Tai Chi Chuan

I have previously described Yang Style Tai Chi Chuan as an excellent sub-ascetic practice. That is to say Tai Chi gives alot of bang for ones buck.

However, the benefits accumulate in the oposite way from the more common Greek exercise systems such as calesthenics and weight training.

In the Greek exercise paradigm, a given execise routine will take you to a certain level of impovement at a fast rate, but once that improvement has been achieved the improvement rate goes flat and the routine merely maintains that new level. To go to a higher level of improvement, one must increase the difficulty or duration of the routine.

Tai Chi, because of the different approach to developement used, initially provides improvement at a much flatter rate. It takes several months to learn a practice routine that will ultimately only take up a 15-20 minutes per set, with a total exercise period of about 1/2 hour a day.

Once you have learned the proctice routine and can perform it without interuption, you will have achieved the full benefit of the Greek paradigm for that series of movements. That is to say, you will have gotten the full contractive muscular benefit from it and continued inattentive practice will maintain the level of developement that you acquired from just learning the moves.

Tai Chi is not, however, a greek exercise.

Once you have learned the practice routine, you will begin bringing more and more concentration into the different structural aspects of the exercise and in doing so you will find that you have a very different and much more intimate relationship between your mind and body than you ever imagined possible. In essence, intead of adding weight or duration to improve developement as in the Greek paradigm, you will be adding concentration.

And as you ingrain the interaction of concentration and body movement over a few years you will find that while still doing essentially the same physical exercise that you were doing from the time that you successfully learned the practice routine, you will find that you are accumulating a wide variety of unforeseen benefits at a steeper and steeper rate.