I found this gem of a clip whilst randomly surfing YouTube links. Taijiquan in action:
The guy in the clip is Professor Huang Zhen Huan, and a quick Google search turns up this page about him; it seems he was a student of Wu Tu Nan for twenty years.
My taiji level is very low, I’ll be the first to admit, so I would welcome feedback from more experienced practitioners on what’s happening in this video. The throwing of opponents is pretty straightforward; I’ve been thrown in this manner often enough by my teachers. What’s less clear is what’s going on later in the video, where the opponents look almost as if they’re being electrified! My guess would be using sensitivity to control the opponent through manipulation and direction of body weight, combined with some qin na/dian xue to cause pain (hence the stamping)….
Living in Taiwan some 15 years, on and off, training mostly in IMA, but also some other stuff for more then 20 years, having met a lot of teachers and some real masters, for me, there is only one conclusion: ridiculous.
Getting pushed from a good teacher looked always quite differntly to me, I never had time to lift my legs or get electrified.
But, then again, my level might be too low, as yours, to fully understand….
I agree with Bai. It’s just… too strange to simply “touch and ZAP” others like, in a second, or a half-second. I’ve always watched Taiji clips on youtube and on a lot of other sources, like even the Jet Li’s movie, Tai-Chi (Twin Warriors).
I don’t think there’s even time do use qin na or dian xue, unless he has some untapped power that unleashes with a movement with his arm… but, I’m no expert on Taiji, so maybe I’m just talkin gibberish.
I’m going to keep an open mind here.
The first few throws are totally for real. I’ve been lifted off my feet and sent stumbling backwards like that by teachers who are much older and smaller than me. I’ve also done it a couple of times to other people. If the person being thrown isn’t rooted, and is stiff in their posture, then it’s really not all that hard to do – IF the thrower is relaxed and rooted.
As someone else said to me in email, after that, the students are plainly nervous; you can see it in the way they approach. That means that their body weight is already positioned to move away from the instructor, plus they’re tense. He hardly needs to do anything to throw them, they’ve already done the hard work for him.
See this earlier post with a clip of bagua fa jin:
http://jianghu.wordpress.com/2007/04/14/bagua-fajing/
It’s all about the direction of body weight. Personally, I’m easily willing to believe that someone who’s trained in dian xue for a decade or two would be able to sink their weight very quickly through their fingertips, and into a pressure point on the opponent’s hand or forearm – particularly when the opponent is a non-resisting student. Harder to do in a fight, of course… I know someone in Beijing who’s been studying dian xue, I’ll ask them to take a look at this clip and comment!
It looks fake to me. Do you know where they train?
Other than “somewhere in Beijing”, no….
Looks very similar to this!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_gmMqzf2I8
[...] Huang Zhen Huan lives very close to where I’ll be, and I have his phone number. He was a student of Wu Tu Nan [...]
[...] Huang Zhen Huan lives very close to where I’ll be, and I have his phone number. He was a student of Wu Tu Nan for [...]
If you haven’t experienced (and 99.99999% you haven’t and won’t ever) “touch and zap” – there’s no other way to explain certain totally unbelievable things that some of us have had done to us, including those of us who have been thrown countless times with perfectly understandable, beautiful, efficient, simple mechanics. I really don’t know what to tell you but “touch and zap” is actually more descriptive than you meant it to be.