 this video, I'm gonna show you the three mistakes in Tai Chi that are very common that people make. So one of the main advantages of learning Tai Chi is for health, for your joints, for your bones, for breathing, for relaxation and meditation. But also, you learn a concept called rooting or sinking. So as you can see in the demonstration, we'll hear how much do you weigh? 240 pounds. 220 pounds, look at his muscles. Look at his arms, holy cow. They're as big as my leg, 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, 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, okay? But being relaxed in a concept called shong, or shong in Chinese, is being loose, but relaxed, but still have structure. So he's pushing, he's pushing harder, harder, harder, harder. I'm relaxed, see? My hand's relaxed, but he's pushing harder, harder. I'm still relaxed. See how he's relaxed my arm is? I'm still able to resist him, okay? So that's the difference between being shong, which means loose and placid. But in English, we use the word relaxation, which is very easy to misinterpret. So number one key, when you practice your tai chi, for example, practice your tai chi, your hands are always relaxed. There's only a tense state and a relaxed state. Now, when we go to the gym, most people practice being tense. Use your muscles, tense up to get more power, which is okay, it works. But if you practice being tense 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. 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, 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 daishou, 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 you see it doing correctly? So how you can practice is actually put your finger or put your hand, your fingers touch your belly button and then feel it move before your hand moves. But now you get the difference, okay? And the difference, you can tell. Let's see, I'm just using my hand like this. Just my hand. Okay, pain-wise, how much is that? Good, you got it, 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 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? 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 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, suck in your gut, and then stretch this out like this, okay? So now I can feel his lower back is straightening up, okay? But it's still not enough, you want it to stick out. You push out over here, push, push, push, push, that's better, okay? So now you can feel that it's more like a C, whereas starting about before, see how it's like an S. So you don't want that. And you can see a lot of people doing tai chi with a back like this is actually very bad for your back and also it makes you disconnected. It disconnects your upper body with your lower body. The key to having a strong core and dan tian is to connect your upper body with your lower body. And this is the main mistake that people make by having the S curve of the spine. And what it does is 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. 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 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 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. 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 it down to my head, like expand my chest open and you go, I don't even have to turn. So there's actually sink your chest and expand your chest. All right. So now there's another, not going mechanism that blends. So there's blending and sinking more, let's do it, see? So when you're sinking, it sinks down to the heart. So your chin is tight, your chest is in. And then you push hard as well. It's not going anywhere, right? You can expand a bit and you don't want to bounce. You're good. Both shoulders? Yeah. Both shoulders, can you please? 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, 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 on here, you're totally relaxed. I'm just using my whole structure on 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. 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. All right. All right. I'm so new, okay. So, Glenn, put that into your cushion. So you're like sucking in. Are you ready? I'm already sucked in. Yeah. You only got one. But then you need to make sure the elbow, cap the elbow. Yeah. Cap the elbow. So if I go like this, you can just push it up there. Okay. But you try to elbow me like this. You do that. Elbow me. Okay. At least I got control of the elbow. Okay. All right. Then if you feel yourself moving this way, you're right there. You're just gonna change it to here. Yeah. Okay. All right. So you need to in, cap the elbow. Is this sucking in? Is this 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. Going through you instead of going to the ground. Okay. Okay. You try that. I'll stand here and you just try bumping into that. So you gotta step really deep through it. So I 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 into that. You wanna take my place. Here's my center. You wanna be there. So my foot basically has to be here. Oh yeah. All right. Let's see how deep you have to go. So. But then don't need for, you straight? Yeah. Boom. It's almost straight. It's like one straight step. Okay. I'm trying to drop my height down because I feel like that when I get here, my shoulder's here. Yeah, don't use your shoulder. Yeah. And there's one technique is to use your shoulder. It should be. That's where I'm more like combata. Yeah. Because you can use your shoulder bone. Yeah. But for training, you're just gonna bump into 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. You're not stepping people down. So I feel that when I step here. So 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. Yeah. So. Yeah, there you go. No problem. I can do that a lot more than you think. But you step first, right? So you wanna aim for 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. Yeah. Okay. Because you stick out any part of the cup then it's just gonna go in. It won't affect the whole thing. Okay. So you make this round, you go. 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? Yeah. All right. So now you just extend this. 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. One of the main advantages of learning Tai Chi is for health, for your joints, for your bones, for breathing, for relaxation and meditation. But also, you learn a concept called rooting or sinking. So as you can see in the demonstration, Will here, how much do you weigh? 220 pounds. 220 pounds? Look at his muscles. Look at his arms. Holy cow. He's as big as my leg. Right? I'm already, I'm only about 150 pounds. Look at my skinny arms. And I'm able to resist them pushing me. And I'm fairly relaxed. Without using a lot of strength, I can resist this push. And how hard were you pushing there? 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 saying it's placid, okay? But being 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 hand's relaxed, but he's pushing harder, harder. I'm still relaxed. See how he's relaxed my arm is? I'm still able to resist him, okay? So that's the difference between being shong, which means loose and placid. But in English, we use the word relaxation, which is very easy to misinterpret. So number one key, when you practice your tai chi, for example, practice your tai chi, your hands are always relaxed. There's only a tense state and a relaxed state. Now, when we go to the gym, most people, they practice being tense. Use your muscles, tense up to get more power, which is okay, it works. But if you practice being tense all the time and practice being tense, like this, then if you're fighting against someone bigger than you, you're at a disadvantage because his force will be stronger than your force. So rather than use force, I use shong, I use relaxation. So when you practice your tai chi, make sure that your hands are not open like this because that's too much tension. Because your hands are not closed like this because that's too much tension. Your hands should always be in the middle. When it's relaxed, it's completely relaxed. Imagine holding an egg in your hand. When you're open, just open them slightly. Just stretch them out a little bit. When they're relaxed, relaxed. When they're open, just open a little. You always wanna feel the energy ball in the palms of your hands. So it's very subtle. For example, when I do this, I'm combining two things. First of all, my hands are lifting up. At the same time, my hands are going from relaxed to slightly open. And then back to relaxed, slightly open. It's a very minor detail, but what that does is it teaches you to, even though you're using tension, see my hands are slightly open, that I'm still in a relaxed state. So I never go from, I never go up to 100%. I go up to maybe 60 to 70% tension. Never go above that. Because once you go above that, then you start to use force. 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. 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 the mistake. See a difference? My hand is leading my core. So there's very little power or connection when I'm moving my hand. I'm just moving my hand. I'm not even leading it with the core. Now do as you're doing correctly. So how you can practice is actually put your finger or put your hand and your fingers touch your belly button and then feel it move before your hand moves. But now you get the difference, okay? And the difference, you can tell. Let's see, I'm just using my hand like this. Just my hand. Okay, pain-wise, how much is that? You got to fill it, yeah. One to 10. About a four. Four, okay? Now I'm using my hip. I mean using my dan tian. How much pain, more pain is there? It brings it up to about a seven. A seven, right? And I didn't use more power, I just used my waist. And if I use more, I can get it up to 10, right? So that's the key of generating power is to use your dan tian. So let me show you a demonstration in the 24 move tai chi form. I'll how to use the dan tian to guide your hands. So let me show you the wrong way of doing this, okay? I'm trying very hard to do it the wrong way because I practice so much the proper way. But what I'm doing is I'm leading with my hands and then I move my body. So a very basic fundamental in early tai chi if you're a beginner is to learn how to move your hips. Now when you get advanced tai chi, you actually do the opposite. You learn to move your hands before your hips. It's contradictory, isn't it? Okay, but I'll show you how to do that in the next lesson or in a later lesson. And it goes with the concept that Bruce Lee taught which is to move your hands before your feet just like in fencing, you 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, 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 just power there, how that happened, right? I just moved my hand, right? I'm not gonna move my hand and then my body. Go ahead and do it again. I moved my hand and then my body. I didn't move my hip first. Just me moving my hips first. Too slow, right? I have to go one, two. You know how to hit me, okay? But now I wanna do it so that I move my hand first. Okay, so how does that work? Maybe in a later lesson, I can show you how to do that. Mistake number one that you can make in tai chi is to not sink your tailbone, which means not to open your back. Now I'm gonna show Will, for example, because I'm wearing a jacket you can't see. So you see, if you take this shirt and tighten it up, your spine has a curve here, right? So most people have that curve naturally, but in tai chi, you actually don't want that curve. In tai chi, you want to get rid of that curve. So you wanna sink down the tailbone, okay? So that you can feel that this is flatter. And ideally, it's actually a C, it's a couple. So what you need to do is sink your tailbone down even more, suck in your gut, and then stretch this out like this, okay? So now I can feel his lower back straining up, okay? But 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, I make this into a C, and then now he pushes on it. What happened? It's a difference. You're more rooted. It's rooted. See, what happens when you curve your back is now that energy transfer goes straight through your spine and then into your hips and into the legs, into the knees and into the ground. When you break that connection by curving your spine, now all the energy just goes in your spine. It doesn't go to your legs. So that's why he pushes, right? That energy goes to the spine and then I go. So that's the number one mistake that you can make in Tai Chi. So when you practice your Tai Chi, make sure that you always check. Put my hand back behind my back, I see. If it's straight, 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 the wall is 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 very 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 it down to my head. So I expand my chest, and then you go, and then you 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. 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. Then you expand a bit, and you know you're on the ground, so just expand. Pull the shoulders, pull the shoulders, come here 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, 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, you're totally relaxed. I'm just using my whole structure, in my body. Okay. So this is actually touching my body, and that's 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, 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 here. So I'm ready. I'm already sucked in. Yeah. Do you want me 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 got control of the elbow. Okay. I don't, right? Then if you feel yourself moving this way, you can just change it to here. Yeah. So you need to, in, cut the elbow. This is sucking in. This is sucking in. Just sucking in, and then expand. Step here, and I bump into you 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. So you try that. I'll stand here. You just try to bump into that. So you got to step really deep through it. 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 I'm going to 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. So then don't need for, it's straight. Yeah. Boom. It's almost straight. It's like one straight step. Okay. I'm trying to drop my height down, because I feel like that when I get here, my shoulder's here. Yeah, don't use your shoulder. Yeah. And this one technique is to use your shoulder. It'll 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 into the chest. So. I'll grab that. Okay. This is the 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. 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, 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 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 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 destroys 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 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. 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 wanna feel the energy ball in the palms of your hands. So it's very subtle. For example, when I do this, I'm combining two things. First of all, my hands are lifting up. At the same time, my hands are going from relaxed to slightly open, and then back to relaxed. Slightly open. It's a very minor detail, but what that does is it teaches you to, even though you're using tension, see my hands are slightly open, that I'm still in a relaxed state. So I never go from, I never go up to 100%. I go up to maybe 60 to 70% tension. Never go above that, because once you go above that, then you start to use force. If you stay below, let's say, 60% tension, then you're not using force, you're using relaxation. And the key to Tai Chi is to train yourself so that you can still use relaxation at 60%, 50%, 40%, 30%, eventually using no tension at all to be able to resist someone with force. So that's what takes the training. That's what takes the many, many hours of repetition and training, doing the push hands that we just showed you in the demonstration. Doing that for a lot, then you can learn how to use relaxation. Mistake number two in Tai Chi is to not use your Dan Tian or not use your core, the center of gravity to direct the movements, okay? So there's a very simple movement called bowed hands. So I'm using my core to direct my body. 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. 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 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 and once we 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? Yeah. 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. It is 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 going to show Will, for example, because I'm wearing a jacket you can't see. So you see, if you take this shirt and tighten it up, your spine has a curve here, right? So most people have that curve naturally, but in Tai Chi, you actually don't want that curve. In Tai Chi, you want to get rid of that curve. So you 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 straining 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. 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 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, 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. 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 into 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 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. Another technique is 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, you expand my chest, and then you go, I don't even have to turn. So there's actually, so now there's another, not going mechanism that blends, right? So there's blending and 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? You expand a bit and you go, I don't know. Both shoulders? Yeah. Both shoulders coming, please. 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 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, 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's 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. Right? Sucking in things. So I'm ready. I'm already sucked in. Yeah. Yeah, we got one. You need to make sure the elbow, cut the elbow. Yeah. Cut the elbow, so like like this, you can just push it up there. Okay. But you try to elbow me a little bit. You do that. Elbow, elbow me. Okay. At least I can control the elbow. Okay. Right, right? Then if you feel yourself moving this way, you're right there. You're gonna just gonna change it to here. Yeah. Okay. All right. So you need to in, cut the elbow. Is this sucking in? Is this 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. 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. 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 see how deep you have to go. So. That's better. Okay. But then don't need four. 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 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. Like that. Yeah. So just relax. Like. All right. You're not stepping people down. So feel that when I step in. So you don't want to step then go? Yeah. You have to go. You have to pay before I land. Okay. You see I can. 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. Okay. But you step first, right? 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 there's 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. Okay. Yeah. So there's two ways you can sink down. Yeah. For you to sink. That's rising up. Okay. Yeah. So you go. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Or you can sink down. So it's like. It's down. Yeah. All right. You got it. Same idea, right? All right. So now you just extend this. And now you're bringing your whole body into it. Into the push. Yeah. So. Don't push. Just like. 