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One of Sifu’s signatures is “no force” (not “Empty Force”, i.e. bouncing people without touching them) but yielding without force, and even when expressing force (Fajin 發勁) the force seems to come in as a wave, not as a focused point.

This yielding with no force is contrary to what I learned before. When first doing that, a common mistake – which I myself made plenty of, is trying too hard to be soft and yielding. It’s not based on true Song (non-collapsed relaxing 鬆). The first step is to train the sensitivity of you skin and learn to Song. Once I started to get past that hurdle, then the problem became that my yielding just wasn’t that great, and people who used force would easily trapped me.

There is no magic. Sifu said “everything is in the form” – mobilize with Qi, learn to move the joints, and harmonize external and internal. On one side, your arm has a wrist joint, elbow and shoulder joints. Beyond the arm, you have hip, knee, foot joints. If they trap you on one side, you have the other side. The Classics says “Stick, adhere, link, and follow”. Yielding then is just the understanding “in your body” of these core concepts and principles, plus the principle of Zhong Ding 中定.

We can say that this is the Yin side of Tai Chi.

While some people practice Tai Chi for health, other people practice for the martial arts aspects, sometimes preferring to call what they do Tai Chi Chuan (Chuan being the pinyin for the word “fist” 拳). Some in the latter camp even go as far as saying that when Elder Yang Chengfu created the Yang large frame that, he “watered down” the martial aspects and the popular YCF forms are only good for health and useless for fighting.

The truth is that Yang Tai Chi has always been about both. Of course, the fighting forms such as the Fast Form train the fighting art more, but the difference between Tai Chi for health vs. for fighting really has more to do with the use of Yi 意. Sifu Sam Tam could bounce you with Tai Chi – long force that feel like being hit by a wall but no shock to the body, or with Xing Yi, where it feels like being hit by a pole, to Yiquan, where it feels like being hit by a jackhammer, and the difference is the Yi – the mind intent. The move and internal is exactly the same. Elder Wong Yongquan said the same thing.

To fight, as my good friend Michael Phillips used to say, “you need bullets in your barrel”, and Tai Chi and other internal martial arts do give you different types of “bullets” different from other martial arts.

In 2020s, unless you engage in sports or street fighting, being able to fight is not of primary concern for most people. The form that Sifu taught me is slow and gentle, like other Yang Tai Chi forms. It is also true that the moves can turn into applications, hidden in plain sight. But in the end, practicing Tai Chi improves balance, lower blood pressure, and provides much health benefits and that’s more important to all of us as we age.

Of course not all forms are the same, but finding the right teacher is more important. Look for the quality you want to study or improve on, and find the right teacher that will give you that.

I have been practicing Tai Chi since the early 90s. As a native Cantonese speaker, I have dabbled in translating some of the Tai Chi Classics and also portion of the book by master Wong Yongquan.

My Sifu, master Sam Tam, excels in multiple martial arts, but is most famous for his Yiquan and Yang Tai Chi. In my opinion, every martial art teaches you how to generate power, but the specialty of Yang Tai Chi is 走化, loosely translated as Yielding. Of course other Tai Chi and martial arts have “yielding”, but I am specifically talking about 走化.

More on that later.