Tai Chi for Self Defense?
Let me state that Tai Chi is more than a slow and graceful dance used to promote good health. It is a real method of self-defense.
Granted it takes a while for the average person to really learn how to defend themselves with Tai Chi but then that is why we call it a practice and why all martial arts promote self-discipline.
Although, it is relatively easy to take individual Tai Chi moves and use them in a way that lends itself to self-defense it does require a knowledgeable instructor and not a video.
From a self-defense perspective keep in mind that Tai Chi is designed to teach you how to move efficiently and softly in a way so that force cannot find a place in you to hurt; because of this we call it a martial art of true self-defense. Proper Tai Chi practice teaches how to deflect force by the way you move and how sensitive you become to contact and your surroundings. You literally learn to relax enough so that force passes through you and exits as opposed to finding a place inside of you to take hold.
In Tai Chi we learn to fight better with breath. Holding your breath can also cause you to freeze when you really need to move and can also cause undue tension that will cause and help external force and trauma to harm you. Tai Chi helps you learn to breathe and breathe properly. There is an old Buddhist saying that states if you can control your breath, you can control your life. This is Tai Chi.
Tai Chi emphasizes continuous internal and external movement and relaxing and breathing even while under stress. Of course push hands practice really helps with this and the push hands can be practiced at your level of ability with no impact and without undue force as you learn to dispel greater and greater force. Using the analogy (and reality) that the drunk is the one who survives the car wreck, Tai Chi is like drunken style for old people.
When you properly learn Tai Chi you are taught how to find the weakest point on and within an opponent, and you are taught how to touch with your entire body weight. So, imagine if you can sense on your attacker a misaligned vertebrae on the spine that is not meant to take more than 25 pounds of force on a good day, and you touch them sending all of your 150 pounds of body weight into it while you flow in a way that makes it so that they cannot impact you in any harmful way. This is the skill that serious Tai Chi practitioners seek to cultivate. We often refer to this as “4 ounces to move 1000 pounds”.
The really neat thing is that Tai Chi can be learned reasonably quickly within a few short years and does not require the 20 – 30 years that most people think it takes. In the meanwhile you are learning an effective art that will help stave off the real lethal killers we all face in the way of deadly stress and disease.