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. 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? You're 100%. He's putting all the strength in there. And I'm just standing there, not using too much strength. So the key is don't fight strength with strength. Don't fight force with force. So in Tai Chi, you'll teach you how to use structure. The structure of your skeletal structure, of your bones, of your joints, of your alignment and also of your mind of what the intention is in order to resist force using just structure. So 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 relaxing, my hands relax when he's pushing harder, harder, I'm still relaxed. You 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 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. The mistake number two in Tai Chi is to not use your dan tian or not use your core, the center of gravity, to direct the movements, okay? So there's a very simple movement called bowed hands. So I'm using my core to direct my body. The same I'm using just one hand. See how my core is moving in a circle to direct my arm. So the core or the dan tian leads the arms. Sun dai sao, that's what I say in Chinese. The body leads the hand. So that's number two mistake. Here's how it looks like when you make the mistake. See a difference? My hand is leading my core. So there's very little power or connection when I'm moving my hand. I'm just moving my hand. I'm not even leading it with the core. 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 gotta 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. Seven, right? And I didn't use more power, I just used my waist. And if I use more, I can get it up to 10, right? So that's the key of generating power is to use your dan tian. So let me show you a demonstration in the 24 move tai chi form of how to use the dan tian to guide your hands. So let me show you the wrong way of doing this, okay? I'm trying very hard to do it the wrong way because I practice so much the proper way. But what I'm doing is I'm leading with my hands and then I move my body. So a very basic fundamental in early tai chi, if you're a beginner, is to learn how to move your hips. Now when you get advanced tai chi, you actually do the opposite. You learn to move your hands before your hips. It's contradictory, isn't it? Okay, but I'll show you how to do that in the next lesson or in a later lesson. And it goes with the concept that Bruce Lee taught, which is to move your hands before your feet, just like in fencing, you want to move your hands before your feet. The reason is because when somebody attacks you, I don't have time to move my hip first and do a big to giant tai chi move, right? If somebody attacks me, I have to move my hand first. So what's the difference? See, before you learn tai chi and once you learn tai chi, they move their hands first, but there's no power. And then they'll practice tai chi and then they'll learn how to use the hips to get power, but they practice enough tai chi and now they'll go back to the beginning. They use their hands first, but now it comes with power. How does that happen? So let me show you again. Let's see his attacking, right? I don't have time to move my hips and do a big tai chi move, like in a lot of demonstrations. I only have time to just move my hand up, right? But there's power there. How that happened, right? I just moved my hand, right? I'm not moving my hand and then my body. Go through 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 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 straining 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 it's like an S, so you don't want that. And you can see a lot of people doing tai chi with a back like this is actually very bad for your back and also it makes you disconnected. You disconnect your upper body with your lower body. The key to having a strong core and dan 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 difference. Here, 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 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, we talked 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, slam my chest open, and then you go, I don't even have to turn. So there's actually, so now there's another, not going mechanism that blends. So there's blending, I try to do it, see? So when you're sinking, it sinks down to the bottom. So the chin is tucked, chest is in. And then you push hard as well. It's not going anywhere, right? Then you'd expand a bit and you know what I'm saying. Chris, close your wrist, come here, please. So you contract? Yeah. Easily when we're bound 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? You don't, you don't even have to bend. 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. Okay. So this is actually touching my body, and 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, 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. 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, cut the elbow. Yeah. Cut the elbow, so if I go like this, you can just push it up there. Yeah. Okay. But you try to elbow me like this. You do that. Elbow, elbow me. Okay. At least I can control the elbow. Okay. All right? Then if you feel yourself moving this way, you're, you're, Right there. You're just 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. 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 I've already made contact. Okay. So now all the momentum is going through you, instead of going to the ground. Okay. Okay? You try that. I'll stand here and you just try it. Bump into 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 see how deep you have to go. But then, don't knee forward. You straight? Yeah. Boom. It's almost straight. It's like one straight step. Okay. I'm trying to drop my height down, because I feel like that. When I get here, my shoulder's here. Yeah, don't use your shoulder. Yeah. And this one technique is to use your shoulder. It should be. That's for a more combata. Yeah. Shoulder bone. Yeah. But for training, you're just gonna bump the chest. So, Okay. Like that. Okay. The chest. So relax your shoulder. Don't do this. Okay. Yeah. Like that. All right. But don't stick it out like this. I'm trying to pull it back. Yeah. So just relax. All right. Come, 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 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? I think through 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 be relaxed in concept called shong, shong in Chinese. It's being loose, but relaxed, but still have structure. So he's pushing, he's pushing harder, harder, harder. I'm relaxed, see? My hands relaxed when he's pushing, harder, harder. I'm still relaxed. See how I'm relaxed my arms? I'm still able to resist them, okay? So that's the difference between being shong, which means loose and placid. But in English, we use 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. Make sure your hands are not closed like this because that's too much tension. Your hands should always be in the middle. When it's relaxed, it's completely relaxed. Imagine holding an egg in your hand. When you're open, just open them slightly. Just stretch them out a little bit. When you're relaxed, relaxed. When you're open, just open a little. You always want to feel an energy ball in the palms of your hands. So it's very subtle. For example, when I do this, I'm combining two things. First of all, my hands are lifting up. At the same time, my hands are going from relaxed to slightly open. And then back to relaxed, slightly open. It's a very minor detail, but what that does is it teaches you to, even though you're using tension, see my hands are slightly open, that I'm still in a relaxed state. So I never go from, I never go up to 100%. I go up to maybe 60 to 70% tension. Never go above that. Because once you go above that, then you start to use force. If you stay below, let's say, 60% tension, then you're not using force, you're using relaxation. And the key to Tai Chi is to train yourself so that you can still use relaxation at 60%, 50%, 40%, 30%, eventually using no tension at all to be able to resist someone with force. So that's what takes the training. That's what takes the many, many hours of repetition and training, doing the push hands that we just showed you in the demonstration. Doing that for a lot, then you can learn how to use relaxation. Mistake number two in Tai Chi is to not use your Dan Tian, or not use your core, the center of gravity to direct the movements. 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 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, your 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. So let's see, I'm just using my hand like this. Just my hand. Okay, pain-wise, how much is that? Good, you got to feel it, yeah. One to 10. About a four. Four, okay. Now I'm using my 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 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, it won't be 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? 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. 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 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 whereas standing 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 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, 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. Doesn't go to your legs. So that's why he pushes, right? That energy goes into spine and then I go. So that's the number one mistake that you can make in tai chi. So when you practice your tai chi, make sure that you always check. Put my hand back behind my back. I see, if it's straight, 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 there's a wall against me. I wanna first put my back against the wall and then see if there's any space behind my back. See if I slip my hand behind my back. If there's a space that I can slip my hand behind, then there's too much space. So I need to get rid of that space. I want all my spine to be touching the wall. Once I get that, then I can go up and down. Just go halfway and go back up. Sliding my spine up and down the wall. Now after I do that and I'm good at it, then I can go all the way down, all the way down, keeping my spine straight and touching the wall all the way. And put it slow like this. So that's gonna be very hard on your lower back, but it strengthens your lower back. It strengthens your leg. So that's one key in Tai Chi of creating connectedness. So stay tuned, I'm gonna show you the bonus mistake that people make. So the bonus mistake that you can make in Tai Chi is doing it too fast. I know everybody says this, you wanna do Tai Chi slow, but many people don't understand why you do Tai Chi so slow. Well, today we talked about three mistakes. Number one, relaxation. Number two, using your Dan Tian to lead your hands. Number three, having a proper spine alignment. What do all those things mean? All those things mean connectedness of your whole body, integration of your whole body. If your hand moves, your whole body moves. If your feet move, your whole body moves. Everything's connected. And the reason we do Tai Chi so slow is that we're training that connectedness. And it's impossible to train it doing it fast. That's why we do it slow. If we can do it fast and still get connectedness, then everybody would do Tai Chi fast. But the reason we do it slow is because Tai Chi doing it slow is probably the only way you can train that connectedness in your body by combining all the techniques that we learned. Relaxation, leading with the Dan Tian. And later on, how to use your breath to relax and connect your body to and your mind. So there's many aspects of learning how to connect your whole body and mind as an integrated machine, integrated unit, in order to function totally and holistically. When it comes in, you sink your chest. Yeah. So you press here. Like I'm pretty solid here, right? Yeah. Because you're pushing down to my back, expand my chest, and then you go, and leave, not to come. But there's actually, so now there's another, not going mechanism that, 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. So your chin is tight, chest is in. And then you push hard as well. It's not going anywhere, right? You need to expand a bit and you don't want to be caught. Yeah. Oh, sure, just come in, please. So you contract? Yeah. Easily when we balance it hard. Yeah. Because when you can try, you feel like, oh, I can push the guy, right? Yeah. You feel like you can push me. Right, you feel you got me, right? So we don't, you don't get that. Okay. Don't use this. Yeah. Use, just relax. Like when you push on here. Yeah. I'm totally relaxed. I'm just using my whole structure. Yeah. And my body. Oh, okay. So this, 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. All right. All right. Just relax this, 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, sucking in. So, are we ready? I'm already sucked in. Yeah. And then we're expanding. Okay. Ideally I want to, then you need to make sure the elbow, cap the elbow. Yeah. Cap the elbow, so if I go like this, you can just. Press 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. I don't. Then if you feel yourself moving this way, you're, you're. Right there. You're going to just change it to here. Yeah. Okay. All right. So you need to, in, cap the elbow. This is sucking in. Just a second. Just a second. 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, 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. True. So I'll step with this foot, or? No, this foot. So. Like that. You gotta check. Yeah. So that works too, but that's not the technique. So. So I'm here. You gotta step deeper today. You want to take my place. So here's my center. You want to be there. So my foot basically has to be here. Oh yeah. All right. Yeah. Let's just see how deep you have to go. So. But then don't need for, just be straight. Yeah. Bump. It's almost straight. It's like one straight stick. 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 where I'm more like combata. Yeah. Cause 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. So. Yeah. Like that. All right. But don't stick it out like this. Put 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- 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 the shape. But you step 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, 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. So. 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. That's rising up. Okay. Or you can sink down. So it's like going downwards. Yeah. All right. You got it. Yeah. Yeah. Same idea, right? I'm pretending I'm not even there. 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 push. Yeah. So. Yeah. Yeah. Don't push. Just like. 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. 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? Now you're 100%. He's putting all the strength in there. And I'm just standing there, not using too much strength. So the key is, don't fight strength with strength. Don't fight force with force. So in Tai Chi, we'll teach you how to use structure, the structure of your skeletal structure, of your bones, of your joints, of your alignment, and also of your mind of what the intention is in order to resist force using just structure. So one of the key things that you need to have structure, well, there's three mistakes that people make that destroy structure in Tai Chi. And very few people that actually practice Tai Chi actually know and actually experience and know how to do this. So stay tuned and I'm gonna show you those to you. Mistake number three is not being relaxed. So a lot of people are confused about relaxation and about being placid. There's two different things. For example, if I'm being placid, he pushes, and that's placid, right? There's nothing there. I'm not saying it's placid, okay? But being relaxed in a concept called shong, or shong in Chinese. It's being loose, but relaxed, but still have structure. So he's pushing, he's pushing harder, harder, harder, harder. I'm relaxed, see? My hand's relaxed, but he's pushing harder, harder. I'm still relaxed. See how he's relaxed my 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 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 of repetition and training during the push-hands that we just showed you in the demonstration. Doing that for a lot that you can learn how to use relaxation. Mistake number two in Tai Chi is to not use your dan tian or not use your core, the center of gravity to direct the movements, okay? So there's a very simple movement called followed hands. So I'm using my core to direct my body. 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? 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. 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. 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 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'd that happen? 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 know how to 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, suck in your gut, and then stretch this out like this, okay? So now I can feel his lower back is straightening up, okay? But it's still not enough, you want it to stick out. You push out over here, push, push, push, push, that's better, okay? So now you can feel that it's more like a C, whereas starting about before, see how it's like an S, so you don't want that. And you can see a lot of people doing tai chi with a back like this is actually very bad for your back. And also it makes you disconnected. It disconnects your upper body with your lower body. The key to having a strong core and dan qian is to connect your upper body with your lower body. And this is the main mistake that people make by having the S curve of the spine. And what it does is disconnects your body. So for example, I'm gonna do an S curve on purpose. My spine is like my belly 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. Let's see if it's straight, is it a C? You don't want to be like this. So even when you do your moves, think about that. Think that the spine is going to be straight. One exercise you can do is to do very slow squats against the wall. So that's the wall against me. I want to first put my back against the wall and then see if there's any space behind my back. See if I slip my hand behind my back. If there's a space that I can slip my hand behind, then there's too much space. 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 it down to my head. Press, expand my chest, and then you go. And then you don't even have to turn. There's actually an expanded chest. So now there's another, not going mechanism that lends, right? So there's blending. I'm trying to do it, see? So when you're sinking, it sinks down to the body. Chin is tight, chest is in. And then you push hard as well. It's not going anywhere, right? Make it expand a bit and you know your balance. Just expand. You're cool, right? Pull shoulders? Yeah. Pull shoulders, come here, please. So you contract? Yeah. Easy when we balance it, all right? Yeah. Because when you can try and you feel like, oh, I can push the guy, right? Yeah. You feel like you can push me. 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 in my body. Yeah, okay. So this is actually touching my body. I let you in. 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? So, glad. Put that into your sucking in things. So I'm ready, I'm already sucked in. Yeah. I'm already expanding. Okay. 