The fundamental reality of the beginner’s nervous system. When you first step onto the path of Classical Tai Chi, you are trying to speak a brand-new physical language, but your brain is broadcasting pure static.
We have brains that are geared neurologically to be efficient and not to isolate movement. Today when you grasped the door knob or turned to answer that person in back of you that particular part of your brain signaled those muscles necessary for the movement.
- The Shoulder Tension: When you try to turn your waist, your brain doesn't know how to activate the deep core muscles independently. It sends a massive "turn" signal that bleeds upward, causing your shoulders to clench and tense in sympathy.
- The Hip Wobble: Because the brain cannot yet anchor the lower torso while moving the upper torso, the turning signal also leaks downward. Your pelvis slips out of place, your root vanishes, and your hips wobble out of alignment.
Your nervous system is doing what you were born with and “naturally” trying to use a giant blanket to cover a tiny spot.
The core mechanical rule—inherited from Grandmaster Wu Chien Chuan—is that every single movement must have a Yin part (perfectly stationary) and a Yang part (moving). Power originates at the "junction" where these two opposites meet in the torso.
At the beginning of learning Classical Tai Chi, your brain has no idea how to separate Yin and Yang within your own body. If you try to turn your waist, your shoulders tense up, or your hips wobble, your neural signals are chaotic.
At the beginning of learning Classical Tai Chi, when you try to turn your upper body, your brain has no idea how to separate Yin and Yang within your own body. If you try to turn your upper body using only your core at the waist, your pelvis tenses up, or your hips wobble, or your body turns just at the shoulders, or the whole body rotates on the feet like a dance movement. Your neural signals are chaotic.
Wu's Tai Chi student wrote: "As a practitioner of Wu Style TCC (disciple of the Wu Family), we are taught that all of the movements are generated by the ' hips' first, not the 'waist." Explain why Master Hwa thinks that the hips should remain less mobile than the waist.
My response to YouTube:
Dear Wu Style practitioner, Turning from the hips is External Coordination: This is like trying to move the ship by having the crew stand on the deck and manually push and pull the sails, or using giant oars from the sides.
Classical Tai Chi (Internal Discipline): This is like controlling the ship entirely from the deep internal rigging, the rudder, and the central mast.
I understand quite a bit about "turning from the hips" because I was one of the first group of disciples that Master Eddie Wu chose and his first disciple in the U.S. :
“ALL of the movements are generated by the hips first, not the waist," "turn your hips," "push him harder so that he can turn his hips,"? This refrain and misunderstanding of the hips' role are indeed prominent in studying the large-frame Wu Style. The hips are a large and complex joint of the body and, like any joint, are necessary for movement. They are necessary for movement but not sufficient to power or "generate" movement. In other words, they do not move in and of themselves but move as a result of action initiated by other parts of the body.
Stating that they are "the fulcrum of the body and connect the upper with the lower" still is not a sufficient explanation of what powers or "generates" their movement. A crowbar is also a fulcrum, but without a source of power "generation," it is just a metal bar. What exactly is the mechanism that they use to move in and of themselves? There is no such self-perpetuating mechanism in the hips wherein one can "generate movement."
The hips "permit," "allow," "tolerate," "provide for" movement. Still, they do not "generate movement; generation of movement for our hips comes either from our legs or from our waist, and not from the hips themselves. See the attached video for examples of what happens when practitioners turn hips and waist simultaneously. In large frame Tai Chi, the movement of the legs to turn the hip is "folding the hip or Kua." A leg pushing the body either forward or backward makes one hip rotate into itself, and the other rotate out of itself, hence the inguinal "fold' so coveted by large-frame practitioners. As far as "Power" is concerned, one will reduce or drain off power when turning the "hip first" (which, as we said, is impossible because it does not generate its movement). Keep the hip still and then turn the hip "first," and you can readily see the difference in the "generation" of power. The hips can rotate forcefully in a large frame once the legs push the body and reach the apex of a weight shift. As we have stated previously, however, power drains after rotation. The compact frame does this by pulling.
In contrast to pushing, pulling moves are internal and stay energized. Energy is not lost; it recirculates and does not depend on the legs for power. Talking about "fulcrums" is of prime importance as to how one locates or places a working fulcrum. In the video, you can see that turning the hips lowers the yin/yang junction (fulcrum) to the knee area. In the background, one can readily see several practitioners of "external" style Tai Chi turning their bodies at the hips, lowering the junction to the area of the knees in the mistaken impression that "generating movement by the hips first and not the waist" can be used to "turn the body."
Master Stephen Hwa, Ph.D., says: "The most important instruction on Internal Discipline passed down from Wu Chien Chuan to my teacher Young Wabu is that": "Every movement in Tai Chi Form has to have two complementary parts of the body, a moving part (called Yang) and a stationary part (called Yin). When the yin-yang junction is in the torso, it is an internal move. When it is outside the core, it is an external move.
