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Comment by corysama | Hacker News Reader

Long ago, maybe before the consumer internet, I saw a video claiming to showcase people who studied tai chi as a fighting art instead of just exercise. It was a lot of being able to follow the other person's movements to the point that "Fighting a tai chi master is like wrestling with an empty jacket". There was also a demonstration where a master pushed a student's middle finger back using an open palm. No matter how the student spun around and whipped his hand around, he couldn't get his finger away from the pressure of the palm that was following him around.

No idea how legit it was. I've never seen tai chi presented primarily as self-defense since.

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Alarm bells go off in my head whenever the demonstration of an extraordinary martial arts skill is being done by a master and his student. Maybe the most egregious example of how this sort of dynamic can work out is George Dillman and his "no touch knockouts". It's easy enough to find amusing YouTube videos showing how that worked out when someone roped him into trying to demonstrate the technique on someone who wasn't a student of his.

Anyway, it's usually not nearly that spectacular, but the same basic dynamic has historically pervaded many martial arts. Participants in one style typically only practice and spar with each other, and the "more advanced" techniques might only be demonstrated using advanced students who wouldn't get to be that advanced in the first place without being heavily bought into the whole thing, so you can get some almost cult-like dynamics coming into play.

Reminds me of this guy, who got a ton of blowback for calling out fake martial arts masters, goading them into fights and humiliating them: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xu_Xiaodong

> Xu started a dispute with Wei on social media, beginning with a demand that Wei provide evidence of his abilities, and culminating in a bare-knuckle fight in a basement in Chengdu in 2017, where Xu won convincingly in less than 20 seconds.

Mentalist Derren Brown also did an episode where he took advantage of students of this kind of teaching, by using their "brainwashed" instincts against them to demonstrate he had the same powers as their sensei, even though he had no martial arts training.

If you can find a competent instructor from a lineage that preserved the fighting applications of tai chi, you can see some pretty interesting grappling and joint-locking techniques. It's not all snake oil.

One example (Yang-style tai chi): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kp2jWeaKrqI

Honestly, it still looks like it could only defend against an opponent that moves in slow motion.

The purpose is to practice slowly with care to learn the moves thoroughly so that when it's time to perform them quickly you'll know the form and can flow quickly - the teacher was showing slow demonstrations.

I've never fought anyone, but as I've been taught the moves in Tai Chi's martial technique are generally intended to put people down quickly and hard by doing things like breaking elbows, eye gouges, and other grappling intended to severely injure the other party, essentially breaking every MMA rule that would get you disqualified.

This all varies significantly depending on the teacher, my teacher studied Chinese grappling, Mongolian wrestling, Aikido, and other arts that I'm sure he brought elements in from.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc3Q6vqvemA this is pretty much what high level skills in Tai Chi look like. You can see that it's mainly very, very secure footwork and explosive coordinated force delivered when the opponent is off balance -- this is a grappling situation but the logic is pretty similar if they were hitting each-other or even using swords / spears.

My Tai Chi teacher (Yang Family) is also an Aikido teacher and he teaches Tai Chi as a martial art, interpreting the form in terms of blocks, grappling moves, joint locks, etc. He learned at least some of that from earlier Tai Chi teachers who treated it as a cryptic martial art.

Here is a pretty good example of a very large trained fighter and a very excellent and much smaller tai chi guy going at it reasonably hard (like maybe one of them walks away with a concussion type hard).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7D5DGpORANE

I think that's a pretty good example of what "people who can actually fight well use tai chi techniques" looks like. A lot of force is going into those throws, bodies are flying, and they aren't students doing a demonstration for a crowd. Legit.

It's better than most of bullshido videos but it's obvious that the greco wrestler is acting and not really trying: no head control, no wrist control, high center of gravity, dramatic throws.

That "very excellent tai chi fighter" is, if I'm not mistaken, Chen Ziqiang - son of Chen Xiaoxing and nephew of Chen Xiaowang, part of the family that the Chen style comes from. He's the current master of the original Chen village school of Taijiquan, one of the biggest winners of Chinese push hands and wrestling championships (for his weight) and one of the most serious practitioners I know. I've been there and seen it, it's lots of heavy exercises, hours of daily practice and sparring.

He is indeed excellent, but if that is the level it takes to use Taiji in practice, you won't find many people in the world who can.

I have heard it takes roughly ten years of practice of tai chi to be able to fight reasonably effectively using tai chi principles, assuming you have a very workable base of kung fu or something equivalent established (say ten years) before that.

If it's just about learning how to fight really really fast the WW2 combatives courses seem to be the best available system. I don't think any martial art is suited to the speed and directness of modern life.

Very sceptical of such claims. It's quite easy to ascertain them too. You pressure test the system (or your variant of it) in a lab (ie. in a fighting ring). If it can hold up against fighters of a certain level of skill, you can, in a way, claim to be atleast as good as them. Otherwise, you're not.

The book "Professor in the Cage" goes into this distinction at length. It's an interesting thing to consider for people like me who are into martial arts.

There is a slight problem with that - it doesn't invalidate the idea of testing, but you do have to think about it. Taiji is not ring/cage wrestling, it was created as a fight art, and its most efficient applications usually will break bones, dislodge joints, generally do things that are outlawed in most fighting arenas nowadays. It also was not designed with a limited ring around it, which changes the dynamics of movement. So, just by putting the fighter in a ring and defining allowed/forbidden moves, you're biasing the experiment in favor of a modern contact sport practitioner.