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. Well, you try to elbow me like this. You do that. Elbow, elbow me. Okay. At least I can control the elbow. Okay. I do it. Right? Then if you feel yourself moving this way, you're, you're... Right there. You're going to just change it to here. Yeah. Okay. All right. You need to... In, cap the elbow. This is sucking in. This is sucking in. Just sucking in, and then expand. 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. 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 got to step really deep through it. So I'll step with this foot or... No, this foot. This one. So, like that. You got to check. Yeah. So that works too, but that's not the technique. So... So I'm here. So I'll 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... Be straight? Yeah. Bump. 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 for a more combata. Yeah. Because you can use your shoulder bone. Yeah. But for training, you're just going to bump the chest. So... Okay. Like that. Okay. So relax your shoulder. Don't do this. Okay. Okay. Yeah, 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. 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, we learn a concept called rooting or sinking. So as you can see in the demonstration, we'll hear how much 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 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? 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, nothing, it's placid. 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, 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 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. The 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 this is doing correctly. So how you can practice is actually put your finger or put your hand, fingers touch your belly button and then feel it move before your hand moves. But now you get the difference, okay? And the difference, you can tell. Let's see, I'm just using my hand like this. Just my hand. Okay, pain-wise, how much is that? Yeah, really, yeah. One to 10. About a four. Four, okay. Now I'm using my hip, I mean using my dan tian. Yeah. How much pain, more pain is there? 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 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. 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 this shirt and tighten it up, your spine has a curve here, right? So most people have that curve naturally, but in tai chi, you actually don't want that curve. In tai chi, you want to get rid of that curve. So you wanna sink down the tailbone, okay? So that you can feel that this is flatter. And ideally it's actually a C, it's a couple. So what you need to do is sink your tailbone down even more, suck in your gut, and then stretch this out like this, okay? So now I can feel it's lower back, it's straightening up, okay, but still not enough. You want it to stick out, you push out over here, push, push, push, 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 qian is to connect your upper body with your lower body. And this is the main mistake that people make by having the S curve of the spine. And what it does is disconnects your body. So for example, I'm gonna do an S curve on purpose. My spine is like, my belly's sticking out. I'm trying to, and he pushes on my hand. See, I'll automatically go back. There's no resistance. But now I stick my back out, I drop my hip, 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, 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 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. Okay, so when it comes in, you sink your chest. Yeah. 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 I don't even have to do it. So there's actually, so now there's another, not going mechanism that blends. So there's blending. I try to do it, see? So when you're sinking, it sinks down to the bottom. Chin is tucked, chest is in. And then you push hard as well. It's not going anywhere. You can expand a bit and you know your balance. Just expand. Both shoulders? Yeah. Both shoulders, can I do this? 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. You think you got me, right? So we don't use that then. Okay. Don't use this. Yeah. Just relax. Like when you push in here, Yeah. I'm totally relaxed. I'm just using my whole structure on 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. 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, Glenn, put that into your sucking in things, man. So I'm ready. I'm already sucked in. Yeah. And I'm already expanding. Okay. Ideally I want to make sure it's elbow 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 like that. Okay. But you try to elbow me like this. You do that. Elbow me. Okay. And control the elbow. Okay. I don't. All right? 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, cap the elbow. This is sucking in. This is sucking in. Just sucking in. And then expand. When you're freaking in, you're still forward. Step here and I bump into you like that, right? Yeah. If I step too 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. Okay. So you got to step really deep to it. So I step with this foot or? No, this foot. 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. But then don't need for, just be straight. Yeah. Boom. It's all straight. It's like one straight stick. Okay. I'm trying to drop my height down. You know what I feel like though? 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 combata. Yeah. 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. 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 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. So 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 do that a lot more than. Okay. But you step first, right? So you want to 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. 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. Yeah. All right. Well, 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. Or you can sink down. So it's like. Yeah. All right. You got it. Pushes? Yeah. Same idea, right? You're 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. Three mistakes in Tai Chi that are very common that people make. The main advantages of learning Tai Chi is for health, for your joints, for your bones, for breathing, for relaxation and meditation. But also, you learn a concept called rooting or sinking. So as you can see in the demonstration, Will 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? 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. Nothing, it's placid. 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 when he's pushing. Harder, harder. I'm still relaxed. See how it's relaxed my arm is? I'm still able to resist it, 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, then if you're fighting against someone bigger than you, you're at a disadvantage because his force will be stronger than your force. So rather than use force, I use shong. I use relaxation. So when you practice your tai chi, make sure that your hands are not open like this because that's too much tension. Make sure your hands are not closed like this because that's too much tension. Your hands should always be in the middle. When it's relaxed, it's completely relaxed. Imagine holding an egg in your hand. When you're open, just open them slightly. Just stretch them out a little bit. When you're relaxed, relaxed. When you're open, just open a little. You always want to feel an energy ball in the palms of your hands. So it's very subtle. For example, when I do this, I'm combining two things. First of all, my hands are lifting up. At the same time, my hands are going from relaxed to slightly open, and then back to relaxed, slightly open. It's a very minor detail, but what that does is it teaches you to, even though you're using tension, see my hands are slightly open, that I'm still in a relaxed state. So I never go from, I never go up to 100%. I go up to maybe 60 to 70% tension. Never go above that, because once you go above that, then you start to use force. If you stay below, let's say 60% tension, then you're not using force, you're using relaxation. And the key to Tai Chi is to train yourself so that you can still use relaxation at 60%, 50%, 40%, 30%, eventually using no tension at all to be able to resist someone with force. So that's what takes the training. That's what takes the many, many hours of repetition and training doing the push-hands that we just showed you in the demonstration. Doing that for a lot, then you can learn how to use relaxation. Mistake number two in Tai Chi is to not use your Dan Tian or not use your core, the center of gravity to direct the movements, okay? So there's a very simple movement called 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, your 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 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? 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? 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 know where to hit me, okay? But now I wanna do it so that I move my hand first. Okay, so how does that work? Maybe in a later lesson I can show you how to do that. Mistake number one that you can make in Tai Chi is to not sink your tailbone, which means not to open your back. Now I'm gonna show Will, for example, because I'm wearing a jacket, you can't see. So you see, if you take your shirt and tighten it up, the spine has a curve here, right? So most people have that curve naturally. But in Tai Chi, you actually don't want that curve. In Tai Chi, you want to get rid of that curve. So you wanna sink down the tailbone, okay? So that you can feel that this is flatter. And ideally it's actually a C, it's a couple. So what you need to do is sink your tailbone down even more, suck in your gut and then stretch this out like this, okay? So now I can feel his lower back straining up, okay? But it's still not enough. You want it to stick out, you push out over here, push, push, push, push, that's better, okay? So now you can feel that it's more like a C where I started about before. See how, see how it's like an S. So you don't want that. And you can see a lot of people doing Tai Chi with a back like this is actually very bad for your back and also it makes you disconnected. You disconnect your upper body with your lower body. The key to having a strong core and Dan Qian is to connect your upper body with your lower body. And this is the main mistake that people make by having the S curve of the spine. And what it does is disconnect your body. So for example, I'm 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, I make this into a C and then now he pushes on it. What happened? It's a difference. You're more rooted. It's rooted. See what happens when you curve your back is now that energy transfer goes straight through your spine and then into your hips and into the legs, into the knees and into the ground. When you break that connection by curving your spine, now all the energy just goes in your spine. It doesn't go to your legs. So that's why he pushes, right? That energy goes to the spine and then I go. So that's the number one mistake that you can make in Tai Chi. So when you practice your Tai Chi, make sure that you always check, put my hand back behind my back. I see, if it's straight, you did a C. You don't wanna be like this. So even when you do your moves, think about that. Think that the spine is gonna be straight. One exercise you can do is to do very slow squats against the wall. So that's the wall against me. I wanna first put my back against the wall and then see if there's any space behind my back. See if I slip my hand behind my back. If there's a space that I can slip my hand behind, then there's too much space. So I need to get rid of that space. I want all my spine to be touching the wall. Once I get that, then I can go up and down. Just go halfway and go back up, sliding my spine up and down the wall. Now, after I do that and I'm good at it, then I can go all the way down, all the way down, keeping my spine straight and touching the wall all the way and put 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 right leg. So expand my chest, and then you go, and then you have to turn. But there's actually an expanded chest. So now there's another, not going mechanism that blends. So there's blending, try to do it, see? So when you're sinking, it sinks down to the bottom. So your chin is tucked, your 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. Just expand. All right, good boy. Chris, do you have a postures coming, please? So you contract? Yeah. All right. Because when you can try, you feel like, oh, I can push the guy, right? You feel like you can push me, right? You think you got me, right? So you don't feel like you got me. OK. Don't use this. Use, just relax. Like when you push in here, I'm totally relaxed. I'm just using my whole structure, my body. OK. So this is actually touching my body, that you in. So you feel like you got me, right? Because actually 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, OK. I'm already so new, OK. So put that into your cushion so you're sucking in. So you're ready? I'm already sucked in. Yeah. OK. 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. OK. When you try to elbow me like this, you do that, elbow me. OK. At least I can control the elbow. OK. Then if you feel yourself moving this way, you're right there. You're going to just change it to here. Yeah. OK. So 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, my feet haven't touched the ground yet and they've already made contact. OK. So now all the momentum is going through you instead of going to the ground. OK. OK. You try that. I'll stand here and you just try it. Bump it like that. So you gotta step really deep. True. So I'll step with this foot or? No, this foot. So like that. You're going to check. Yeah. So that works too, but that's not the technique. 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 see how deep you have to go. So, yeah. But then don't move forward. You straight? Yeah. Boom. It's almost straight. It's like one straight step. OK. 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. 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, like that. OK. So relax your shoulder. Don't do this. OK. OK. Yeah, like that. All right. But don't stick it out like this. I'm trying to pull it back. Yeah. So just relax. OK. I'm David Wong. And in this video, I'm going to show you the three mistakes in Tai Chi that are very common that people make. So one of the main advantages of learning Tai Chi is for health, for your joints, for your bones, for breathing, for relaxation and meditation. But also, you learn a concept called rooting or sinking. So as you can see in the demonstration, 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 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 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 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, it's placid. 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 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 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 you're relaxed, 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 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. So there's a very simple movement called bowed hands. So I'm using my core to direct my body. Let's 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 mistake. See a difference? My hand is leading my core. So there's very little power or connection when I'm moving my hand. I'm just moving my hand. I'm not even leading it with the core. Now do as you're doing correctly. So how you can practice is actually put your finger or put your hand and fingers touch your belly button and then feel it move before your hand moves. But now you get the difference. And the difference, you can tell. So let's see, I'm just using my hand. Like this. Just my hand. Okay. Pain wise, how much is that? One to ten. About four. Four, okay. Now I'm using my hit. I mean using my Dan Tian. How much pain more pain is there? About 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 ten, right? So that's the key of generating power is to use your Dan Tian. So let me show you demonstration in the 24 move Tai Chi form 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. 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 practice Tai Chi and then they'll learn how to use the hips to get power. But they practice enough Tai Chi and now they'll go back to the beginning. They use their hands first, but now it comes with power. How does that happen? So let me show you again. Let's see if it's attacking, right? I don't have time to move my hips and do a big Tai Chi move like in a lot of demonstrations, right? I only have time to just move my hand up, right? But there's power there. How does that happen? Yeah. 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. 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 going to show Will, for example, because I'm wearing a jacket you can't see. So you see, if you take your shirt and tighten it up, your spine has a curve here, right? So most people have that curve naturally. But in Tai Chi, you actually don't want that curve. In Tai Chi, you want to get rid of that curve. So you want to sink down the tailbone, 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 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 it's like an S. So you don't want that. And you can see a lot of people doing Tai Chi with a back like this, it's actually very bad for your back, and also it makes you disconnected. It disconnects your upper body with your lower body. The key to having a strong core and Dan Tian is to connect your upper body with your lower body. And this is the main mistake that people make by having the S curve of the spine. And what it does is disconnects your body. So for example, I'm going to do an S curve on purpose. My spine is like my belly sticking out. I'm trying to, and he pushes on my hand. See, I'll automatically go back. There's no resistance. But now I stick my back out. I drop my hip and make this into a C. And then now he pushes on it. What happened? It's different. 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. It doesn't go to your legs. So that's why he pushes. That energy goes to the spine and then I go. So that's the number one mistake that you can make in Tai Chi. So when you practice your Tai Chi, make sure that you always check put my hand back behind my back. See, it's straight. It's a C. You don't want to be like this. So even when you do your moves, think about that. Think that the spine is going to be straight. One exercise you can do is to do very slow squats against the wall. So that's the wall against me. I want to first put my back against the wall and then see if there's any space behind my back. See if I slip my hand behind my back. If there's a space that I can slip my hand behind, then there's too much space. So I need to get rid of that space. I want all my spine to be touching the wall. Once I get that, then I can go up and down. 