqian is to connect your upper body with your lower body. And this is the main mistake that people make by having the S curve on 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 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. 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 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 a 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 what 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. 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 monkey and 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. 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. You expand my chest, and then you go. And then you have to come. But there's actually a sink your chest and expand your chest. So now there's another, not going mechanism that blends. So there's blending. I try to do it to 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. You expand a bit and you know your balance. So you contract? Yeah. Easily when we balance 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. You think you got me, right? So we don't do it that bad. 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 and my body. Okay. So this is actually touching my body. I let you in. 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. I'm already so new. Okay. Right? So, Glenn, put that into your sucking things. So I'm ready. I'm already sucked in. Yeah. And I'm already expanding. Okay. I want to make sure it's helpful. 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, elbow me. Okay. At least I can control the elbow. 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. Pump into you like that, right? Yeah. Every step through deeper. So 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. So I'll step with this foot or this one. So like that. You're gonna check. Yeah. So that works too, but that's not the technique. So 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. But then don't need for, just be 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 your shoulder. So be. That's where more like 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. And 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? 240 pounds. 250 pounds. Look at his muscles. Look at his arms. Holy cow. He's 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 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? About 90 to 100%. 90 to 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 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 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 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, but he's pushing harder, harder. I'm still relaxed. See how it'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, 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, 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%, 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 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 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 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 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? 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? 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, his 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 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, okay? So now I can feel his lower back is straightening up, okay? But it's still not enough. You want him 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. 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. Yeah, it's more rooted. It's rooted. See, what happens when you curve your back is now that energy transferred 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. 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. 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 spine is gonna be straight. One exercise you can do is to do very slow squats against the wall. So that's where 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 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. 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. Like I expand my chest, and then you go from knee to toe. But there's actually an expanded chest. Oh, okay. All right, nice. So now there's another, not going mechanism that blends, right? So there's blending. Got 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, right? You expand a bit and you know your problems. So you contract? Yeah. We were bound so hard. Yeah. Because when you contract, you feel like, oh, I can push together, right? Yeah. You feel like you can push me. You think you got me, right? So you don't push me back. 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 and 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. Because actually there's more. There's more room. Yeah. All right. 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. Right? So let's put that into your sucking in things. So I'm ready. I'm already sucked in. Yeah. And I'm already expanding. Okay. Ideally I want to make sure it's comfortable. But then you need to make sure the elbow, copy elbow? Cut the elbow so if I go 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 can control the elbow. Okay. Right, well, 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, 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. Have I stepped through deeper? Yeah. Okay. See that? So 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 in like that. So you gotta step really deep. So I'll step with this foot or? No, this foot. This one. Okay. So 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. Sorry. But then don't need for, just be 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 your shoulder. So be. 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. 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. All right. All right. You're not stepping people down. So I feel that when I step in. So don't, 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- So before my foot even touches the ground, I'm already there. Yeah, or the same time. Yeah. So. Yeah. There we go. I can feel that a lot more than the shape. But you step first, right? So you want to aim, 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. That. Okay. Because you stick out any part of the cup, then it's just going to go, go in. It won't affect the whole thing. Okay. So you make this round, you go. 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. Yeah. So you go. Yeah. Yeah. Rising up. Okay. Or you can sink down. So it's like going downwards. Yeah. All right. You got it. Yeah, pushes. Yeah. Same idea, right? Pretending I'm not even there. Yeah, all right. So now you just extend this. Yeah. So now you're bringing your whole body into it. Into the foot. So, yeah. Yeah. Don't push. Just like, stop. Just keep it there. Okay, 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 we 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 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? Like 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 being relaxed in concept called Song or Song 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 relaxed my arm is? I'm still able to resist them, okay? So that's the difference between being Song, 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 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 pilot 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 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. Okay, pain-wise, how much is that? You got it, yeah. 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. 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? 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 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 is 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 don't 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. 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 cup. 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 straining 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 that 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, 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 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 speak 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. Let's 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, 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. 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. You're taking rest here. Like I'm pretty solid here, right? Yeah. Because you're pushing down to my head. I expand my chest, and then you go. And then you have to come. But there's actually, so now there's another, not going mechanism that blends. So there's blending, 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. And then you expand a bit, and you know you're on balance. Good boy. Both shoulders? Yeah. Both shoulders, can we please? So you contract? Yeah. Easily when we're bound to the bottom, all right. Because when you can try, you feel like, oh, I can push the guy, right? Yeah. You feel like you can push me, but you think he got me, right? So we don't need to go down. 