There is No Such Thing as Easy Tai Chi

They sell you memberships to their “Black Belt Club” and guarantee that you’ll receive a black belt. For the next promotion you might need to know a few extra techniques and maybe a form. The quality is negotiable. I’ve studied in these schools at times during my 36 years in martial arts.

Some of these schools are raking in a lot of money.

When I began studying Chen tai chi, I had already studied Yang style for over a decade. I was pretty good. At least, I thought I was. I won a gold medal in the 1990 AAU National Kung-Fu Championships in Tai Chi Forms competition.

Then, in 1998, I met Jim and Angela Criscimagna (now disciples of Chen Xiaowang) and I began seeing how difficult it is to achieve good tai chi body mechanics. Month after month I studied, drove a 4-hour round trip to go to classes — sometimes twice a week — and learned weekly lessons in humility. Week after week, month after month, my bad habits were corrected. Each time, the long drive home was spent realizing just how much I had to learn, and yet I was psyched by the knowledge that I was learning high quality tai chi.

It’s too much for some people. I’ve had students come to me after studying other styles of martial arts. Most of them don’t last long. They see how difficult it is, and they can’t adjust to the fact that THIS TAKES YEARS, not months or weeks.

Quality tai chi is a long-term commitment. When your experience in martial arts is in a strip-mall karate or taekwondo school and a punch is simply a matter of maintaining muscle tension and balance — and twisting the hips into the punch — it’s a rude awakening when you’re faced with the internal arts. Establishing ground path, maintaining peng, rotating the dan t’ien (NOT the hips) and other

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