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 going to be very hard on your lower back. But it strengthens your lower back. It strengthens your leg. So that's one key in Tai Chi of creating connectedness. So stay tuned. I'm going to show you the bonus mistake that people make. So the bonus mistake that you can make in Tai Chi is doing it too fast. I know everybody says this. You want to do Tai Chi slow. But many people don't understand why you do Tai Chi so slow. Today we talked about three mistakes. Number one, relaxation. Number two, using your Dan Tian to lead your hands. And number three, having a proper spine alignment. What do all those things mean? All those things mean connectedness of your whole body. Integration of your whole body. If your hand moves, your whole body moves. If your feet move, your whole body moves. Everything's connected. And the reason we do Tai Chi so slow is that we're training that connectedness. And it's impossible to train it doing it fast. That's why we do it slow. If we can do it fast and still get connectedness, then everybody would do Tai Chi fast. But the reason we do it slow is because Tai Chi doing it slow is probably the only way you can train that connectedness in your body. By combining all the techniques that we learned. Relaxation. Leading with the Dan Tian. And later on, how to use your breath to relax and connect your body 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. 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 head. You expand my chest. And then you go. And then you don't have to turn. So there's actually a sink your chest and expand your chest. So now there's another, not going mechanism that blends. Right, so there's blending. And it's sinking more. Try to do it. So when you're sinking, it sinks down to the bottom. Chin is tight. Chest is in. And then you push hard as well. It's not going anywhere. You expand a bit and you know what you're about. First, your foreshort is coming, please. So you contract? Yeah. Easily when we balance it. Because when you contract, you feel like, oh, I can push the guy, right? Yeah. You feel like you can push me. You think you got me, right? Don't use this. Yeah. Use, just relax. Like when you push in here, I'm totally relaxed. I'm just using my whole structure, my body. 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 for you. Yeah. All right. All right. Just relax this whole thing. Suck in there, everything. So it feels like, oh yeah, I got you now. But you feel like now it's on your back leg, right? Yeah. Now you just expand. Yeah. Okay. All right. It's so new. Okay. Put that into your cushion. So you're like sucking in there. So I'm ready. I'm already sucked in. Yeah. Ideally I want to make sure it's elbow. But then you need to make sure the elbow, cap the elbow. Yeah. Cap the elbow. So if I go like this, you can just push it up. 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 going to change it to here. Yeah. Okay. All right. So you need to in, cap the elbow. This is sucking in. This is sucking in. Just sucking in. And then expand. Step here. And I bump into you. Like that, right? Yeah. If I step too deeper, my feet haven't touched the ground yet. And I've already made contact. Okay. So now all the momentum is going through you instead of going to the ground. Okay. Okay. You try that. I'll stand here. You just try to bump into that. So you got to step really deep. So I step with this foot. No, 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. 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. So that's 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 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. If there's one technique, is to use your shoulder. It should be. That's for more combata. Yeah. Because you can use your shoulder bone. Yeah. But for training, you're just going to bump into your chest. So. Okay. Like that. Okay. So relax your shoulder. Don't do this. Okay. 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 here. So you, you don't want to step then go. Yeah. You have to go. You have to pay before I land. Okay. But before my foot even touches the ground. I'm already there. Yeah. Or at the same time. Yeah. So. Yeah. There you go. No problem. I can feel that a lot more than. Okay. But you step first, right? So you want to aim. Aim for behind the guy. Okay. Another thing is to make a frame. Yeah. Like this. Round. Yeah. Sink your chest. So there's like one big. One big cup. Yeah. One big cup is gone. 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. Okay. Yeah. So there's two ways. You can sink down. Yeah. Or you can rise up. Or you sink. That's rising up. Okay. Yeah. So you go. Yeah. Rising up. Yeah. Rising up. Okay. Or you can sink down. So it's like. Yeah. Same idea, right? Yeah. All right. So now you just extend this. What's that? So now you're bringing your whole body into it. Into the foot. Yeah. So. I'm going to show you the three mistakes in Tai Chi that are very common that people make. So one of the main advantages of learning Tai Chi is for health, for your joints, for your bones, for breathing, for relaxation and meditation. But also you learn a concept called rooting or sinking. So as you can see in the demonstration, Will here, how much do you weigh? 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? Now you're 100%. He's putting all the strength in there. And I'm just standing there, not using too much strength. So the key is don't fight strength with strength. Don't fight force with force. So in Tai Chi you'll teach you how to use structure. The structure of your skeletal structure, of your bones, of your joints, of your alignment and also of your mind of what the intention is in order to resist force using just structure. So one of the key things that you need to have structure. Well, there's three mistakes that people make that destroy structure in Tai Chi. And very few people that actually practice Tai Chi actually know and actually experience and know how to do this. So stay tuned and I'm going to show you those to you. Mistake number three is not being relaxed. So a lot of people are confused about relaxation and about being placid. There's two different things. For example, if I'm being placid, he pushes and that's placid, right? There's nothing there. I'm not being placid. But 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 relaxed my arm is? I'm still able to resist him. Okay. So that's the difference between being shong, which means loose and placid. But in English, we use the word relaxation, which is very easy to misinterpret. So number one key, when you practice your Tai Chi, for example, practice your Tai Chi, your hands are always relaxed. There's only a tense state and a relaxed state. Now, when we go to the gym, most people practice being tense. Use your muscles, tense up to get more power, which is okay. It works. But if you practice being tense all the time 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 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. So there's a very simple movement called followed hands. So I'm using my core to direct my body. The same as 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 that move before your hand moves. But now you get the difference. And the difference, you can tell. Let's see, I'm just using my hand like this. Just my hand. Pain wise, how much is that? About four. Now I'm using my hit. I mean using my dan tian. How much pain more pain is there? About a seven. And I didn't use more power. I just used my waist. And if I use more, I can get it up to ten. 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. I'm trying very hard to doing the wrong way because I practice so much the proper way. But what I'm doing is I'm leading with my hands and then I move my body. So a very basic fundamental in early tai chi if you're a beginner is to learn how to move your hips. Now when you get advanced tai chi, you actually do the opposite. You learn to move your hands before your hips. It's contradictory, isn't it? But I'll show you how to do that in the next lesson or in a later lesson. And it goes with the concept that Bruce Lee taught which is to move your hands before your feet. Just like in fencing, you want to move your hands before your feet. The reason is because when somebody attacks you I don't have time to move my hip first and do a big tai chi move, right? If somebody attacks me, I have to move my hand first. So what's the difference? See, before you learn tai chi and once you learn tai chi they move their hands first but there's no power. And then they practice tai chi and then they'll learn how to use the hips to get power. But they practice enough tai chi and now they'll get back to the beginning. They use their hands first, but now it comes with power. How does that happen? So let me show you again. Let's see if it's attacking. I don't have time to move my hips and do a big tai chi move like in a lot of demonstrations. I only have time to just move my hand up. But there's power there. How does that happen? I just move my hand. I just 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. But now I want to do it so that I move my hand first. So how does that work? Maybe in a later lesson I can show you how to do that. Mistake number one that you can make in tai chi is to not sink your tailbone which means not to open your back. Now I'm going to show Will for example because I'm wearing a jacket you can't see. So you see, if you take your shirt and tighten it up, your spine has a curve here, right? So most people have that curve naturally. But in tai chi you actually don't want that curve. In tai chi you want to get rid of that curve. So you want to sink down the tailbone so that you can feel that this is flatter. And ideally it's actually a C, it's a cup. So what you need to do is sink your tailbone down even more. Suck in your gut. And then stretch this out like this. So now I can feel it's lower back. It's straightening up. But it's still not enough. You want it to stick out. You push out over here. Push, push, push. That's better. So now you can feel that it's more like a C. Where I started about before. See how it's like an S. So you don't want that. And you can see a lot of people doing tai chi with a back like this. It's actually very bad for your back. And also it makes you disconnected. It disconnects your upper body with your lower body. The key to having a strong core and dan chi is to connect your upper body with your lower body. And this is the main mistake that people make by having the S curve of the spine. And what it does is disconnects your body. So for example, I'm going to do an S curve on purpose. My spine is like my belly sticking out. I'm trying to, and he pushes on my hand. See, I'll automatically go back. There's no resistance. But now I stick my back out. I drop my hip and make this into a C. And then now he pushes on it. What happened? It's a difference. You're more rooted. It's rooted. See, what happens when you curve your back is now that energy transfer goes straight through your spine and then into your hips and into the legs, into the knees and into the ground. When you break that connection by curving your spine, now all the energy just goes in your spine. It doesn't go to your legs. So that's why he pushes. 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, it's straight. It's a C. You don't want to be like this. So even when you do your moves, think about that. Think that the spine is going to be straight. One exercise you can do is to do very slow squats against the wall. So that's 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 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 one key in Tai Chi of creating connectedness. So stay tuned. I'm going to show you the bonus mistake that people make. So the bonus mistake that you can make in Tai Chi is doing it too fast. I know everybody says this, you want to do Tai Chi slow, but many people don't understand why you do Tai Chi so slow. Today we talked about three mistakes. Number one, relaxation. Number two, using your dan tian to lead your hands. And number three, having a proper spine alignment. What do all those things mean? All those things mean connectedness of your whole body, integration of your whole body. If your hand moves, your whole body moves. If your feet move, your whole body moves. Everything's connected. And the reason we do Tai Chi so slow is that we're training that connectedness. And it's impossible to train it doing it fast. That's why we do it slow. If we can do it fast and still get connectedness, then everybody would do Tai Chi fast. But the reason we do it slow is because Tai Chi doing it slow is probably the only way you can train that connectedness in your body by combining all the techniques that we learned. Relaxation, leading with the dan tian. And later on, how to use your breath to relax and connect your body to and your mind. So there's many aspects of learning how to connect your whole body and mind as an integrated machine. Integrated unit in order to function totally and holistically. Another technique is when it comes in, you sink your chest. So you press here, like I'm pretty solid here. You're pushing down to my right leg. So I expand my chest and then you go. So now there's another mechanism that blends. So there's blending. I try to do it. So when you're sinking, it sinks down to the bottom. Chin is tucked, chest is in. Then you push hard as well. It's not going anywhere. You expand a bit and you go. Full shoulders. Full shoulders. So you contract? Yeah. Easily when we balance it. When you contract, you feel like, oh, I can push the guy, right? You feel like you can push me. You got me, right? Don't use this. Just relax. When you push on here, I'm totally relaxed. I'm just using my whole structure, my body. So this is actually touching my body. I let you in. So you feel like you got me, right? Because actually there's more. There's more room. 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? And you just expand. Yeah, okay. I'm learning something new, okay. Right? Sucking in there. I'm ready, I'm already sucked in. But then you need to make sure the elbow, cap the elbow. So if I go like this, you can just push it up a little bit. But you try to elbow me a little bit. You do that. Elbow me. I can control the elbow. I don't. Then if you feel yourself moving this way, you're going to change it to here. Yeah. 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? Step through deeper. 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. You try that. I'll stand here and you just try it. So you got to step really deep. So I step with this foot, or this one. So, like that. So that works too. But that's not the technique. So I'm here. You want to take my place. So here's my center. You want to be there. It has to be here. Yeah. See how deep you have to go. That's better. But then, don't knee forward. Be straight. Boom. It's almost straight. One straight step. 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. One technique is to use your shoulder. That's for a more combata. Because you can use your shoulder bone. But for training, you're just going to bump the chest. So relax your shoulder. Don't do this. Yeah, like that. Don't stick it out like this. I'm trying to pull it back. So just relax. Alright. I'm David Wong. In this video, I'm going to show you the three mistakes in Tai Chi that women that people make. 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, they 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. 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 percent. He's putting all the strength in there. And I'm just standing there, not using too much strength. So the key is, don't fight strength with strength. Don't fight force with force. So in Tai Chi, you'll teach you how to use structure. The whole structure of your bones, of your joints, of your alignment, and also of your mind of what the intention is in order to resist force using just structure. So one of the key things that you need to have structure. Well, there's three mistakes that people make that destroy structure in Tai Chi. And very few people that actually practice Tai Chi actually know and actually experience and know how to do this. So stay tuned and I'm going to show you those to you. Mistake number three is not being relaxed. So a lot of people are confused about relaxation and about being placid. There's two different things. For example, if I'm being placid, he pushes and that's placid, right? There's nothing there. I think it's placid. But be relaxed in a concept called shong in Chinese. It's being loose by relax, but still have structure. He's pushing. He's pushing harder, harder, harder, harder. I'm relaxing. My hands are relaxing. He's pushing harder, harder. I'm still relaxed. You see how it relaxes my arm? I'm still able to resist them. 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 in Tai Chi, for example, practice in 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 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. 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 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 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 repetition and training the hands that we just showed you in the demonstration. Doing that but 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 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. See how my core is moving in a circle to direct my arm. So the core or the dan tian leads the arms. That's what I say in Chinese. The body leads the hand. So that's number two the stick. Here's how it looks like when you make the stick. 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 and fingers touch your belly button and then feel it move before your hand moves. But now you get the difference. And the difference you can tell. Let's see I'm just using my hand like this. Just my hand pain wise how much is that? 1 to 10 4 4 Now I'm using my hit. I'm using my dan tian. How much pain more pain is there? 7 And I didn't use more power I just used my waist. And if I use more I can get it up to 10. 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 want to move your hands before your feet. The reason is because when somebody attacks you I don't have time to move my hip first and do a big tai chi move. If somebody attacks me I have to move my hand first. So what's the difference? See before 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. A lot of demonstrations. I only have time to just move my hand up. But there's power there. How does that happen? Right? I just move my hand. I move my hand and then my body. I move my hand and then my body. I didn't move my hip first. Here's me moving my hips first. Too slow. I have to go one, two. You already hit me. But now I want to do it 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 going to 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. So most people have that curve naturally. But in tai chi you actually don't want that curve. You want to get rid of that curve. So you want to sink down the tailbone so that you can feel that this is flatter. And ideally it's actually a C. It's a 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. So now I can feel it's lower back. It's straightening up. But still not enough. You want it to stick out. Push out over here. Push, push, push. That's better. So now you can feel that it's like a C. Whereas I've done it 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 on 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 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 he pushes on it. What happened? It's a different. It's more rooted. What happens when you curve your back is now that energy transfer goes straight through your spine and then into your hips and into the legs, into the knees and into the ground. When you break that connection by curving your spine, now all the energy just goes in your spine. It doesn't go to your legs. 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, you do the C. You don't want to be like this. So even when you do your moves think about that. I 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 the wall again thing. 