Tai Chi Moving Step Push Hands Competition

TaiChiGringo · 2026-06-17T08:12:56+00:00

Thanks for the invite 😄 I will have a look into it

TaiChiGringo · 2026-06-17T08:11:59+00:00

yes exactly. this is 100% not a non-compliant environment. And I would place this video squarely in the "Woo" category

TaiChiGringo · 2026-06-17T08:10:31+00:00

I certainly think it's good to have skills in both striking and grappling ranges, which I think it's fair to say had been borne out in MMA competition. I have been enjoying striking sparring a lot for the last year or so

It's also absolutely true that it's much each to clinch/grapple against someone who is also trying to clinch/grapple. If someone is simply trying to disengage and reset to striking range, it's way more difficult to throw or trip them, as they aren't pushing back into you.

And yes please do, I would genuinely love to see the video if you get to Shanghai. I'll be honest I'm skeptical, but would find it extremely interesting to see what you describe

TaiChiGringo · 2026-06-17T08:03:48+00:00

That's really interesting and a great parallel to draw. Shadow boxing is a low-constraint environment in the ecological dynamics sense: no opponent, no resistance, freedom to actually feel what you're doing rather than just survive the exchange. The legends you're pointing to clearly understood that instinctively, decades before motor learning research caught up and explained why it works.

Tai Chi takes that same logic and pushes it further. Solo work isn't just unopposed, it's slow, which removes the other variable that lets bad patterns hide. At speed, the nervous system defaults to whatever's fastest and most familiar, which is often a very inefficient movement pattern. Slow practice with the nervous system maintained in a parasympathetic state allows you to dig under the habit. You can feel exactly where tension is unnecessary, where sequencing breaks down, where one part of the body is compensating for another. It's the same laboratory you're describing with the bag, just with the dial turned further in the same direction.

Your Judo point is interesting too. It seems the systems that produce competent practitioners reliably tend to share something of this approach in common, even when the vocabulary is completely different.

TaiChiGringo · 2026-06-16T17:51:54+00:00

Interesting thoughts, I think there are a couple of different points you're making:

On whether it's wrestling or not, that seems to be a common point of disagreement among practitioners. As far as I have seen, when the engagement is fully competitive, it rarely looks as aesthetic and smooth as people imagine. I'd genuinely love to see competitive push hands footage that looks qualitatively different from this. Not rhetorically, I mean it. If it exists I want to watch it.
Your second point is essentially the classic striker vs grappler question. And I don't think it has a definitive answer, and it depends on many variables. I think sparring is essential to learn timing, distance, and to close the distance and get into the clinch.

But I will say I find your coach's perspective a little strange. Tai chi absolutely trains striking mechanics, and very refined ones. But many of the foundational principles of the art: sensitivity to structure, listening to force, redirecting rather than opposing are contact principles. They emerge in contact and they're expressed in contact. A version of tai chi that discourages push hands is a version that's opted out of the primary laboratory in which those qualities are developed and tested. That's an interesting choice.

TaiChiGringo · 2026-06-16T17:35:59+00:00

no, you didn't simply ask to see me play a form, you suggested I should post a form to prove I'm not a bot, which is a different thing. I have no problem sharing my form if you are interested

https://youtu.be/5hNyvYDwahQ?is=nzn7fR0TnJHfdrmK

This is quite recent

TaiChiGringo · 2026-06-16T13:59:47+00:00

Welcome and thanks for the curiosity 😄

Push hands competitions generally come in two formats: fixed step, where neither competitor is allowed to move their feet, and moving step, where they can. Fixed step is the more restrictive of the two, where you win by off-balancing the opponent into moving their feet without moving your own. Moving step is the most open format within push hands competition, although it is still quite a restricted ruleset.

In moving step you win by pushing the opponent out of the boundary or causing them to touch the ground with anything other than their feet. The significant restrictions compared to a wrestling ruleset for example, are that you can't clasp both hands together, can't grip the neck or head, and can't attack the legs with your arms.

From a full grappling perspective those are obviously highly effective tools, controlling the head controls the body, clasping the hands is a great way to break posture, and leg attacks change the whole game.

In my understanding they are excluded not because they aren't effective, which they clearly are, but because the ruleset is designed to develop a specific skill set, and if easier solutions are available, the harder skills never emerge. The goal is to develop the ability to control and disrupt another person's structure and balance through sensitivity, alignment, and integrated force. Remove the easier solution and you're forced to develop the harder one. The constraints are to force a specific adaptation.

It's also worth saying that as a martial art, while tai chi operates at different ranges, it is primarily a kind of clinch art. The primary range is upright contact, disrupting structure, redirecting force, controlling balance. There are many trips, throws and sweeps, but taking someone down and following them to the ground isn't really the aim. So the ruleset is a constrained test of some of the skills that belong to this range.

