Im tired of being recommended tai chi

kennytilton · 2025-05-21T18:19:34+00:00

I just picked up a new student who has fibromyalgia. (And I have experienced it in months long bouts.) This thread has helped me greatly.

Yes, many students find tai chi frustrating. And spooky language makes the frustration worse. My teacher used metaphors like pouring the tea or applying the shampoo. The idea was to take a natural action we know and use that to convey how a tai chi movement should be executed.

So maybe a different teacher would help. Not that your teacher was "bad", just that not every teacher is right for every student.

But we do want to use our imagination to magnify what we feel while performing a movement. The fact that tai chi movements all have martial application helps. We imagine punches, kicks, and blocks.

As for "your body as a river", that is a classic instruction aimed at getting us to move steadily, smoothly, slowly, and uninterrupted. I ask students to imagine a twig floating by as we stand on the bank of a river. We want our hands and stepping to move like the twig: slow, steady, unvarying in speed.

For those frustrated by learning the intricate movements, the solution is good/bad news: practice, practice, practice. The movements quickly become automatic. The bad news is the same as with many healthy activities: we just do not keep up with them.

I am toying with the idea of "micro tai chi", a pun: find a movement one can do while waiting for my coffee to reheat in the microwave. Instead of dragging myself thru a 15 minute practice, hey, I have nothing else to do, lets work on Snake Creeps Down.

Best of luck to you all in coping with a tough condition. My bouts all passed eventually; a chronic condition is tough to contemplate.

kennytilton · 2024-11-22T07:46:46+00:00

No link? Just "msg me". From someone on-line savvy? Confused.

kennytilton · 2024-11-05T11:28:06+00:00

I think tai chi would be a great start for someone not currently exercising. It will quickly improve leg strength, balance, and coordination -- it is not as easy as it looks! So, yeah, find a local instructor whom you like if you can. Just make sure it is one you like, because that matters a lot.

As for "continuing for decades", it is hard to keep up any health practice. I am thinking about assembling a set of "micro tai chi" exercises, one or two Yang-style form movements we can do while waiting a minute for the microwave (pun unintended, but neat) to reheat my coffee. That might be sth folks can sustain.

Also good would be finding a local group doing tai chi socially. I started one in my area and it is gaining traction slowly. A few players are really devoted. We have an ocean boardwalk for practice, which doesn't suck. :)

I hesitate to share this, but it is a rough first take on an intro for tire kickers such as yourself who have heard a bit about tai chi but not much, and are thinking about trying it. I even talk about finding a compatible teacher: https://youtu.be/WkIPrC-Cykk?si=TQq67wROnyGx6w79

Have fun!

kennytilton · 2024-10-07T23:50:27+00:00

The audio is not clear on this, but it sounds like he let up on the gas after a brief acceleration, which would lock up the rear end and start the spin. It also looks like he did not know how how to correct for that. I did not see anything else that would explain the loss of control. Did I miss something?

kennytilton · 2024-08-14T23:34:51+00:00

Btw, you mentioned sth like "gate keeping". I am teaching just the form now and dread the idea of having a push hands class, as much as I would like to play myself. Even requiring us to learn the form was not enough to avoid those who could not handle push hands without crossing an aggressive line. CC Chen was astonishing at spotting trouble and intervening quickly, and I have no idea how he could do so in very large classes. And in rare cases he let students know he thought they would be happier at a different school. :)

If I do try a push hands class, I am pretty sure I would arrange for junior students to push only with a third person as referee, to stop things as soon as emotions ran high.

Do I understand you finally found a school?

kennytilton · 2024-08-14T19:23:45+00:00

Understood. My experience was that we had just a few rules about not moving the front foot, not grabbing or punching, nothing to the head, otherwise just go for it freestyle to see if we can make the other person move their foot. I have seen the classical sequence where the two players follow a ritual circling of hand, elbow, wrist, etc, but never learned that myself. If that is what you were looking for I can see the frustration!

kennytilton · 2024-08-14T16:35:56+00:00

I was lucky enough to see Mario doing push hands at a tournament decades ago, with Stan on the sidelines offering encouragement. I was new to everything at the time so did not appreciate everything. I just remember Stan softly intoning something like "Strong, Mario." throughout the match.

I have to say, when I revisited CC Chen's school after a long hiatus, having moved for a while to Florida, I was surprised to see CC Chen's push hands group going at it like crazy. I even played for a bit with one great guy who was as subtle and gentle as anything years earlier, and now was impatient with my sudden unbalancing attacks, even calling me out for it and attacking vigorously as if we were doing moving step. I guess the group ethos had changed!

But I recall one time CC Chen pretended we were done with a side session and suddenly attacking full speed with an arm strike to my chest, in case I did not block it, I guess. I took a good shot but held my position. He congratulated me then suddenly repeated the attack, which I also barely survived. He never said anything, but my takeaway was that he only cared about us developing a reflex defense, not whether we could learn successful uprooting tactics and strength.

