What happens in a class?

This varies depending on who’s in the class and what I’ve got in mind, but generally it involves some or all of the following:

Warm ups
All classes generally start with various loosening exercises to relax the joints.

Foundation exercises
These fairly simple exercises work on the basic principles of posture and movement. They include Reeling Silk body mechanics exercises, various Chi Kung breathing exercises, the Ba Fa 8 basic ‘energies’ or techniques and Tiger Walking stepping practice.

Forms
A major part of all Tai Chi classes are ‘Forms’ – the fixed set of linked postures that often gets portrayed in the media. We practice several forms.
Daytime classes tend to practice the shorter forms (the Chen 13 or 18 movement forms) while evening classes learn the longer ones (the Chen Old Frame First form has around 74 moves) and ‘fast’ form, where the majority of the movements are performed with more energy and a higher tempo.
All classes also learn at least one of several weapons forms such as sword, sabre or spear, which helps train different principles, and provides a nice bit of variety! More about forms here.

Chi Kung
Exercises designed to increase the flow of energy (chi) around the body. The Tai Chi forms, being based on principles of Chinese medicine have the same effect. Whether you believe in the ideas of chi energy flowing around your body doesn’t really matter – whether you see it from a western or eastern perspective, the general idea is to make you more healthy.

Push Hands (Tui Shou)

This can be practised in two ways: competitive and non-competitive. Non-competitive push hands is a set of exercises with a partner to develop balance, posture, sensitivity and co-ordination. Competitive push hands is a bit like judo – the aim is to use techniques from Tai Chi principles to knock your opponent over, or move them out of a circle.
No punches or kicks are allowed, this is a training technique to develop skills of timing, judging distance, rooting and energy release.
Personally, I’m not really interested in competitions, so generally tend to focus on non-competitive push hands, although it’s fun to play with people’s balance and learn to control them using the principles behind Tai Chi Chuan.

Applications
Tai Chi was originally developed as a martial art, so as well as using the principles and methods learned to promote health in the student, it can also be used in a very different way in a self defence context. As most people today see Tai Chi as purely a health promoting exercise, they may not be expecting to learn self defence in a class, so many teachers don’t teach them, which I think is a shame as it misses a really interesting aspect of the art.

Meditation
Learning to focus & calm the mind. There are many kinds of meditation, Tai Chi is often considered a moving meditation, but this is tricky until you know the form inside out. Until then, we also use sitting or standing meditations / guided relaxation.
See the Current Classes page for more details of sessions currently running and what they focus on.