Tai Chi for health & wellbeing
Lately it has been too wet to practice my Tai Chi weapons’ forms so I’ve had to practice in my living room.
I use my wooden sabre and sword for safety reasons but my eight foot spear can be a problem. Especially near a television set or over hanging lights not to mention the walls. So far I haven’t destroyed anything yet.
I’ve been practicing my double fan form and the other day I was at a picnic in a park and forgot to bring my fans along.
So I searched around for a couple of sticks about the same size of the fans in length, and practised the form.
I try and practice on a regular basis and if do not have my Tai Chi weapons I improvise and practice a weapon form without the weapon.
It certainly makes you concentrate on other parts of the body when you do this. Sometimes when you practice a weapons’ form you can focus too much on the weapon itself and not enough on your body balance or movement.
Eventually you just ‘do’ and not focus on your weapon. But every now and then it’s good to focus on other aspects of your weapon form.
So when you ‘do’ it all comes together.
Besides using sticks you can also imagine you are holding a weapon and practice a weapon form either mentally or physically.
So the next time you forget or can’t use a weapon in a particular space – why not practice your weapons training without weapons.
I was asked recently what is the ‘form’ in Tai Chi so I thought now would be a good time to do a post on it.
The word ‘form’ in Tai Chi can have different meanings so let’s clarify that now.
There’s the Tai Chi form and there are weapons forms such as sabre form, sword form, spear form and staff form.
I’ll focus on the generally accepted view of the ‘form’ as in the Tai Chi form.
The Tai Chi form is a series of mostly slow movements that are performed in sequence. See the clip below.
There are different syles or forms – the major ones are:
There are two categories of forms:
1. The traditional form (long form)
2. Short Forms