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, and my body. Okay. So this is actually to touch my body, and let you in. Yeah. So you feel like you got me, right? Yeah. Because 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. I'm so new. Okay. So let, put that into your sucking. 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, copy elbow. Yeah. Copy 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 can control the elbow. Okay. I don't, right? 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, in, copy elbow. This is sucking in. This is sucking in. Just sucking in. And then expand. That here, and I bump into you. Like that, right? Yeah. I've stepped through deeper. Yeah. So my feet haven't touched the ground yet and I've already made contact. Okay. So now all the momentum. This is both. Going through you instead of going to the ground. Okay. Okay. You try that. I'll stand here. You just try it. I'm gonna do that. So you gotta step really deep. So I step with this foot, or? No, this foot. 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 then, don't need for this. You straight? Yeah. Boom. It's all straight. It's like one straight step. Okay. I'm trying to drop my height down. Cause I feel like that when I get here, my shoulder's here. Yeah, don't use your shoulder. Yeah. Is this one technique is to use your shoulder? It should be. That's for more like combata. Yeah. Cause you can use your shoulder bone. Yeah. But for training, you're just gonna bump with your chest. So, I'll grab that. Okay. This is the chest. So relax your shoulder. Don't do this. Hold on. Okay. Yeah. Like that. All right. Don't stick it out like this. I'm trying to pull it back. Yeah. So just relax. Welcome. I'm David Wong and 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. 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 really 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, 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. Nothing, it's placid. But be relaxed in the 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 relaxed but he's pushing harder, harder. I'm still relaxed. See how it 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 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. 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 different techniques to 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, 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. 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 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? You got a billion, yeah. One to 10. About a four. Four, okay. Now I'm using my hit. 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, 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 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 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 this shirt and tighten it up, his 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, 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, so push out over here, push, push, push, that's better, okay? So now you can feel that it's more like a C, where I stand 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. 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 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, is it 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. Let's 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. 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. The press here, like I'm pretty solid here, right? Because you're pushing down to my head. I span my chest, and then you go. But there's actually, so now there's another, not going mechanism that, 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 more. It's not going anywhere, right? You expand a bit, and you know your balance. Just expand. Both shoulders? Yeah. Both shoulders, come in, please. So you contract? Yeah. That's fine. That's fine, that's fine, all right. Because when you contract, you feel like, oh, I can push the guy, right? Yeah. You feel like you can push me. Right, you feel like you've gotten me, right? You don't feel like you've got that. 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. Okay. So this is actually touching my body, that you in. Yeah. So you feel like you've got me, right? Yeah. Because 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. I'm so new, okay. So, Glenn, put that into your cushion, so you're sucking in. All ready? I'm already sucked in. Yeah. And I'm already expanding. Okay. You only want to make sure it's elbow. But then you need to make sure the elbow, copy elbow. Yeah. Copy 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 can control the elbow. Okay. If I don't, 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, in, cut the elbow. Is this sucking in? Is this sucking in? Just sucking in and then expand. And I bump into you like that, right? Yeah. Have I stepped through deeper? Yeah, okay. My feet haven't touched the ground yet and I'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 into that. So you gotta step really deep. So I step with this foot or? No, this foot. 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 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. Yeah. Let's see how deep you have to go. But then don't need for, you straight? Yeah. Boom. It's all 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. Is 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, put your chest. So. Okay. Like that. Okay. Put 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. You're not gonna step in deep enough. So I feel that when I step here, 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 when you step first. So you wanna aim for it behind the guy. Okay. Another thing is to make a frame. Yeah. Like this round. Yeah. Sink your chest. So this is like one big, one big cup. Yeah. One big cup is gone. So. Okay. Because if 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. 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. Yeah. So you go. Yeah. Up. Yeah. That's rising up. Okay. Or you can sink down. So it's like going downwards. Yeah. All right. You got it. Yeah. Do your pushes. Yeah. Same idea, right? Yeah. All right. So you just extend this. Got it. So now you're bringing your whole body into it. Into the foot. Yeah. So. Three 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, Will here, how much do you weigh? 240 pounds. 220 pounds. Look at his muscles. 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 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? 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, 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 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, nothing'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 relaxed, but 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 it 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. 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. 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? 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 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 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 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 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 straining 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. I'm trying to, and he pushes on my hand. See, I 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. Let's 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 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 again thing. 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 Don 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 Don Tian. And later on, how to use your breath to relax and connect your body too, 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 right leg. So I expand my chest, and then you go, and then you have to come. But there's actually an expanded chest. 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 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 what you're talking about. And you go, and you know what you're talking about. So you contract? Yeah. Easily when we balance it, all right? 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? And you don't feel like you can step in. Okay. Don't use this. Yeah. Use, just relax. Like when you push on here, you're totally relaxed. I'm just using my whole structure, and my body. Mm, okay. So this is actually the touching of my body. I let you in. Yeah. So you feel like you got me, right? Yeah. Because actually there's more. There's more room. 