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 and strengthens your leg. So that's one key in Tai Chi of creating connectedness. So stay tuned I'm going to show you the bonus mistake that people make. So the bonus mistake that you can make in Tai Chi is doing it too fast. I know everybody says this you want to do Tai Chi slow but many people don't understand why you do Tai Chi so slow. Today we talked about three mistakes. Number one relaxation. Number two using your dan tian to lead your hands. 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 the 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 learn. 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 because you're pushing down to my neck to expand my chest and then you go and I don't even have to turn. So now there's another mechanism that that blends. So there's blending and sinking more. So when you're sinking it sinks down to the bottom and your chin is tucked and your chest is in and then you push hard as more. It's not going anywhere. You expand a bit and you go both shoulders. 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? You feel like you can push me. Yeah. Don't use this. Just relax. When you push down here I'm totally relaxed. I'm just using my whole structure on my body. So this is actually touching my body. So you feel like you got me, right? It actually does more. It does more room. Just relax this whole thing. Suck in there. So it feels like oh yeah I got you now. But you feel like now it's on your back leg, right? Now you just expand. Yeah, okay. I'm already so new. Sucking in things. I'm already sucked in. Ideally I want to make sure it's elbow. But then you need to make sure the elbow, cup the elbow. So if I go like this you can just push it up there. But you try to elbow me a bit. Elbow me. And we think I control the elbow. I don't. Then if you feel yourself moving this way you're going to change it to here. So you need to cup the elbow. This is sucking in. Just sucking in. And then expand. Step here and I'm bumping to you. Like that, right? Yeah, okay. See that? My feet haven't touched the ground yet and they've already made contact. So now all the momentum is going through you instead of going to the ground. You try that. I'll stand here and you just try it. So you got to step really deep. So I'll step with this foot or this one. Like that. So that works too. But that's not the technique. So I'll step deeper today. You want to take my place. Here's my center. So my foot basically has to be here. Oh yeah. Let's see how deep you have to go. But then don't knee forward. You straight? Boom, it's almost straight. It's like one straight step. I'm trying to drop my height down. Because I feel like when I get here my shoulders here. One technique is to use your shoulder. That's where I come back to. Because you can use your shoulder bone. But for training, you're just going to bump the chest. So relax your shoulder. Don't do this. But don't stick it out like this. I'm trying to pull it back. So just relax. You're not stepping deep enough. So I feel that when I step in. You don't want to step then go. You have to go. You have to pay before I land. Before my foot even touches the ground I'm already there. I feel that a lot more than when I step first. So you want to aim forward behind the guy. The other thing is to make a frame. Make this round. Sink your chest. So this is one big cup. One big cup is gone. Because you stick out any part of the cup then it's just going to go in. It won't affect the whole thing. So you make this round. So there's two ways you can sink down. Or you can rise up. That's rising up. So here you go. Rising up. Or you can sink down. You got it. See my idea. So now you just extend this. And now you're bringing your whole body into it. 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. 220 pounds. Look at his muscles. Look at his arms. Holy cow. He's as big as my leg. I'm only about 150 pounds. Look at my skinny arms. And I'm 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? You're 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. 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 exists 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 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 a concept called shong in Chinese. It's being loose but relaxed but still have structure. So he's pushing. He's pushing harder, harder, harder, harder. My hands relax when he's pushing. I'm still relaxed. See how my arms relax? I'm still able to resist them. 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 then if you're fighting against someone bigger than you you're at a disadvantage 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 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. 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. So what you can do in 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. So there's a very simple movement called ballot hands. So I'm using my core to direct my body because 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 in Chinese. The body leads the hand. So that's number two mistake. Here's how it looks like when you make the mistake. See a difference? My hand is leading my core. So there's very little power or connection when I'm moving my hand. I'm just moving my hand. I'm not even leading it with the core. Now do as you're doing correctly. So how you can practice is actually put your finger or put your hand and fingers touch your belly button and then feel it move before your hand moves. But now you get the difference. And the difference you can tell I'm just using my hand like this just my hand. Pain wise how much is that? One to ten. About four. Now I'm using my hit I'm using my dan tian. How much pain more pain is there? About seven. And I didn't use more power I just used my waist. And if I use more I can get it up to ten. 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 hand. 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 the later lesson. Bruce Lee taught which is to move your hands before your feet just like in fencing you want to move your hands before your feet. The reason is because when somebody attacks you I don't have time to move my hip first and do a big tai chi move right? If somebody attacks me I have to move my hand first. So what's the difference? See before you learn tai chi and once you learn tai chi they move their hands first but there's no power and then they'll practice tai chi and then they'll learn how to use the hips to get power. But they practice enough tai chi and now they'll get back to the beginning. They use their hands first but now it comes with power. How does that happen? So let me show you again. Let's see if it's attacking. I don't have time to move my hips and do a big tai chi move like in a lot of demonstrations. I only have time to just move my hand up. But there's power there. How does that happen? I just move my hand I 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. Here's me moving my hips first. Too slow right? I have to go one, two You already hit me. But now I want to do it so that I move my hand first. 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 going to show Will for example because I'm wearing a jacket you can't see. So you see if you take your shirt and tighten it up your spine has a curve here right? So most people have that curve naturally but in tai chi you actually don't want that curve. In tai chi you want to get rid of that curve so you want to sink down the tailbone so that you can feel that this is flatter and ideally it's actually a C, it's a cup. So what you need to do is sink your tailbone down even more sucking your gut and then stretch this out like this so now I can feel it's lower back straightening up but still not enough, you want it to stick out push out over here, push, push, push that's better. So now you can feel that it's more like a C where I started about before see how it's like an S 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 if I do an S curve on purpose my spine is like my belly sticking out 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 now he pushes on it what happened? it's different it's rooted when you curve your back is now that energy transfer goes straight through your spine and then into your hips 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 it doesn't go to your legs so that's why he pushes that energy goes to the spine and then I go so that's the number one mistake that you can make in tai chi make sure that you always check put my hand back behind my back 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 I want to first put my back against the wall 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 keeping my spine straight and go in 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 you want to understand why you do tai chi so slow today we talked about three mistakes 1. relaxation 2. using your dan tian to lead your hands 3. 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 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 so expand my chest and then you go from here there's actually a bigger chest an expanded chest so now there's another not going mechanism that blends so there's blending and it's sinking more so when you're sinking it sinks down to the bottom so the chin is tucked chest is in and then you push hard as more it's not going anywhere expand a bit so you contract yeah cause when you can try you feel like oh I can push the guy right? you feel like you can push me but you think you got me right? don't use this just relax I'm totally relaxed I'm just using my whole structure in my body so this is actually touching my body so you feel like you got me right? cause it actually does more alright alright 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 okay I'm already so new so glad put that into your cushion already I'm already sucked in yeah but then you need to make sure the elbow cap the elbow so if I go like this push it up but you try to elbow me like this you do that we think I control the elbow okay then if you feel yourself moving this way you're you're gonna change it to here okay so you need to cap the elbow suck in just suck in and then expand step here and I bump into you step through deeper yeah see that? my feet haven't touched the ground yet and they've already made contact so now all the momentum is going through you instead of going to the ground okay I'll stand here and you try to try that so you gotta step really deep so I step with this foot or this one like that so that works too but that's not the technique so step deeper today so here's my center you wanna be there so my foot basically has to be here alright see how deep you have to go so but then don't knee forward you straight? it's almost straight okay I'm trying to drop my height down cause I feel like when I get here my shoulders here don't use your shoulder so be that's where I'm more like combative cause you can use the shoulder bone but for training you just gonna bump into the chest so like that so relax the shoulder don't do this like that I'm trying to pull it back so just relax come 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 relaxation and meditation but also you learn a concept called rooting or sinking so as you can see in the demonstration we'll here how much do you weigh 220 pounds look at his muscles look at his arms, holy cow he's as big as my leg I'm only about 150 pounds look at my skinny arms and I'm able to resist and pushing me and I'm fairly relaxed without using a lot of strength I can resist this push and how hard were you pushing there 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 don't fight force with force so in Tai Chi you'll teach you how to use 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, it's placid but being relaxed in a concept called shong in Chinese he's pushing harder harder, harder, harder I'm relaxing, my hands are relaxing he's pushing harder, harder I'm still relaxed you see how it relaxes my arms I'm still able to resist them 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 for example your hands are always relaxed there's only a tense state and a relaxed state now when we go to the gym most people practice being tense use your muscles tense up to get more power which is okay, it works but if you practice being tense on time practice being tense then if you're fighting against someone bigger than you you're at a disadvantage because his force will be stronger than your force so rather than use force I use shong I use relaxation so when you practice your tai chi make sure that your hands are not open like this because that's too much tension because your hands are not closed like this because that's too much tension your hands should always be in the middle when it's relaxed it's completely relaxed when you're using 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 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 to slightly open and then back to relaxed slightly open it's a very minor detail but what that does is it teaches you 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 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 center of gravity to direct the movements so there's a very simple movement called followed hands so I'm using my core to direct my body this time I'm using just one hand see how my core is moving in a circle to direct my arm so the core or the dan tian leads the arms that's what I say in Chinese the body leads the hand so that's number two mistake here's how it looks like when you make the mistake my hand is leading my core so there's very little power or connection when I'm moving my hand I'm just moving my hand, I'm not even leading it with the core now do as you're doing correctly so how you can practice is actually put your finger or put your hand and fingers touch your belly button and then feel it move before your hand moves so now you get the difference and the difference you can tell, let's see I'm just using my hand like this just my hand pain wise how much is that? one to ten about four now I'm using my hit dan tian how much pain more pain is there? about 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 ten 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 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 the later lesson and it goes with the concept Bruce Lee taught which is to move your hands before your feet just like in fencing you want to move your hands before your feet the reason is because when somebody attacks you I don't have time to move my hip first and do a big tai chi move 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 I don't have time to move my hips and do a big tai chi move like in a lot of demonstrations I only have time to just move my hand up but there's power there how does that happen? right? I just move my hand and then my body 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 but now I want to do it so that I move my hand first how does that work? 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 going to show Will for example because I'm wearing a jacket you can't see if you take your shirt and tighten it up your spine has a curve here so most people have that curve naturally but in tai chi you actually don't want that curve in tai chi you want to get rid of that curve so you want to sink down the tailbone so that you can feel that this is flatter and ideally it's actually a C, it's a 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 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 push, push, push, push, that's better so now you can feel that it's more like a C where I started about before see how it's like an S so you don't want that and you can see a lot of people doing tai chi with a back like this it's actually very bad for your back and also it makes you disconnected it disconnects your upper body with your lower body the key to having a strong core and dan tian is to connect your upper body with your lower body and this is the main mistake that people make by having the S curve of the spine and what it does is disconnect your body so for example I'm going to do an S curve on purpose my spine is like my belly sticking out and he pushes on my hind 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 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 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 that energy goes to the spine 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, 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 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 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 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 to 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 because you're pushing down to my back expand my chest and then you go so there's actually a bigger chest and an expanded chest so now there's another not going mechanism that blends so there's blending I'm going to try to do it so when you're sinking it sinks down to the bottom and your chin is tucked chest is in and then you push hard as well it's not going anywhere you expand a bit so you contract yeah easily lose balance so hard because when you can try you feel like oh I can push the guy right you feel like you can push me right? don't use this just relax when you push down here I'm just using my whole structure in my body this is actually to touch my body I'll let you in so you feel like you got me there's actually more 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? now you just expand yeah okay I'm so new so let's put that into your so I'm ready I'm already sucked in ideally I want to make sure you need to make sure the elbow cap the elbow so if I go like this push it up when you try to elbow me like this you do that elbow me at least I can control the elbow then if you feel yourself moving this way you're right there you're going to change it to here so you need to cap the elbow suck it in just a second and then expand step here and I bump into you like that right? every step through deeper my feet haven't touched the ground yet and they've already made contact so now all the momentum is going through you instead of going to the ground okay you try that I'll stand here and you try to try bump into it so I'll step with this foot or this one like that so that works too but that's not the technique so I'm here you want to take my place here's my center you want to be there so my foot basically has to be here alright see how deep you have to go but then don't need for be straight boom it's almost straight I'm trying to drop my height down because I feel like that when I get here my shoulder is here one technique is to use your shoulder that's where more combata because you can use your shoulder bone if you're training you're just going to bump into your chest so relax your shoulder don't do this like that don't stick it out like this I'm trying to pull it back just relax alright so I feel that when I step here so you don't want to step then go you have to go before I land before my foot even touches the ground I'm already there same time there you go I can feel that a lot more when you step first same the other thing is to make a frame yeah make this round sink your chest so this is like one big one big cup one big cup is gone ok because you stick out any part of the cup then it's just going to go in it won't affect the whole thing so you make this round yeah so there's two ways you can sink down or you can rise up that's rising up so you go rising up rising up or you can sink down going downwards you got it same idea pretending I'm not