Tai Chi and Tai Chi Chuan
Tai chi (simplified Chinese: 太极; traditional Chinese: 太極; pinyin: Tàijí), short for T’ai chi ch’üan or Tàijí quán (太極拳), sometimes colloquially known as “Shadowboxing,” is an internal Chinese martial art practiced for defense training, health benefits, and meditation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tai_chi
Tai Chi is basic mindful whole body exercise
The leaders are doing Tai Chi Chuan, the followers, most of them, are doing Tai Chi and gaining a bit of a health boost, even if they only participate now and then. In the next video, folks have obviously been practicing a lot more, but the culture in China is different than in the United States when it comes to learning even a gentle and slow things such as Tai Chi.
The result of even an average performance of Tai Chi is a state of relaxed balance while moving. When successful, you will be “in the zone” or “flowing.” Your mind will not be empty, but will be completely filled with doing the movements. It is usually done in a group following a leader and can vary in difficulty form really simple flowing back and forth in place to a long and complex sequence of moves. The very basic skill is focusing the mind on the movement being done so completely that no other thoughts are rattling around up there.
This is hard to do; but a lot easier when there is a leader calling out the sequence so you can focus on the move and not worry about the sequence. One of the side effects is that when participating in a challenging sequence of follow the leader the whole body moves at a level where muscle bonding occurs. Tai Chi as a gentle but health generating exercise is often called Tai Chi Flow.
Whether the activity is Tai Chi, Zumba, Line Dance, Ballroom dancing or Tai Chi Chuan, the amount of health benefit depends on how fully you get into it. If your mind wanders while you are doing it, the health benefit wanders, too. You want to be “in the zone.”
“In the zone” for Tai Chi means slow motions, means paying attention to the body, means tiny incremental improvements, and most of all, Tai Chi means filling the mind completely with the details of what the body is doing. Learning how to get into this kind of flow takes about 3 minutes with a trained leader. It’s not quite the same as slow motion Zumba, but that’s not a bad description of basic Tai Chi. A half hour or an hour a week will be great. You might even enjoy it enough to want to learn a Tai Chi Chuan form. Maybe not at the Olympic level, such as this inspiring performance.
Tai Chi Chuan (Taijiquan) is advanced mindful whole body exercise
Actually getting a Taijiquan form, however, would be more like Ballroom Dancing — years of work to get close to perfecting the footwork and developing the mind/body coordination skills necessary to get in the zone for a formal and complete performance of a long, complex and difficult sequence of precisely choreographed body movements.
Doing a Tai Chi flow session for an hour a week will be good for your health. Practicing what you do in the class by yourself a few minutes every day will be even better. Taking a class in Taijiquan won’t be as good for your health at first because so much class time is spent figuring out how to do the complex moves of a Taijiquan form. But after a few months of classes with daily practice in between, there will be a definite boost in health.
If you have a specific health issue you think Tai Chi might be good for, I suggest checking out this newly formed organization: the INTERNATIONAL MEDICAL TAI CHI and QIGONG ASSOCIATION ( iMTQA ) at http://www.imtqa.org/. There is a growing number of studies on specific medical applications for Tai Chi and Qigong.
Chi Kung (Qigong) is breath or energy work and was developed long before Tai Chi Chuan. I use Qigong sets as warm ups. More on that in another article. Advanced Qigong requires learning Traditional Chinese Medicine. (In terms of training the mind, probably about the same as any MD program).