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 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 that the elbow, cut the elbow. Yeah. Cut 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. Like that. Then if you feel yourself moving this way, you're right there. You're going to just change it to here. Yeah. Okay. All right. So you need to, in, cut the elbow. Is this sucking in? Is this sucking in? Just a second and then expand. Pump into you, like that, right? Yeah. Every step through deeper. Yeah. Okay. See that? So 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 got to step really deep. So I'll step with this foot or? No, this foot. This one. So, like that. You got to check. So that works too, but that's not the technique. So. So I'm here. So let's 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 it. 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 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. 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. Look at his muscles. Look at his arms. Holy cow. He's as big as my leg. All right, I'm already, I'm only about 150 pounds. Look at my skinny arms. And I'm really 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%. 90 to 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 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 when he's pushing harder, harder. I'm still relaxed. See how it'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 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 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. 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, 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 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. Okay, pain-wise, how much is that? Good, you got it, yeah. 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 of how to use the dan tian to guide your hands. So let me show you the wrong way of doing this. 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? 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 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 moved my hand, right? I'm not gonna move 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. 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, sucking 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, whereas that 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. 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, 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 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 want to be like this. So even when you do your moves, think about that. Think that spine is going to be straight. One exercise you can do is to do very slow squats against the wall. So that's what 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. 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. 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, you have to expand my chest and then you go, I don't even 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 and do it to see. So when you're sinking, it sinks down to the body. So your 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 where you are. So you contract? Yeah. Easily when we balance it hard. Because when you can try and 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 need to do it again. 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 to get my body. Mm, okay. So this is actually to touch my body, and let you in. Yeah. So you feel like you got me, right? Yeah. 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. Right? So Glenn, put that into your sucking things. So I'm ready, I'm already sucked in. Yeah. I'm already expanding. Okay. But then you need to make sure the elbow, tap the elbow. Yeah. Tap the elbow, so if I go like this, you can just push it up like that. Okay. But you try to elbow me a little bit. You do that, elbow me. Okay. At least I can control the elbow. Okay. 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, in, tap the elbow. This is sucking in, this is sucking in. Just sucking in and then expand. When you're pushing in, you're still forward. I'm gonna step through deeper. So 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'll step with this foot or? No, this foot. This one. So like that. You're gonna check. So that works too, but that's not the technique. So 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, go. But then don't need for this. 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. 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. That's where more like combata. Yeah. Because you can use your shoulder bone. Yeah. But for training, you're just gonna bump the chest. So. Okay. Like that. Okay. This is 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. So just relax. Now I'm stepping deeper down. So feel it when I step in. So you don't want to step then go. Yeah. You have to go. You have to hit before I land. Okay. You see I can. So before my foot even touches the ground, I'm already there. Yeah. Or the same time. Yeah. So. Yeah. There you go. Go across. I can feel that a lot more than. Okay. But you step first, right? So you want to aim before behind the guy. Okay. Another thing is to make a frame. Yeah. 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. 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 here you go. Yeah. Rising up. Rising up. Okay. Or you can sink down. So it's like. All right. You got it. Yeah. Pushes. Yeah. Same idea, right? Yeah. All right. So now you just extend this. Yeah. So now you're bringing your whole body into it. Into the push. Yeah. So. Okay, in this video, I'm going to show you the three mistakes in Tai Chi. The main advantages of learning Tai Chi is for health, for your joints, for your bones, for breathing, for relaxation and meditation. So we learned a concept called rooting or sinking. So as you can see in the demonstration, we'll hear how much 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 really 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? I was 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 being relaxed in concept called Song or Song 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 but 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 Song 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 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. 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 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, your 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. 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. 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 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? Good, you got to feel 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 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, you won't be able to 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 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 don't hit me, okay? But now I wanna do it so that I hit with 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. His 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 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, okay? So now I can feel his lower back straining 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 that 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. 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 off 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. 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 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, 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 this is the wall again thing. 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. Let's 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. 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. I think it's 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. It expands my chest, and then you go, and then you don't have to come. But there's actually an expanded chest. All right. So now there's another, not going mechanism that blends, right? So there's blending, go ahead and do it, see? So when you're sinking, it sinks down to the bottom. And then your tension is tucked, your chest is in. And then you push hard as well. It's not going anywhere, right? It expands a bit, and you know what you're on for, that's what you call it. Pull the shoulders? Yeah. Pull the shoulders, come here, please. So you contract? Yeah. Easily when we're bound, it's so hard. Because when you contract, 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? Don't use your pen. Okay. Don't use this. Yeah. Use, just relax. Like when you push on here, you're totally relaxed. I'm just using my whole structure, my body. Mm, okay. So this is actually touching my body, and that's you in. Yeah. So you feel like you got me, right? Yeah. It's actually, there's more. There's more moves. 