even there so now you just extend this and now you're bringing your whole body into it into the push so don't push just like just keep it there ok 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 220 pounds look at his muscles his arms, holy cow he's as big as my leg I'm only about 150 pounds look at my skinny arms and I'm able to resist and pushing me and I'm fairly relaxed without using a lot of strength I can resist this push and how hard were you pushing there he's putting all his strength in there so the key is don't fight 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 there's nothing there nothing, it's placid but be relaxed in a concept called 松 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 relaxed he's pushing harder, harder I'm still relaxed see how it relaxes my arm I'm still able to resist them so that's the difference between being 松 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 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 松 I use relaxation so when you practice your Tai Chi when you're 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 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 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 repetition and training doing the push hands that we just showed you in the demonstration doing that for a lot, you can learn how to use relaxation mistake number two in Tai Chi is to not use your Dan Tian or not use your core center of gravity to direct the movements so there's a very simple movement called bowed hands so I'm using my core to direct my body so say I'm using just one hand see how my core is moving in a circle to direct my arm so the core or the Dan Tian leads the arms Sun Dai Sao, that's what I say in Chinese the body leads the hand so that's number two mistake here's how it looks like when you make the mistake see a difference I'm just leading my core so there's very little power or connection when I'm moving my hand I'm just moving my hand I'm not even leading it with the core now do as you're doing correctly so how you can practice is actually put your finger or put your hand and fingers touch your belly button and then feel it move before your hand moves so now you get the difference and the difference you can tell let's see I'm just using my hand just my hand pain wise how much is that one to ten about four four okay now I'm using my hip I mean using my Dan Tian how much pain more pain is there about seven and I didn't use more power I just used my waist and if I use more I can get it up to ten 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 doing the wrong way because I practice so much the proper way but what I'm doing is I'm leading with my hands and then I move my body so a very basic fundamental in early Tai Chi if you're a beginner is to learn how to move your hips now when you get advanced Tai Chi you actually do the opposite you learn to move your hands before your hips it's contradictory isn't it but I'll show you how to do that in the next lesson or in a later lesson and it goes with the concept that Bruce Lee taught which is to move your hands before your feet just like in fencing you want to move your hands before your feet the reason is because when I don't have time to move my hip first and do a big Tai Chi move 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 so let me show you again let's see if it's attacking I don't have time to move my hips and do a big Tai Chi move I only have time to just move my hand up but there's power there how that happens I just move my hand I 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 it's too slow, I have to go one, two you already hit me but now I want to do it so that I move my hand first 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 going to show Will because I'm wearing a jacket you can't see so you see if you take this shirt and tighten it up your spine has a curve here so most people have that curve naturally but in Tai Chi you actually don't want that curve in Tai Chi you want to get rid of that curve so you want to sink down the tailbone so that you can feel that this is flatter and ideally it's actually a C it's a 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 so now I can feel it's lower back straightening up not enough, you want it to stick out push out of here, push, push, push, push that's better so now you can feel that it's more like a C where I started about before see how it's like an S so you don't want that and you can see a lot of people doing Tai Chi with a back like this it's actually very bad for your back and also it makes you disconnected it disconnects your upper body with your lower body the key to having a very 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 there's no resistance but now I stick my back out I drop my hip and make this into a C and now he pushes on it what happened? it's more rooted see what happens when you curve your back is now that energy transfer goes straight through your spine and then into your hips and into the legs, into the knees, into the ground when you break that connection by curving your spine now all the energy just goes in your spine it doesn't go to your legs so that's why he pushes that energy goes to the spine and then I go so that's the number one mistake that you can make in Tai Chi so when you practice your Tai Chi make sure that you always check put my hand back behind my back if it's straight, it's in a C you don't want to be like this so even when you do your moves when you think about that the spine is going to be straight one exercise you can do is to do very slow squats against the wall 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 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 the bottom 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 first 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 if we still get connectedness then everybody would do Tai Chi fast but the reason we do it slow is because Tai Chi doing it slow is probably the only way you can train that connectedness in your body by combining all the techniques that we learned, relaxation leading with the dan tian and later on how to use your breath to relax and connect your body to and your mind so there's many aspects of learning how to connect your whole body and mind as an integrated machine integrated unit in order to function totally and holistically when it comes in you sink your chest you press here like I'm pretty solid here because you're pushing down to my neck I expand my chest and then you go so now there's another not going mechanism that blends so there's blending I try to do it, see so when you're sinking it sinks down to the body 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 where you're at pull the shoulders pull the shoulders you contract? easy when we balance so hard because when you can try you feel like oh I can push the guy you feel like you can push me you think you got me don't use that don't use this just relax when you push on here I'm totally relaxed I'm just using my whole structure this is actually touching my body so you feel like you got me there's more room just relax this whole thing suck in there so it feels like oh yeah I got you now but you feel like now it's on your back leg right? now you just expand yeah okay I'm so new so let's put that into here so I'm ready I'm already sucked in I'm already expanding but then you need to make sure the elbow so if I go like this you can just push it up when you try to elbow me like this elbow me at least I can control the elbow right right then if you feel yourself moving this way you're gonna change it to here so you need to in is this sucking in is this sucking in just sucking in and then expand step here and I bump into you like that right? yeah if I step too deeper my feet haven't touched the ground yet and I already made contact so now all the momentum is going through you instead of going to the ground okay you try that I'll stand here and you just try it so you gotta step really deep so I step with this foot or this one like that so that works too but that's not the technique so I'm here you want to take my place so here's my center so my foot basically has to be here oh yeah see how deep you have to go but then don't need for just be straight boom it's almost straight I'm trying to drop my height down cause I feel like when I get here don't use your shoulder one technique is to use your shoulder that's for a more combata cause you can use your shoulder bone but for training you're just going to bump into your chest like that so relax your shoulder don't do this yeah like that but don't stick it out like this I'm trying to pull it back just relax welcome I'm David Wong and 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 for the muscles for his arms, holy cow as big as my leg I'm only about 150 pounds look at my skinny arms and I'm able to resist and pushing me and I'm fairly relaxed without using a lot of strength I can resist this push and how hard were you pushing there he's putting all his strength in there and I'm just standing there not using too much 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 it's a 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 relaxed my arm is I'm still able to resist them so that's the difference between being shong which means loose 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 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 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 never 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 that's what takes the many many hours 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 pilot hands 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 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 and fingers touch your belly button and then feel it move before your hand moves so now you get the difference and the difference, you can tell let's see I'm just using my hand like this, just my hand pain wise how much is that 1 to 10 about 4 4, okay now I'm using my hip I'm using my Dan Tian how much pain more pain is there 7 and I didn't use more power I just used my waist and if I use more I can get it up to 10 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 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 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 if somebody attacks me I have to move my hand first so what's the difference see before you learn Tai Chi and once you learn Tai Chi they move their hands first but there's no power and then they practice Tai Chi and then they'll learn how to use the hips to get power but they practice enough Tai Chi and now they'll go back to the beginning they use their hands first but now it comes with power how does that happen so let me show you again let's see if it's attacking I don't have time to move my hips and do a big Tai Chi move I only have time to just move my hand up but there's power there how does that happen I just move my hand I move my hand and then my body I move my hand and then my body I didn't move my hip first just moving my hips first too slow right I have to go one, two you already hit me but now I want to do it so that I move my hand first 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 going to show Will for example because I'm wearing a jacket you can't see so you see if you take your shirt and tighten it up it's fine it has a curve here so most people have that curve naturally but in Tai Chi you actually don't want that curve in Tai Chi you want to get rid of that curve so you want to sink down the tailbone so that you can feel that this is flatter and ideally it's actually a C it's a 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 so now I can feel it's lower back it's straightening up but still not enough you want it to stick out you push out of here push push push that's better so now you can feel that it's more like a C where I started about before see how it's like an S so you don't want that and you can see a lot of people doing Tai Chi with a back like this it's actually very bad for your back and also it makes you disconnected it disconnects your upper body with your lower body the key to having a strong core and Dan 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 there's no resistance but now I stick my back out I drop my hip and make this into a C and now he pushes on it what happened is different you're more rooted it's rooted what happens when you curve your back is now that energy transfer goes straight through your spine and then into your hips and into the legs, into the knees, into the ground when you break that connection by curving your spine now all the energy just goes in your spine it doesn't go to your legs so that's why he pushes that energy goes to the spine and then I go so that's the number one mistake that you can make in Tai Chi so when you practice your Tai Chi make sure that you always check put my hand back behind my back it's straight, it's a C you don't want to be like this so even when you do your moves think about that the spine is going to be straight one exercise you can do is to do very slow squats against the wall I want to first put my back against the wall and 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 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 my 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 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 when it comes in you sink your chest so you press here like I'm pretty solid here because you're pushing down to my fan my chest 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 the machine is tucked the 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 explaining pull the shoulders pull the shoulders can you please contract easy when we balance so hard because when you can try you feel like oh I can push the guy you feel like you can push me you think you got me right okay don't use this just relax when you push on here I'm totally relaxed I'm just using my whole structure my body so this is actually touching my body so you feel like you got me it actually does more yeah 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 now you just expand yeah okay alright I'm already so new so Glenn put that into your sucking in things already I'm already sucked in okay but then you need to make sure the elbow cup the elbow so if I go like this push it up there when you try to elbow me like this you do that elbow me at least I can control the elbow if I don't then if you feel yourself moving this way you're gonna change it to here okay so you need to suck in this is sucking in just sucking in and then expand and I bump into you if I step through deeper my feet haven't touched the ground yet and they've already made contact so now all the momentum is going through you instead of going to the ground okay I'll stand here and you can try to bump into it so I step with this foot this one like that so that works too but that's not the technique so I'm here you want to take my place so here's my center you want to be there so my foot basically has to be here yeah see how deep you have to go but then you don't need to be straight boom one straight stick I'm trying to drop my height down because I feel like when I get here my shoulders here yeah don't use your shoulder is this one technique is to use your shoulder that's for a more combative because you can use your shoulder boom if you're training you're just going to bump into your chest so so relax your shoulder don't do this yeah don't stick it out like this I'm trying to pull it back so just relax you're not stepping people down so I feel like when I step here you don't want to step then go you have to go before I land before my foot even touches the ground I'm already there yeah yeah there you go I can feel that a lot more so you want to aim aim for behind again another thing is to make a frame yeah make this round sink your chest so there's like one big cup one big cup is gone because you stick out any part of the cup then it's just going to go in it won't affect the whole thing so you make this round so there's two ways you can sink down or you can rise up that's rising up so you go that's rising up that's rising up or you can sink down so it's like going down you got it same idea right so now you just extend this and now you're bringing your whole body into it into the foot any mistakes in Tai Chi so one of the main advantages of learning Tai Chi is for health for your joints, for your bones for breathing, for relaxation and meditation but also you learn a concept called rooting or sinking so as you can see in the demonstration we'll hear how much do you weigh 240 pounds look at his muscles look at my leg I'm only about 150 pounds look at my skinny arms and I'm able to resist and pushing me and I'm fairly relaxed without using a lot of strength I can resist this push and how hard are you pushing there 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 don't fight force with force 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 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 but being relaxed in concept called shong in Chinese he's loose but relaxed but still have structure so he's pushing he's pushing harder I'm relaxed he's pushing harder I'm still relaxed I'm still able to resist him 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 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 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 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 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 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 arms so the core or the dan tian leads the arms sun dai xiao 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 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 and the difference you can tell, let's see I'm just using my hand like this just my hand pain wise how much is that one to ten about four now I'm using my hit I mean using my dan tian how much pain is there about seven and I didn't use more power I just used my waist and if I use more I can get it up to ten 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 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 move your hands before your hips it's contradictory isn't it but I'll show you how to do that in the next lesson or in a later lesson and it goes with the concept that Bruce Lee taught which is to move your hands before your feet just like in fencing you want to move your hands before your feet the reason is because when somebody attacks you I don't have time to move my hip first and do a big tai chi move 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 use the attacking I don't have time to move my hips I do a big tai chi move in a lot of demonstrations I only have time to just move my hand up but there's power there how does that happen I just move my hand 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 moving my hips first too slow I have to go one, two you already hit me so that hit move my hand first 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 going to show Will for example because I'm wearing a jacket you can't see if you take your shirt and tighten it up your spine has a curve here most people have that curve naturally but in tai chi you actually don't want that curve in tai chi you want to get rid of that curve so you want to sink down the tailbone so that you can feel that this is flatter and ideally it's actually a C, it's a 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 so now I can feel it's lower back it's straightening up but still not enough, you want it to stick out push out over here, push push push that's better 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 it disconnects your body so for example I'm going to do an S curve on purpose my spine is like my belly sticking out 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 now he pushes on it what happened? you're more rooted it's rooted 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 and it doesn't go to your legs so that's why he pushes that energy goes to the spine and then I go so that's the number one mistake that you can make in tai chi so when you practice your tai chi make sure that you always check put my hand back behind my back if it's straight, it's in 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 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 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 today we talked about three mistakes 1. relaxation 2. using your dan tian to lead your hands 3. 