Unfortunately, this is the kind of thing that all bullshido practitioners say. "It's too deadly to use in a ring since I might break bones or kill the opponent" so I can't. Please note that I'm not saying that you are one. I'm just saying that you're using the same argument that charlatans do.

If Tai Chi is indeed so deadly, it must be possible to tone it down just a little to make it 75% as effective inside a ring. Just short stop of breaking bones or dislodging joins (submission holds) and still be useful. Good martial arts and artists are flexible enough to adapt. If Tai Chi were so deadly and a practitioner gets accosted in a narrow alley, it should be flexible enough to be useful. Otherwise, it's simply not effective as a fighting system. Either that or we can make the claim that it's not a fighting system. It's a set of exercises (like pilates etc.) that achieve certain outcomes and measure against those metrics. That's fine too.

The tendency has been parodied in countless media instances. e.g.The Bruce Lee appearance in "Once upon a time on Hollywood", the youtube channel "Master Ken", The instagram account "McDojo life" etc. Master Ken does this especially well with his "Ameri do te" which is so street lethal that it's impossible to even demo some of the techniques.

There are a lot of possibly exaggerated, and somewhat dubious, legends about Cheng Man Ching (who created the "Yang style" I believe). In one such story, he performs an exhibition match at the British Embassy in Chungking during WWII, and none of the British soldiers manage to land a single hit. In the story, the British army ends up so impressed they decide to study T'ai Chi.

Yang Luchan was the creator of Yang style taijiquan.

Ah yes, thank you! The Cheng Man Ching so-called "short form" would be considered a descendant/variation of Yang style then. I assume we're more familiar with Cheng Man Ching in the West due to his travels and teachings in the US. Hard to say how closely related to the source modern-day lessons are TBH.

I've seen a video of a Tai-Chi master fighting a whole group of students of his simultaneously. He did things like throw several of them off the mat by swooshing his hands at them.

It was obvious to me that the students were simply responding to what they saw the master doing. I don't believe for one second that it would have worked if the students had blindfolds on.

I took Tai Chi during college from a guy with a passion for it (his day job was as a sign painter and he was a pretty firm Christian), with no mystical overtones to his interest at all. The one thing he drove home, repeatedly, was that if you wanted to be prepared a case where you needed fight, there were self-defense classes available, and to study that. He'd even help you find one.

While some of the things he described about studying with masters had elements of the video you describe (if put less strongly), he also expressed that this was folks who had been studying for a long, long time, and moved on from the rote movements associated with Tai Chi to other aspects. He said he'd been studying awhile (at least ten years) and didn't think he could use it to defend himself.

"Fighting" Tai Chi was traditionally taught to people who were already very adept at Kung Fu. If you can already fight the form trains a bunch of clever footwork and a few other things at a really high level; it's _clever_. But if you can't already fight it has none of that basic stuff in it like "how to hit people really hard". If you don't know that already Tai Chi forms won't teach it to you every effectively.

Younger kung fu people wouldn't generally be so into Tai Chi. You'd learn it as you aged so that as you became less athletic you'd be substituting smart for strong and extending your lifetime as an effective fighter. All of this context was lost when it came to the west.

Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yang_Chengfu this is kinda what top tier tai chi people used to look like: neckless bears with fists the size of your head.

Also: weapons. In China open hand stuff is taught before you attempt the complexity of swinging round a sword but these were (and are) armed arts. Nobody shows up at a real fight without a machete or sabre I believe.

Almost everything you said. I learned Taiji after Karate, Judo and other arts, and I love how its principles can help me improve the techniques in these other arts. But it does have its own basics for punching, kicking, grappling, throwing, etc. It's just not easy to find outside of the most traditional schools.

And the weapons part, totally true - I mean, humans have always beat other animals by using tools that extend their strength, reach, speed, armor, damage, etc. You do learn to fight with your hands and feet in a pinch, but whatever stick is around increases your chances 10x if you know how to use it.

Yeah, here are some more videos. Some of them barely need to breathe in the direction to drop a fully grown man. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8uZVyq4NIc

There are some ancient arts that are unbelievably powerful. We have forgotten breath techniques that allow you to survive in space and travel backwards through time. It is said that some of the great warriors of the past practised these techniques. How could David destroy Goliath? With a sling? I broke my arm once and had it in a sling. Wouldn't have helped me destroy a titan. It was martial arts.

Some say Superman wasn't just a comic book story but a real man who used these techniques. Unfortunately, he defected to the Japanese and so we had to drop an atomic bomb to stop him. Many of the unique methods were lost with him.

The word sling also refers to a weapon used to thow projectiles. https://youtu.be/6irNkhLdApk

What about the Superman part. Any videos for that?

Poe's law is strong with this one. The Superman bit makes me inclined to believe this is just a joke, but I know there's real believers out there.

It wasn't the "forgotten breath techniques that allow you to survive in space and travel backwards through time"?

I mean there are stories of people believing kung fu training would make them impervious to bullets, so that doesn't seem too big a leap. Wasn't breatharianism a thing people believed in?

Well, the good news is that if someone re-discovers them later, they can then teach them to us at this time.

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