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. I'm so new, okay. Right? So, Glenn, put that into your question. So you're sucking in things. So, are we ready? I'm already sucked in. Yeah. And I'm already expanding. Okay. You 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, everything just. Press it up there. 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. If I don't, then if you feel yourself moving this way, you're, 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. Just sucking in, just sucking in. Just sucking in, and then expand. And I'm bumping to you. If I step too deeper, 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. Bump it like that. So you gotta step really deep too. So I step with this foot, or? No, this foot. 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. So I step deeper than that. 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, just be 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. There's one technique is to use your shoulder. Should be. 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. Just use your chest. 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. 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, we 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. All right. I'm already, I'm only about 150 pounds. Look at my skinny arms. And I'm really 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 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 relax 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 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 to 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 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. 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 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, 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. 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 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 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. 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 don't want to 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 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, 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 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's sticking out. I'm trying to, and he pushes it 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, 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 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. 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. So you press here, like I'm pretty solid here, right? Because you're pushing down to my back, you expand my chest, and then you go, and then you have to come. So there's actually a sink your chest and expand your chest. All right. So now there's another, not going mechanism that, that blends. So there's blending, and it's sinking more. Try and do it, 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. And you expand a bit, and you know what you're on. Both shoulders? Yeah. Both shoulders coming from this. So you contract? Yeah. Easily moved by the suit, all right. 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 use that then. 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. Mm, okay. So this is actually the touching of my body. I let you in. Yeah. 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. All right, so new. Okay. Right? So Glenn, put that into your cushion. So you're sucking in things now. So already 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, copy elbow. Yeah. Copy elbow. So like 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. Like don't, right? And if you feel yourself moving this way, you're, you're, Right there. You're gonna 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 sucking in and then expand. Step here and I bump into you like that, right? Yeah. Have I stepped through deeper? Yeah. So right, 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 through the ground. Okay. Okay. You try that. I'll stand here and you just try to bump into that. So you gotta step really deep. So I stepped with this foot or this one. So like that. You're gonna check. So that works too, but that's not the technique. So. So I'm here. So I stepped 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. That's better. Okay. But then don't need four. You straight? Yeah. Boom. It's all straight. It's like one straight step. Okay. I'm trying to drop my height down. Cause I feel like when I get here, my shoulder's here. Yeah. Don't use your shoulder. Yeah. This one technique is to use your shoulder. So deep. That's where I'm more like combata. Yeah. Cause you can use your shoulder bone. Yeah. But for training, you're just gonna bump into your chest. So. Okay. Like that. 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. So I feel that when I step here. 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 go. But 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 step first. So you want to aim for behind the guy. Okay. Another thing is to make a frame. Yeah. Like this round. Yeah. It's like your chest. So this is like one big, one big cup. Yeah. One big cup is gone. So. Okay. Cause you stick out any part of the cup then it's just gonna go in. So it won't affect the whole thing. Okay. So you make this round. You 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. Yeah. Rising up. Yeah. Rising up. Okay. Or you can sink down. So it's like. Yeah. It's going down. All right. You got it. Your pushes. Yeah. Same idea, right? Yeah. All right. Extend this. What's that for? So now you're bringing your whole body into it. Into the 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 that pain 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 the wheel here, 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 really 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? 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 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 being placid, okay? But being relaxed in a concept called Song 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 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 Song 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 want to 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. I never go above that. Because once you go above that, then you start to use force. If you're staying 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 at 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 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 don't 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 him 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. 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. 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 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. Let's 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 Dantian 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 Dantian. 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 back, so I expand my chest, and then you go, and then you have to turn. So there's actually, sink 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. Try and do it, see? So when you're sinking, it sinks down to the bottom. Sheen 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 your balance. So you contract? Yeah. Easily lose balance too, all right? Because when you can try, 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 you don't, you just get in. 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 is actually to touch my body, or let you in. 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. I'm so new. Okay. So let, put that into your pushing, so you're like sucking in there. So I'm ready, I'm already sucked in. Yeah. And I'm already expanding. Okay. You'll be elbowing. But then you need to make sure the elbow, copy elbow. Yeah. Copy 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 can control the elbow. I don't. 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, cut the elbow. Is this sucking in? Is this sucking in? Just sucking in and then expand. When you're pushing in, you're still forward. Step here and I bump into you like that, right? Yeah. Have I stepped through deeper? Yeah. So 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. Okay. So you gotta step really deep too. So I stepped with this foot or? No, this foot. This one. So like that. You gotta check. Yeah. So that works too. But that's not the technique. So. So I'm here. So I stepped 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 see how deep you have to go. So. That's better. Okay. 