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 and hold it strictly when it comes in you sink your chest so you press here because you're pushing down to my neck right leg you expand my chest and then you go there's actually sink your chest and expand your chest so now there's another nago mechanism that blends I'll try and do it 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 what we want to try you contract? yeah easily we're bound to it because when you can try you feel like oh I can push the guy right? you feel like you can push me right? don't use this just relax when you push down here I'm just using my whole structure in my body this is actually touching my body that you in you got me right? there's more just relax this whole thing suck in there so it feels like oh yeah I got you now but you feel like now it's on your back leg right? now you just expand yeah okay I'm so new okay so let's put that into your pushing so you're sucking in I'm already sucked in I'm already expanding but then you need to make sure the elbow cap the elbow so if I go like this push it up when you try to elbow me you do that elbow me at least I can control the elbow then if you feel yourself moving this way you're right there you can just change it to here so you need to in cap the elbow this is sucking in just sucking in and then expand go forward bump into you I've stepped through deeper my feet haven't touched the ground yet and they've already made contact so now all the momentum is going through you instead of going to the ground okay you try that I'll stand here and you just try it so you gotta step really deep so I'll step with this foot like that like that so that works too but that's not the technique so I'm here you wanna take my place so here's my center you wanna be there so my foot basically has to be here let's see how deep you have to go that's better but then don't knee forward be straight boom it's almost straight I'm trying to drop my height down I feel like that when I get here don't use your shoulder one technique is to use your shoulder that's for a more combata because you can use your shoulder bone if you're training you're just gonna bump into your chest like that so relax your shoulder don't do this like that don't stick it out like this just relax come I'm David Wong in this video I'm gonna show you the three mistakes in tai chi that are very common that people make so one of the main advantages of learning tai chi is for health for your joints, for your bones for breathing, for relaxation and meditation but also you learn a concept called rooting or sinking so as you can see in the demonstration we'll hear how much do you weigh two to twenty pounds look at his muscles look at his arms, holy cow he's as big as my leg I'm only about 150 pounds look at my skinny arms and I'm able to resist and pushing me and I'm fairly relaxed without using a lot of strength I can resist this push and how hard were you pushing there about 90 to 100% he's putting all his strength in there so the key is don't fight 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 very few people that actually practice tai chi actually know and actually experience and know how to do this 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 there's nothing there it's placid but being relaxed in a concept called shong in chinese it's being loose but relaxed but still have structure so he's pushing he's pushing harder, harder, harder I'm relaxed see when he's pushing harder, harder I'm still relaxed you see how I relax my arm I'm still able to resist him so that's the difference between being shong which means loose and placid but in english we use relaxation which is very easy to misinterpret so number one key when you practice your tai chi for example practice your tai chi your hands are always relaxed there's only a tense state and a relaxed state now when we go to the gym most people practice being tense use your muscles tense up to get more power which is okay, it works but if you practice being tense all the time 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 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 because 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 even though you're using tension see my hands are slightly open that I'm still in a relaxed state 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 go to resist someone with force so that's what takes the training that's what takes the many many hours 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 so I'm using just one hand see how my core is moving in a circle to direct my arm so the core or the dan tian leads the arms that's what I say in Chinese the body leads the hand so that's number two mistake here's how it looks like when you make a mistake see the difference I'm not even 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 this correctly so how you can practice is actually put your finger or put your hand and fingers touch your belly button and then feel it move before your hand moves so now you get the difference and the difference you can tell, let's see I'm just using my hand like this just my hand pain wise how much is that? 1 to 10 about a 4 now I'm using my hip I'm using my dan tian how much pain is there? about a 7 and I didn't use more power I just used my waist and if I use more I can get it up to 10 so 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 hand 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 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 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 I don't have time to move my hips and do a big tai chi move like in a lot of demonstrations I only have time to just move my hand up but there's power there how does that happen I just move my hand and then my body 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 but now I want to do it so that I move my hand first 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 going to show Will for example because I'm wearing a jacket you can't see if you take this shirt and tighten it up the spine has a curve here so most people have that curve naturally but in tai chi you actually don't want that curve in tai chi you want to get rid of that curve so you want to sink down the tailbone so that you can feel that this is flatter and ideally it's actually a C, it's a 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 so now I can feel that your back is straightening up but still not enough you want it to stick out push, push, push, push so now you can feel that it's more like a C where I started 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 from 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 going to do an S curve on purpose my spine is like, my belly is 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 now he pushes on it what happened? it's a different it's more rooted what happens when you curve your back is now that energy transfer goes straight through your spine and then into your hips to 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 that energy goes through 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 and see if it's straight if it's a C but 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 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'm trying to be touching the wall once I get that then I can go up and down just go half way 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 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 to 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 too and your mind 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 you're pushing down to my back you expand my chest there's actually 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 so when you're sinking it sinks down to the back so your chest is in and you push hard as well it's not going anywhere you expand a bit so you contract yeah easily where we balance too hard because when you can try you feel like oh I can push the guy you feel like you can push me you got me right don't use this just relax when you push on here I'm totally relaxed I'm just using my whole structure in my body so this is actually touching my body I let you in you got me right there's more room alright just relax this whole thing suck in there so it feels like oh yeah I got you now but you feel like now it's on your back leg right now you just expand yeah okay alright it's all new right so Glenn put that into your sucking in there I'm already sucked in and I'm expanding but then you need to make sure the elbow so if I go like this you can just push it up but you try to elbow me like this you do that elbow me at least I can control the elbow then if you feel yourself moving this way you're you're going to change it to here yeah alright so you need to in just a second and then expand every step through deeper my feet haven't touched the ground yet and they already made contact so now all the momentum is going through you instead of going to the ground okay I'll stand here and you can try so you gotta step really deep so I'll step with this foot like this one like that so that works too but that's not the technique so I'll step deeper today you want to take my place so here's my center so my foot basically has to be here oh yeah let's see how deep you have to go but then don't knee forward you straight boom one straight step I'm trying to drop my height down I feel like that when I get here my shoulders here don't use your shoulder one technique is to use your shoulder that's for a more combata because you can use your shoulder boom you're just going to bump with your chest like that so relax your shoulder don't do this like that don't stick it out like this I'm trying to pull it back so just relax so I feel that when I step here so you don't want to step then go you have to pay before I land so before my foot even touches the ground I'm already there or at the same time so there you go I can feel that a lot more so you want to aim aim for behind again another thing is to make a frame make this round sink your chest so this is like one big one big cup one big cup is gone because you stick out any part of the cup then it's just going to go in it won't affect the whole thing so you make this round there's two ways you can sink down or you can rise up that's rising up so you go rising up or you can sink down so it's like you got it same idea right so now you just extend this so now you're bringing your whole body into it so in this video I'm going to show you the three mistakes in Tai Chi that are very common that people make 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 it'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 and I'm just standing there not using too much strength so the key is don't fight 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 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 but being relaxed in a concept called shong in Chinese it's loose but relaxed but still have structure so he's pushing he's pushing harder, harder, harder I'm relaxing, my hands are relaxed but he's pushing harder, harder I'm still relaxed you see how it relaxes my arm I'm still able to resist them 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 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 even though you're using tension 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 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 so there's a very simple movement called pilot hands so I'm using my core to direct my body the same as 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 fingers touch your belly button and then feel it move before your hand moves but now you get the difference and the difference you can tell let's see I'm just using my hand just my hand pain wise how much is that 1 to 10 about a 4 4 okay now I'm using my hip I mean using my Dan Tian how much pain more pain is there about a 7 and I didn't use more power I just used my waist and if I use more I can get it up to 10 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 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 learn how to move your opposite you learn to move your hands before your hips it's contradictory isn't it but I'll show you how to do that in the next lesson or in a later lesson and it goes with the concept that Bruce Lee taught which is to move your hands before your feet just like in fencing you want to move your hands before your feet the reason is because when somebody attacks you I don't have time to move my hip first and do a big Tai Chi move if somebody attacks me I have to move my hand first so what's the difference see before you learn Tai Chi and once you learn Tai Chi they move their hands first but there's no power and then they practice Tai Chi and then they'll learn how to use the hips to get power but they practice enough Tai Chi and now they'll go back to the beginning they use their hands first but now it comes with power how does that happen okay so let me show you again let's see if it's attacking I'm going to move my hips and do a big Tai Chi move like in a lot of demonstrations I only have time to just move my hand up but there's power there, how does that happen I just move my hand I move my hand and then my body go again I move my hand and then my body I didn't move my hip first just me moving my hips first too slow, I have to go one, two you already hit me 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 going to show Will for example because I'm wearing a jacket you can't see so you see if you take your shirt and tighten it up your spine has a curve here so most people have that curve naturally but in Tai Chi you actually don't want that curve in Tai Chi you want to get rid of that curve so you want to sink down the tailbone so that you can feel that this is flatter and ideally it's actually a C it's a cup so what you need to do is sink your tailbone down even more suck in your gut and then stretch this out like this so now I can feel it's lower back it's straightening up but still not enough, you want it to stick out push out over here, push, push, push 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 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 it 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 now he pushes on it what happened? 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 doesn't go to your legs so that's why he pushes that energy goes to the spine and then I go so that's the number one mistake that you can make in Tai Chi so when you practice your Tai Chi make sure that you always check 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 so one exercise you can do is to do very slow squats against the wall 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 just 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 I'll 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 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 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 to function totally and holistically so when it comes in you sink your chest so you press here like I'm pretty solid here because you're pushing down to my head expand my chest there's actually an expanded chest so now there's another not going mechanism that that blends so there's blending try and do it so when you're sinking it sinks down to the bottom so the chin is tucked chest is in and then you push hard as well it's not going anywhere expand a bit pull the shoulders pull the shoulders can you please so you contract easily when we balance so hard oh I can push the guy you feel like you can push me you think you got me right don't use this just relax when you push in here I'm totally relaxed I'm just using my whole structure in my body so this is actually touching my body so you feel like you got me there's actually more yeah alright just relax this whole thing suck in there so it feels like oh yeah I got you now but you feel like now it's on your back leg right now you just expand yeah okay alright it's all new right so put that into your cushion suck in and expand I'm already sucked in I'm already expanding but then you need to make sure the elbow, cap the elbow cap the elbow so if I go like this you can just push it up but you try to elbow me like this you do that elbow me at least I can control the elbow right then if you feel yourself moving this way you're you're going to change it to here yeah alright so you need to in, cap the elbow is this sucking in is this sucking in just sucking in and then expand step here and I bump into you like that right? yeah if I step too deeper 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 so you got to step really deep so I step with this foot or this one like that so that works too but that's not the technique so I'm here you want to take my place here's my center you want to be there so my foot basically has to be here oh yeah yeah see how deep you have to go that's better then don't need for you straight it's almost straight okay I'm trying to drop my height down because I feel like when I get here my shoulder is here don't use your shoulder is this one technique to use your shoulder that's for a more combata because you can use your shoulder bone but for training you're just going to bump into your chest okay relax your shoulder don't do this yeah don't stick it out like this I'm trying to pull it back so just relax 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 for rooting or sinking so as you can see in the demonstration Will here, how much do you weigh? 