why is tai chi so slow?

this week i watched a short clip of a man doing tai chi under a pavilion at night. dark clothes, sinking into stances so low his knees should have filed a complaint. it was the most comfortable thing i watched all week.

nothing in it looked hard. no grunting, no veins, no grimacing. and you could still feel it coming off him. the chinese word for that is 气势 (qi shi): roughly, presence. the qi part is the same qi people argue about.

so how does something this slow look this strong?

short answer: tai chi isn't trying to beat force with more force. it redirects it. the moves are practised slowly so your body learns exactly where it's stiff and where it's wasting effort. done well, it looks like nothing because almost nothing is being wasted.

four ounces, a thousand pounds

there's an old line in the tai chi songs: use four ounces to deflect a thousand pounds (四两拨千斤). it sounds like a fortune cookie. it's closer to physics.

you can't stop a runaway shopping cart with four ounces. you can nudge it sideways with four ounces and let it miss you. the thousand pounds is still a thousand pounds. it's just going somewhere that isn't your face.

the other half of the trick has a lovely name: 引进落空, lead it in and let it land on nothing. someone pushes you hard, and instead of pushing back, you give way a little and guide them. their weight goes where they expected you to be. you weren't there. now they're off balance and you've spent close to zero.

it's the same idea as holding a door open for someone who was planning to shoulder it down.

this is also what the famous legend is about. the daoist zhang sanfeng supposedly watched a bird attack a snake. the bird dived again and again. the snake barely moved, just swayed its head enough to be somewhere else. in one old telling, nothing ever lands, and the bird just wears itself out. that's the whole art in one scene: one side doing everything, the other side doing almost nothing, and the almost-nothing wins.

why slow is the fast way

here's the part that confuses westerners at the park: if tai chi is a martial art, why is everyone moving like they're underwater?

because slow is how you find your mistakes. at full speed, momentum covers for you. you can swing your arm with a stiff shoulder and the swing still happens. slow it down and the stiff shoulder has nowhere to hide. you feel exactly where you're holding on for no reason.

musicians know this. you don't learn a hard passage at concert speed. you learn it slowly until your hands know the route, and then speed shows up on its own. tai chi does that with your whole body. the old manuals say to practise slowly and without breaks, and not to force power. slow is the training. fast is the side effect.

that's also why masters look effortless. effortless isn't lazy. it's efficient. every muscle that doesn't need to be working has been switched off, so the ones that do work get the whole budget.

the bruce lee part

if this all sounds too gentle, consider the most famous fighter of the 20th century. bruce lee's first martial art was wu-style tai chi, which he started practising with his father at about seven (wikipedia). the man who made enter the dragon began with the slowest martial art there is.

you can hear it in what he said later. his own style, jeet kune do, was built around "the style of no style." and in 1971 he said the line he's best known for, twice on camera, once in the tv series longstreet and once in an interview on canada's pierre berton show: "be water, my friend" (beijing news). water doesn't fight the rock. it goes around, it fills whatever shape it's in, and given time it wins anyway.

that is four ounces and a thousand pounds, said by someone with very fast hands.

what i'm finding out

lately i've been practising ba bu jin gang gong (八部金刚功), a daoist eight-section form. i wrote about how i got into it here. right now i'm trying to find the feeling of moving with qi instead of muscle.

here's what i can tell you so far. when it's qi doing the work, you don't get tired. at all. it's the same reason kids can run around a playground for four hours and then ask what's next. they're perpetual motion machines, and they're not doing it with gym muscles.

sports scientists have their own version of this. a 2018 study in frontiers in physiology had boys aged 8 to 12 cycle against untrained adults and national-level endurance athletes. the kids beat the untrained adults on fatigue, and recovered faster than the athletes (frontiers). so either kids run on qi, or kids run on a very good engine. i'm not sure those are different sentences.

the other thing. a tai chi form isn't only muscle memory. a lot of the time the movement is carried by qi. so if you really get to where qi is moving you, the form might come out a little different for each person, because every body is in a different state. sometimes, while i practise, an arm or a leg starts shaking on its own for no reason i can see. that feeling, to me, is qi pushing.

i'm still looking. i'll tell you when i find it.

on my desk there are three stone men who look like they found it already: the slow masters, holding single whip, grasp the sparrow's tail and snake creeps down. they don't move at all. which, if you've read this far, is the advanced version.

go play.