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 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 for a more like combata. Yeah. Because you can use your shoulder bone. 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. So just relax. All right. Come on, David Wong. And 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? Look at his muscles. Look at his arms. Holy cow. They're as big as my leg. Right? I'm already, I'm only about 150 pounds. Look at my skinny arms. And I'm really 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, 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 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 relaxing. My hand's relaxed but 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 on 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 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, 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. 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. 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 it 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? Good, you got to feel 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 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, it won't be to 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 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 this 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 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, 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, 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 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. Push, push, push. 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 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 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 going to be. 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. When it comes in, you sink your chest. It's like press here, like I'm pretty solid here, right? Because you're pushing down to my head, I expand my chest, and then you go for the lead, not the tail. But it does 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 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, right? Then you expand a bit and you know you are found. That's good, right? No, no, no. Yeah, both shoulders coming from this side. 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, but 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, I'm totally relaxed. I'm just using my whole structure and my body. Yeah, okay. So this is actually to touch my body, and let you in. Yeah. So you feel like you got me, right? Yeah. Because 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. I'm so new, okay. Put that into your pushing. So you're sucking in there. All righty, I'm already sucked in. Yeah. I feel the 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 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 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. You need to. In, cut the elbow. This is sucking in. This is sucking in. Just sucking in and then expand. And I bump into you like that, right? Yeah. Every step through deeper. Yeah. Okay. See that? So my feet haven't touched the ground yet and they've already made contact. Okay. So now all the momentum. This is bump. 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 gotta step really deep too. 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 I'm gonna 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, so. But then don't need for it. Be straight. Boom. It's all straight. It's like one straight step. Okay. I'm trying to drop my height down. Cause 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 like combata. Yeah. Cause you can use your shoulder bone. Yeah. But for training, you're just gonna bump with your chest. So. Okay. Like that. Okay. This is the chest. So relax your shoulder. Don't do this. Okay. Yeah. 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. So I feel that when I step in. 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 feel. 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 feel that a lot more than, like 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. Cause 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. 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. Yeah. So you go. Yeah. Rising up. Yeah. Rising up. Okay. Or you can sink down. So it's like pushes. Yeah. Same idea, right? All right. So now you just extend this. Okay. And now you're bringing your whole body into it. Into the push. Yeah. Don't push. Just like. Stop. Okay, in this video, I'm gonna show you the three mistakes in Tai Chi that are very common that people make. 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, Will here, 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. All right. I'm already, I'm only about 150 pounds. Look at my skinny arms. And I'm really 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? We're saying 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 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 relaxing, my hands relax 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. 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, 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. The same 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 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, here's what 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. 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. 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. 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 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 just power there. How'd that happen? Yeah. I just move my hand, right? I'm not, 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 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 cup. 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 just straightening up, okay? But it's still not enough. You want it to stick out. You push out of 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. 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's sticking out. I'm trying to, and he pushes on my hand. Push, push, push. See, I will 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. 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 this is 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. 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 down to my head. So I expand my chest, and then you go, and then you have to come. But there's actually a sink your chest, and expand your chest. So now there's another, not going mechanism that lends, 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 what we all found. Chris, do you have a postures coming, please? So you contract? Yeah. Easily lose balance, so hard. Because when you can try, 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 it that bad. 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, my body. Mm, okay. So this is actually touching my body, I let you in. Yeah. You feel like you got me, right? Yeah. Because actually there's more. There's more room. Yeah. All right. Just relax this whole thing, suck in 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. So, let's put that into your pushing. So you're sucking in. You're ready? I'm already sucked in. Yeah. Ideally, I want to make sure it's elbow to me. 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 don't, 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. 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. So 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 in like that. So you gotta step really deep through it. So I step with this foot, or this one. So, like that. You gotta check, yeah. So that works too, but that's not the technique. So I'm here. So I 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. But then don't need for, is it straight? Yeah. Boom. Okay. 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 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. 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. Okay. Welcome. I'm David Wong and 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. 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%. 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 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 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 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 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 valid hands. So I'm using my core to direct my body. Just saying 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 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 I'll do what you're doing correctly. So how I 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? You got a billion, 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. 