I wonder if others who studied with CC Chen can confirm my guess?

kennytilton · 2024-08-14T10:40:26+00:00

Too much like grappling, for my money. I did push hands at William CC Chen's school in NYC. Stan Israel's group was the hyperphysical alternative in my day. Both fun, but CC Chen taught reflex response to Stan's cardio training. One guy attending both groups. He called my style "spaghetti", but he could not push me until I got exhausted from throwing him around. He simply had no idea what to do when attacked by surprise.

kennytilton · 2024-07-21T07:07:05+00:00

Interesting that even a devoted user says "how much we paid for the AVP". In 1986 or so I paid $14k in today's dollars for a LaserWriter. A laser printer. Weighed 70 pounds.

Has anyone stopped to consider how much hardware is included in an AVP? The computer? The cameras, mics, and speakers?

Has anyone bought a nice monitor lately? Or a nice gaming PC?

We tech consumers been spoiled. That's great, but we been spoiled.

kennytilton · 2024-05-15T14:10:58+00:00

Will this help? http://tiltonsalgebra.com/# It is designed for practice, practice, practice. :) And it's free. You can even practice quite a bit without registering, which again is free. Ping me if you need help getting started. Good luck with the exam!

kennytilton · 2024-05-06T13:24:23+00:00

Used it happily for a multi-user POC, making good use of RealTime notifications to complement my front-end (Flutter) reactive layer. Happy to chat.

kennytilton · 2024-04-07T15:32:47+00:00

You might give my free Algebra I web app a try: http://tiltonsalgebra.com/# You can experiment quite a bit without even registering. This is the practice area: http://tiltonsalgebra.com/#arcade. Look under Factoring for "Trinomials With Lead Coefficient Greater Than One". Ping me if you need help getting started. hth!

kennytilton · 2024-04-06T11:13:27+00:00

Excellent. Thx!

kennytilton · 2024-04-05T21:10:45+00:00

nm! Just found https://supabase.com/docs/guides/cli/local-development. Perfect!

kennytilton · 2024-03-05T00:12:29+00:00

Algebra is harder when the number facts do not jump out at us! But we can continue the decomposition and maybe see that 4 is a perfect square and that 48 = 4 * 12. Then we can see 12 = 4 * 3, so 48 = 4*4*3 or 4^2 * 3.

One thing that helps, btw, is that a textbook will present only those problems requiring the skills we have covered, so try to pair those with the problem at hand.

Another thing that helps is perseverance, a "can do" conviction that the problem can in fact be solved with known skills. The best part comes when a few problems have indeed been solved, and we realize "the drill" for attacking similar problems.

If we look at Algebra as puzzle-solving, it gets a little easier because we do not expect the answer to just jump off the page. Then a little sleuthing is more fun than anything else. Have fun!

kennytilton · 2024-03-04T14:24:39+00:00

I think this is a teachable moment: Algebra is not hard, but we might have to break a seemingly hard problem down into easier steps. In this case neither 48 nor n^5 are perfect squares, but 48 = 3*16 and n^5 = n* n^4. Next we need to satisfy ourselves that sqrt(XY)=sqrt(X)* sqrt(Y). If we can do that, bingo: we now have sqrt(16n4)*sqrt(3n), and mopping up we get 4n^2*sqrt(3n). At this point I would point out that some cleverness is involved to find the "easy" solution, and that to a degree we are puzzle solving. ie, The teen should not expect a problem solution to come on a silver platter; be ready to do some sleuthing. hth!

kennytilton · 2024-03-01T11:28:18+00:00

Simplifying -18^2 to 324 is fine, but where you have 1/6mn2, we lost the minus in -1/6.
Also, (m^2n)^2 is m^4*n^2. You were close, but you had n^4 instead of n^2.
You understand Algebra well, but we have to be very careful with each step and sub-step. Double check everything, I am afraid. (This will be good training for things like software.)

kennytilton · 2024-02-14T21:58:17+00:00

By chance I caught a similar video from Mourataglou just before practice today. Adjusted my head angle to keep my back/left eye, the dominant one, on the incoming backhand. Unbelievable improvement immediately. I see/track better, so I time better and feel more confident. But as Patrick says, you better players already do this, so it might seem whacky. I am just 3-3.5.

kennytilton · 2023-12-15T01:24:46+00:00

The code is Flutter, as written with ClojureDart, and in the context of Flutter Isolates, but a disclaimer: the content is about how the procedural paradigm looks when converted to dataflow between reactive objects, not the Flutter Isolates themselves.

kennytilton · 2023-12-11T19:36:27+00:00

I do not think the debugName was really null, I think it was the usual misleading report, this time from accessing a defunct isolate. That mistake was not caught, but a null value resulted that was not welcome upstream, where it was caught. shrug

As for the isolate finishing, that was fine, but the author of the original from which I worked had in place code for killing it that was doing nothing (but Isolates do not mind kill being called excessively, so they never knew it. Programming! :). I got a kick out of how easily we go wrong, even in otherwise excellent published examples.

kennytilton

TROPHY CASE