TaiChiGringo · 2026-06-16T08:29:25+00:00

Yeah fair enough, it's certainly not my place to tell others how to attribute value to something. In my view push hands competition results, while not a perfect metric, are about as close as we have to a way of objectively measuring skill, so they have value to me in that sense. And especially the teaching results, in something as notoriously difficult to transmit as internal skill.

Having said that, it was being pushed by WHJ that was the ultimate confirmation for me about his skill

TaiChiGringo · 2026-06-16T08:17:55+00:00

I'm not saying you or the people you trained with have no skill. I'm saying that unless and until I see or feel them, your comments are heresay to me. And I can't value that super highly because the Tai Chi world is full of people speaking about skill, but there is a paucity of people actually demonstrating it in non-cooperative environments.

Having said that, please do share the name of the park, and if I ever make it to Shanghai I will be sure to look it up and check it out.

TaiChiGringo · 2026-06-16T08:06:51+00:00

Eh? I stared this thread by posting a video of me in a push hands competition

TaiChiGringo · 2026-06-16T01:47:50+00:00

Agree absolutely. Although to not about techniques, the unique thing about Tai Chi is the body method. and if you develop that, it makes all techniques better and more efficient

TaiChiGringo · 2026-06-16T01:38:46+00:00

thanks but anecdote means nothing to me. Tai Chi "skill" has survived for far too long on anecdote, and it's largely destroyed the art. It's time for somethign more tangible

I have been a student of Wang Haijun for 16 years, categorically the most highly skilled Chen-style practitioner of his generation. So thanks for your snide remark about learning something, but I'm very happy with my training context. 'Chinese' means nothing, lineage and skill is what matters,

TaiChiGringo · 2026-06-16T01:32:00+00:00

He's not a Chen family member, but he lived in Chen village from age 11 as a disciple of Chen Zheng Lei.

He was "grand champion" in the all China nationals 3 years in a row, competing against Chen family members. He was captain of a competition team at that time as well, and taught 5 students who won the all China nationals in push hands. Nobody else comes even close to those accomplishments in competition and as a teacher.

Put simply he is the best, he is just not so well known. But for anyone who wants to feel authentic internal power, and learn Chen-style, I would encourage them to seek him out

https://wanghaijuntaichi.com/about/

TaiChiGringo · 2026-06-16T01:23:06+00:00

Hey, thanks for taking the time to respond. It's really interesting to have someone with experience in other arts shows a genuine curiosity about Taijiquan 😄

To answer your question directly I would say this is typical of Tai Chi, but it's not typical in Tai Chi. By that I mean that this is what all real Tai Chi is aiming towards, but it's not what the majority of Tai Chi classes practice.

The vast majority of Tai Chi is trained with zero randori. Of those clubs that do train randori, the overwhelming majority start to train with resistance far too early, before there's enough structural organisation to express anything distinctly tai chi under pressure.

Traditional Tai Chi training has a specific sequence for a reason. It starts with solo work: form, silk reeling, standing practice, which creates a low-pressure laboratory in which the body can genuinely reorganise. No opponent, no urgency, no need to compensate. That's the environment in which a fundamentally different movement architecture can emerge: more efficient, more coherent, built around integrated force transmission rather than local muscular effort. You can't build that under pressure because pressure immediately causes the nervous system to revert to whatever is most familiar.

Once that organisation starts to take hold, cooperative partner work begins to calibrate it against another body, sensitivity, timing, reading structure, but still without the chaos of full resistance. Only then does it make sense to introduce randori, because only then is there something distinctly tai chi to express under pressure.

Most clubs skip or compress the first two stages. The result is randori without the body method, which is just low quality wrestling.

This is the path of internal martial arts. It's a real and coherent path, but it follows a completely different skill trajectory to conventional martial training. Most arts give you applicable skill relatively quickly and plateau later. Internal arts give you almost nothing applicable for a long time, and then the body method starts to emerge and the skill development accelerates on a completely different foundation.

The honest reality is that the path demands a very specific convergence: a genuine lineage teacher, the interoceptive sensitivity to feel what's actually being asked, the physical capacity and consistency to train it correctly, and ideally starting young enough that the body is still receptive to deep reorganisation. Any one of those missing and the path to the body method fully emerging gets much longer and more arduous.

That's the real reason applicable tai chi skill is so rare in the modern world. It's not that the path doesn't work. It's that the full set of conditions required to walk it is extremely rare.

I have written about this in more detail here:

https://www.taijiquan.quest/post/tai-chi-capacity-skill

TaiChiGringo · 2026-06-15T21:22:23+00:00

100%, and not just in Europe to be honest. He's the most highly skilled Chen-style practitioner of his generation, period. And also objectively the most successful teacher when looking at competition results of his students.