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 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 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 don't 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. 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, his 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 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, you 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 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, I make this into a C, and then now he pushes on it. What happened? 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. 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, it's a C. You don't want it 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 this is 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 in 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. 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 down to my neck. So expand my chest, and then you go, I don't even have to do it. So there's actually a sink your chest and expand your chest. So now there's another, not going mechanism that blends. So there's blending, 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? So you're going to expand a bit and you're going to bounce. Really? Yeah. First, close your chest, come here, please. So you contract? Yeah. Easily when it's bound to 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. You feel like you've gotten me, right? So we don't need to step in. Okay. Don't use this. Yeah. Use, just relax. Like when you push in here. Yeah. I'm just using my whole structure, my body. Okay. So this is actually touching my body, that you in. So you feel like you've gotten me, right? Yeah. 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. I'm already so new. Okay. Put that into here. So I'm already, I'm already sucked in. Yeah. You have the 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 can control the elbow. Okay. I don't. Right? Then if you feel yourself moving this way, you're right there. You're gonna just gonna 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. 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 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. But then don't need for, it's straight. Yeah. Boom. It's all straight. 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. There's one technique is to use your shoulder. It should be. Best for a more like 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. So. 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, you don't want to step and go. Yeah. You have to go. You have to pay before I land. Okay. You see I go. So before my foot even touches the ground, I'm already there. Yeah. Or at the same time. Yeah. So. Yeah. There you go. I can feel that a lot more than when 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. Cause 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. 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. Yeah. 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 foot. 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? 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%. 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, 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 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 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. 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. 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 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. 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, okay? Now, do you see it 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. 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 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? 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 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. 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 it's lower back, it's 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, 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 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. 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. 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, 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 what 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. 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 very 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 monkey and 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. I think it's 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, right there, you expand my chest, and then you go from there, not to come. But there's actually, so now there's another, not going mechanism that blends, right? So there's blending, and it's sinking more. I try to do it to 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 to expand a bit and you don't have to cry. Both shoulders? Yeah. So you contract? Yeah. Easily when we balance it, all right? 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 do that then. Okay. All right. Don't use this. Yeah. Use, just relax. Like when you push in here, yeah, totally relax. I'm just using my whole structure here, my body. So this is actually to touch my body. I let you in. Yeah. So you feel like you got me, right? Yeah. Because 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. It's so new, okay. Right? Sucking. So I'm ready, I'm already sucked in. Yeah. You're the elbow. But then you need to make sure the elbow, tap the elbow. Yeah. Tap 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 don't. 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 tap 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 too deeper, so 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? This one. So like that. You're gonna check, yeah. So that works too, but that's not the technique. 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. That's better. Okay. But then don't need for, you straight? Yeah. Boom. It's almost straight. 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. So be. That's where more like combata. Yeah. Because you can use your shoulder bone. Yeah. But for training, you're just gonna bump the 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. Thank you. All right. Okay. I'm David Wong and 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, we learn a concept called rooting or sinking. So as you can see in the demonstration, we'll hear how much 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 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? 100%. 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, 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 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, nothing'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 relax when he's pushing, harder, harder. I'm still relaxed. See how I relax 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, 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 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, 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. Just saying I'm using just one hand. Let's 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 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 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. 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? 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 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 don't 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 ahead and 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, his 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 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, you can 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'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. 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 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 you do to 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. Let's 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. 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. You press here, like I'm pretty solid here, right? Because you're pushing down to my next band, my chest. And then you go from knee to toe. So there's actually sink your chest and expand your chest. So now there's another, not going mechanism that blends. So there's blending and sinking more. Try to do it, see? So when you're sinking, it sinks down to the body. So your chin is tucked, your chest is in. And then you push hard as more. It's not going anywhere, right? Thank you to expand a bit and you know your problems. So you contract? Yeah. Easily when we balance it, all right? 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 it.