220 pounds 320 pounds, look at his muscles look at his arms, holy cow he's as big as my leg I'm only about 150 pounds look at my skinny arms and I'm able to resist and pushing me and I'm fairly relaxed without using a lot of strength I can resist this push 900% 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 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 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 he pushes and that's placid right there's nothing there but being relaxed in a concept called shong in Chinese it's being loose but relaxed but still have structure so he's pushing he's pushing harder, harder, harder I'm relaxed see I'm still relaxed see how relaxed my arm is and I'm still able to resist him okay so that's the difference between being shong which means loose and placid but in English we use the word relaxation which is very easy to misinterpret so number one key when you practice your Tai Chi for example your hands are always relaxed there's only a 10 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 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 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 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 to direct the movements so there's a very simple movement called bowed hands so I'm using my core to direct my body because I'm using just one hand see how my core is moving in a circle to direct my arm so the core or the Dan Tian leads the arms that's what I say in Chinese the body leads the hand so that's number two mistake here's how it looks like when you make the mistake see 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 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 so now you get the difference and the difference you can tell, let's see I'm just using my hand like this just my hand pain wise how much is that one to ten about four now I'm using my hip I mean using my Dan Tian how much pain more pain is there brings it up to about a seven and I didn't use more power I just used my waist if I use more I can get it up to ten 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 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 want to move your hands before your feet the reason is because when somebody attacks you I don't have time to move my hip first and do a big Tai Chi move right? if somebody attacks me I have to move my hand first so what's the difference see before you learn Tai Chi and once you learn Tai Chi they move their hands first but there's no power and then they practice Tai Chi and then they'll learn how to use the hips to get power but they practice enough Tai Chi and now they'll get back to the beginning they use their hands first but now it comes with power how does that happen so let me show you again I don't have time to move my hips and do a big Tai Chi move like in a lot of demonstrations I only have time to just move my hand up but there's power there how does that happen I just move my hand I move my hand and then my body go again I move my hand and then my body I didn't move my hip first here's me moving my hips first too slow right? I have to go one, two, you already hit me but now I want to do it so that I move my hand first 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 going to show Will for example because I'm wearing a jacket you can't see if you take this shirt and tighten it up the spine has a curve here most people have that curve naturally but in Tai Chi you actually don't want that curve in Tai Chi you want to get rid of that curve so you want to sink down the tailbone so that you can feel that this is flatter and ideally it's actually a C, it's a 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 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 so push out over here, push, push, push that's better so now you can feel that it's more like a C where I started about before see how it's like an S so you don't want that and you can see a lot of people doing Tai Chi with a back like this 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 it disconnects your body so for example I'm going to do an S curve on purpose my spine is like really 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 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 into your spine and then into your hips and into the legs, into the knees into the ground when you break that connection by curving your spine now all the energy just goes in your spine it doesn't go to your legs so that's why he pushes that energy goes to the spine and then I go so that's the number one mistake that you can make in Tai Chi so when you practice your Tai Chi make sure that you always check put my hand back behind my back 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 just go half way 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 slow like this so that's going to be very hard on your lower back but it strengthens your lower back it strengthens your leg so that's one key in Tai Chi of creating connectedness so stay tuned I'm going to show you the bonus mistake that people make so the bonus mistake that you can make in Tai Chi is doing it too fast I know everybody says this you want to do Tai Chi slow but many people don't understand why you do Tai Chi so slow today we talked about three mistakes relaxation 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 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 it's like a press here like I'm pretty solid here because you're pushing down to my back you expand my chest and then you go from the beginning so now there's another not going mechanism that blends so there's blending and it's sinking more so when you're sinking it sinks down to the back so the chin is tucked chest is in and then you push hard as well it's not going anywhere you expand a bit first so you contract easily what was bound to hard because when you can try and you feel like oh I can push the guy right you feel like you can push me you think you got me right don't use this just relax when you push on here I'm totally relaxed I'm just using my whole structure my body so this is actually touching my body so you feel like you got me right there's more room alright alright just relax this whole thing suck in there so it feels like oh yeah I got you now but you feel like now it's on your back leg right now you just expand okay I'm already so new alright so Glenn put that into your cushion so you're already sucking in the expansion I'm already sucked in and I'm already expanding but then you need to make sure the elbow, cap the elbow cap the elbow so if I go like this you can just push it up when you try to elbow me like this you do that elbow me at least I can control the elbow if I don't then if you feel yourself moving this way you're you're going to change it to here so you need to in, cap the elbow this is sucking in just sucking in and then expand you're freaking in and bump into you every step through deeper so my feet haven't touched the ground yet and they've already made contact so now all the momentum is going through you instead of going to the ground you try that I'll stand here and you try to bump into it so you gotta step really deep so I'll step with this foot or this one like that so that works too so I'll step deeper today you want to take my place so here's my center so my foot basically has to be here oh yeah see how deep you have to go so that's better but then don't knee forward you straight? boom I'm trying to drop my height down because I feel like my shoulder is here don't use your shoulder one technique is to use your shoulder that's for a more combata because you can use your shoulder bone but for training you're just going to bump into the chest so relax your shoulder don't do this like that don't stick it out like this I'm trying to pull it back so just relax you're not stepping deep enough so I feel that when I step here so you don't want to step then go you have to pay before I land so before my foot even touches the ground I'm already there or the same time so there you go I can feel that a lot more so you want to aim for behind the guy okay another thing is to make a frame make this round sink your chest so there's like one big one big cup one big cup is gone 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 so you make this round okay there's two ways you can sink down or you can rise up that's rising up so you go yeah okay so it's like going downwards you got it same idea right so now you just extend this so now you're bringing your whole body into it into a push so okay in this video I'm going to show you the three mistakes in Tai Chi that are very common that 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 okay there's muscles holy cow there's as big as my leg I'm only about 150 pounds look at my skinny arms and I'm able to resist and pushing me and I'm fairly relaxed without using a lot of strength I can resist this push and how hard were you pushing there 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 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 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 there's nothing there I think it's placid but being relaxed in concept called Song means 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 are relaxed but he's pushing harder, harder I'm still relaxed see how it relaxes my arm I'm still able to resist them 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 if you practice being tense all the time if you practice being tense then if you're fighting against someone bigger than you you're at a disadvantage because his force will be stronger than your force so rather than use force I use 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 just 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 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 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 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 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 with 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 I'll 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 so now you get the difference and the difference you can tell let's see I'm just using my hand like this just my hand pain wise how much is that one to ten one to ten about a 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 ten right so that's the key of generating power is to use your Dan Tian so let me show you demonstration in the 24 move Tai Chi form 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 doing the wrong way because I practice so much the proper way but what I'm doing is I'm leading with my hands and then I move my body so a very basic fundamental in early Tai Chi if you're a beginner is to learn how to move your hips now when you get advanced Tai Chi you actually do the opposite you learn to move your hands before your hips it's contradictory isn't it but I'll show you how to do that in the next lesson or in a later lesson and it goes with the concept that Bruce Lee taught which is to move your hands before your feet just like in fencing you want to move your hands before your feet the reason is because when somebody attacks you I don't have time to move my hip first and do a big Tai Chi move right if somebody attacks me I have to move my hand first so what's the difference before 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 I don't have time to move my hips and do a big Tai Chi move like in a lot of demonstrations I only have time to just move my hand up but there's power there how does that happen I just move my hand and then my body I move my hand and then my body I didn't move my hip first just me moving my hips first too slow I have to go one, two you already hit me I just do it so that I hit with my hand first 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 going to 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 so most people have that curve naturally but in Tai Chi you actually don't want that curve in Tai Chi you want to get rid of that curve so you want to sink down the tailbone so that you can feel that this is flatter and ideally it's actually a C so what you need to do is sink your tailbone down even more suck in your gut and then stretch this out like this so now I can feel it's lower back it's straightening up but still not enough you want it to stick out push out over here push push push and now you can feel that it's more like a C where I've 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 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 and make this into a C and now he pushes on it what happened? it's more rooted see what happens when you curve your back is now that energy transfer goes straight through your spine and then into your hips and into the legs into the knees and into the ground when you break that connection by curving your spine now all the energy just goes in your spine it doesn't go to your legs so that's why he pushes 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 it's a C so even when you do your moves think about that think that the spine is going to be straight that's what you can do it's 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 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 half way so that's why I spine up and down the wall now after I do that and I'm good at it then I can go all the way down all the way down keeping my spine straight and touching the wall all the way and going slow like this so that's going to be very hard on your lower back but it strengthens your lower back it strengthens your leg so that's one key in Tai Chi of 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 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 because you're pushing down to expand my chest and then you go from there 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 and 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 what we all found so you contract yeah easily we balance it hard because when you can try you feel like oh I can push the guy right you feel like you can push me you think you got me right don't use this just relax when you push on here I'm just using my whole structure in my body so this is actually touching my body I let you in so you feel like you got me right there's actually more alright just relax this whole thing 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 now you just expand yeah okay I'm already so new so let put that into your your cushion so you're sucking so I'm already sucked in I'm already expanding but then you need to make sure the elbow so if I go like this push it up when you try to elbow me like this you do that elbow me at least I can control the elbow then if you feel yourself moving this way you're going to change it to here so you need to suck in this is sucking in just a second and then expand when you're pushing in step here and I bump into you like that right I've stepped through deeper 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 I'll stand here and you can try so you got to step really deep so I step with this foot or this one like that so that works too but that's not the technique so I'm here you want to take my place so here's my center you want to be there so my foot basically has to be here let's see how deep you have to go that's better 24 you straight? it's almost straight I'm trying to drop my height down because I feel like when I get here my shoulder is here is this one technique to use your shoulder? that's for a more combata because you can use your shoulder bone but for training you're just going to bump into the chest so relax your shoulder don't do this okay don't stick it out like this I'm trying to pull it back so just relax alright 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 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 look at his muscles look at his arms, holy cow he's as big as my leg I'm only about 150 pounds look at my skinny arms and I'm able to resist and pushing me and I'm fairly relaxed without using a lot of strength what are you pushing there? about 90 to 100% he's putting all his strength in there and I'm just standing there not using too much strength so the key is don't fight strength 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 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 if I'm being placid he pushes and that's placid right there's nothing there I think it's placid but being relaxed in a concept called shong in Chinese it's being loose but relaxed but still have structure so he's pushing he's pushing harder, harder, harder I'm relaxing, my hands relax when he's pushing harder, harder I'm still relaxed my arms and 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 10 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 feel that move before your hand moves so now you get the difference and the difference you can tell, let's see I'm just using my hand like this just my hand pain wise how much is that you got a facility one to ten about four now I'm using my hip I'm using my Dan Tian how much pain more pain is there about seven and I didn't use more power I just used my waist and if I use more I can get it up to ten 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 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 want to move your hands before your feet the reason is because when somebody attacks you I don't have time to move my hip first and do a big Tai Chi move right if somebody attacks me I have to move my hand first so what's the difference before you learn Tai Chi they move their hands first but there's no power 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 I don't have time to move my hips and do a big Tai Chi move like in a lot of demonstrations I only have time to just move my hand up but there's power there how does that happen I just move my hand I'm not moving my hand and then my body I move my hand and then my body I didn't move my hip first just moving my hips first too slow right I have to go one, two you already hit me but now I want to do it so that I move my hand first 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 going to 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 so most people have that curve naturally but in Tai Chi you actually don't want that curve in Tai Chi you want to get rid of that curve so you want to sink down the tailbone so that you can feel that this is flatter and ideally it's actually a C, it's a cup so what you need to do is sink your tailbone down even more suck in your gut and then stretch this out like this so now I can feel it's lower back, it's straightening up but still not enough, you want it to stick out push out over here, push, push, push that's better 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 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 and he pushes on my hind 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 now he pushes on it what happened? you're more rooted it's rooted what happens when you curve your back now that energy transfer goes straight through your spine and into your hips and into the legs into the knees and into the ground when you break that connection by curving your spine now all the energy just goes in your spine it doesn't go to your legs so that's why he pushes 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 remember that you always check put my hand back behind my back if it's straight, if 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 I want to first put my back against the wall and see if there's any space behind my back if there's a space that I can sleep 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 keeping my spine straight and touching the wall all the way and go in 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 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 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 you're pushing down to my head and then you go 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 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 expand a bit so you contract yeah easily when we balance so hard because when you can try and you feel like oh I can push the guy right? you feel like you can push me you feel like you've gotten me right don't use this just relax when you push in here I'm just using my whole structure in my body this is actually to touch my body and let you in so you feel like you've gotten me right there's actually more alright alright just relax this whole thing suck in everything so it feels like oh yeah I got you now that's on your back leg right? now you just expand yeah okay alright so new put that into your cushion already I'm already sucked in ideally I want to but then you need to make sure the elbow cap the elbow so if I go like this push it up there but you try to elbow me like this you do that okay at least I can control the elbow alright then if you feel yourself moving this way you're right there you're just going to change it to here alright so you need to cap the elbow