Tai Chi is widely practiced for its ability to cultivate balance, coordination and calm through focused, mindful movement. Over time, its slow precise nature reveals benefits that extend beyond only your physical health. Tai Chi has been shown to offer significant mental health benefits as well. This includes reducing stress, anxiety as well as depression. Though there is a difference between learning and understanding the forms in Tai Chi and simply learning how to perform the movements involved.
Less is More
Although many eager students may assume accumulation of new forms is the way to progress in Tai Chi, yet it only creates an illusion of advancement while diluting attention across too many movement patterns. Instead, students should refine their sensitivity, build structure, and intent. Practitioners who lack this tend to revert to beginners with each additional sequence as the mind and body resets into imitating the teacher. This can interrupt the slow consolidation that internal change requires. Remember, Tai Chi is not linear where you learn a new form until there are no more to learn, it’s meant to fundamentally change your habits in order to better your lifestyle.
Depth versus Breadth
In Tai Chi, depth refers to mastering core principles, and body mechanics. Whereas breadth means to learn many forms or techniques. Much like the movements in Tai Chi, there is no rush, practicing a single form over years can reorganize posture, and intent in a way that a number of lightly trained forms never will. Breadth rewards memory, while depth reshapes the body and mind.
Confusion through Overexposure
When multiple forms are being learned all together, they can become muddied. This blurs the mechanics together, and for an unintegrated body it can result in misalignments, improper weight shifts and other potential contradictions. Over time the forms and movements may appear correct, but feel incorrect or vague.
Building Skill or Distracting from Progress
Learning new material can be useful when it exposes a weakness in the student, or challenges habits that have already stabilized. For example, a student has spent time mastering a slow form, and has a stable sense of rooting and weight transfer. When introduced to a shorter, quicker form, they may lose that sense of connection in transitions and begin to overuse their hips. The new material now reveals that their structure only worked under ideal conditions. This can cause the student frustration, and in order to avoid this they move to another more comfortable form which offers stimulation without demanding change.
Disciplined Skill Progression
This critique doesn’t necessarily target fundamentals or mastery in general, instead it looks at the specific habit of accumulation forms, and instant gratification. The downsides of only learning many different forms is rarely stated. While a student may be able to learn forms quickly and perform them successfully, when under pressure or stress they may struggle with balance or have inconsistencies in their structure ultimately deviating from the original form.
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