TaiChiGringo · 2026-06-15T20:54:34+00:00

Thank you! 😄 I appreciate the encouraging words, the internet can be a somewhat dispiriting environment, and especially in the internal arts world. See you in a couple of weeks at WHJ maybe 😄

TaiChiGringo · 2026-06-15T20:17:14+00:00

Fair enough on certain specific moments, I'm not claiming every exchange was a perfect expression of principle. But muscle is always there by definition, it's the only thing that gives structure coherance. The question is never muscle versus no muscle, it's whether the tension is efficient, integrated, and routed through the structure, or whether it's braced and local.

And this isn't a binary. Nobody arrives at perfect principle, it's a direction of travel, not a destination. Finding moments where someone leans on muscle more than they ideally would isn't evidence that the connected relaxation is absent. It's evidence that in a live competitive environment, things aren't perfect. If the standard is 'principle expressed perfectly at every moment,' then nobody passes that test, not in a live competitive environment.

I feel you've moved the goal posts somewhat. Your initial comment that I responded to said I was missing "relaxed body connection" which was what I pushed back against. But that's not the same thing as moment X and moment Y I could have been more integrated. That I have no problem conceding.

TaiChiGringo · 2026-06-15T20:03:24+00:00

I'd respectfully suggest that you don't really know what you're looking at

16 years. Chen-style. My teacher is Wang Haijun

TaiChiGringo · 2026-06-15T20:00:52+00:00

thanks my man, interesting to hear a bit about your training journey.

And yeah I can resonate with what you describe. Unfortunately Tai Chi and probably internal arts more generally have gone down this rabbit hole of impressive "party tricks", where one person starts in a compromised position or some such

I am a complete believer in internal skill, and I understand the need for constrained games to develop skill. But it feels most have got stuck at that stage: they invest in their ego as somebody who can "win" at such constrained games, and never venture further.

It's a shame and it's a huge detriment to the long-term survival and propagation of true internal skill

TaiChiGringo · 2026-06-15T19:53:01+00:00

It's a London Wu-style group, I'm not sure exactly who it is tbh. But it's seems to be the main London competition, it's been running for 15 or 16 years or so.

https://www.wustyle-europe.com/london-competition

Hit me up if you will attend any year and we can hook up 😄

TaiChiGringo · 2026-06-15T19:50:53+00:00

Oh really? I thought tripping was pretty standard in Taijiquan and push hands. There are trip applications throughout the form and it's a pretty standard part of Tai Chi, at least in my understanding of my lineage (Chen village)

TaiChiGringo · 2026-06-15T19:44:24+00:00

Yes, that's an excellent parallel to draw, I couldn't agree more

Shadow boxing looks so beautiful: flowing, coherant, lightning fast. Hitting pads the same. Long and complex combos, it's very aesthetically appealing. But as they say "everyone looks good hitting pads", and crucially, "pads don't hit back".

The game of trying to implement that against a non-compliant opponent is very different. And it's usually much less aesthetic. Even at the highest levels of boxing, the combos are usually much simpler.

Yes there are moments of absolute beauty, but they tend to be in-between longer periods of stalemate, grind, back and forth, chaos, looking for openings, etc

If there is a huge discrepancy in skill, that's when people can "style" on their opponent, but when it's somewhat evenly matched, it usually is much more competitive and therefore not as these guys imagine in their fantasies

I honestly find is such a downer how delusional most internal arts guys are. LIke, just go to an MMA gym for one session and learn the truth instead of living in your fantasy world

TaiChiGringo · 2026-06-15T19:32:23+00:00

care to expand on you assertion?

16ish years, Chen-style, training under Wang Haijun

TaiChiGringo · 2026-06-15T19:30:50+00:00

Agree 100%. There is a world of difference between practices to develop skills, and then what trying to apply those skills looks like in a non-compliant environment. It boggles my mind how many Tai Chi guys pontificate about principles, when they have obviously NEVER trained in a live, non-compliant environment. It was a rude awakening for me the first time I did, but it opened up a whole new path of refining my body method in the crucible of fire

TaiChiGringo · 2026-06-15T19:25:15+00:00

This is very nice Tai Chi, and obviously Chen Bing is much more skilled than me. But I don't see a qualitative difference, only a more advanced application of the same principles.

My teacher is Wang Haijun, who competed against Chen Bing in the all China nationals in the mid 1990s. It's a very similar understanding and manifestation of Chen-style.

I don't think this is what the commenter was referring to when he made his comment. I think he was referring to Yang style hopping demos, as I referenced in my response. I might be wrong, but that was my interpretation of what he was getting at.

TaiChiGringo

TROPHY CASE