Tai Chi Journal

My Tai Chi Posture

This post is a follow-on to my earlier one titled My Aching Back. In that post I reported back stiffness and soreness, and similar distress in the knees.

Last night, class night, I took the opportunity of asking my instructors Brad and Jeremy about my Tai Chi posture and found out I was doing it all wrong.

All Tai Chi posture is basically Wu Chi, with or without movement and variation. Wu Chi is a Standing Meditation posture which involves placing the feet parallel to one another, shoulder width apart, and then going into a subtle crouch. You soften the knees and tuck your pelvis in (forward) a bit as your head drops a couple of inches.

Your weight is then evenly distributed over your feet. This means no favoritism in the forward-backward direction or likewise in the side-to-side direction. Also, in terms of each foot individually, the weight is not shifted inward or outward or forward or backward, but squarely borne over the entire foot.

Meanwhile, you relax your shoulders and let your chest cave in just a tad. At the same time, you elongate your spine somewhat by imagining your head is attached to a thread or string that is tugging it upward. What you do with your hands and arms depends on which variation of the posture you are using.

This standing posture becomes the Tai Chi Walking posture when you begin stepping forward with each foot in turn while delaying transfering weight to the forward foot until you can do so smoothly without disrupting the other elements of the posture.

One of the criteria of proper Tai Chi posture, said Brad, is that the shoulders be kept right above the hips. That was my main problem, it turns out. I simply will lean backward ... as Brad kept telling me after he put me in the right posture and we continued to chat. Every ten seconds or so it was, "You're leaning back again!" or "Remember not to keep leaning backward!"

Easy for him to say! When I am not leaning backward, but am properly erect according to Brad's lights, my mind tells me I am leaning forward and consequently need to correct my tilt.

Brad calls the proper Tai Chi shoulders-to-hips alignment, by the way, a "gorilla" posture, since the slight caving in of the chest brings the shoulders and arms forward to a degree. No one is saying this posture will win you any awards from an aesthetic point of view.


The second thing I was doing wrong (and all these errors are interconnected, as you might guess) is that I have not been tucking my pelvis properly. As Brad showed me the right "tuck posture," it involves keeping the pelvis roughly centered, loosely held in the middle of its range of "wiggle room," after the knees are bent and the head is lowered.

That is, if you bend your knees and adopt the Wu Chi position, you will find that you can thrust your pelvis forward until it reaches its limit in that direction. You will also find you can rotate your pelvis backward in such a way that the fanny pokes out, until it reaches its limit in that direction. Both limits are wrong for Tai Chi. What you want is a happy medium, in terms of pelvic tilt. When that happy medium is struck, if everything else is right, the pelvis will be somewhat loose and wiggly, not tight and strained.

Well, although there were probably exercises in which I went too far in the pelvic thrust department, when I was Tai Chi Walking I was doing the fanny poke for all it was worth. When that was combined with my incessantly leaning backward, it put quite a strain on my lower back.


And strain on my knees, as well, it seemed, when my third mistake was pointed out by Brad: trying to take too long steps forward in Tai Chi Walking. Brad wants me to take little mincing baby steps, not steps which look to me like the classic Groucho Marx slouch-walking. (Brad is apparently too young to remember Groucho; he drew a blank when I mentioned the comparison.)

Combining the backward lean, the compensating fanny poke, and the overambitious forward steps is what made for not only back strain but knee strain as well. I was straining my "plant leg" like an archer's bow in the process of being strung. That is, each time I stepped too far forward with a foot that initially was to bear no weight, I would allow my rear or plant leg to bend more at the knee than it had originally been bent. Instead of a comfortable sensation of just putting extra weight on the plant leg, and nothing more, I was getting a sensation of extra stress being added in the region of the knee, as it flexed beyond what was good for it.

This untoward flexing of the knee under stress was not necessarily immediately painful ... but it did lead to morning-after knee soreness.

The lesson here is that it's easy to go wrong in terms of your Tai Chi posture, and when you do, you can pay for it with stiffness and soreness later. This is not the fault of Tai Chi, for when done right it does not cause untoward stiffness and soreness. But, despite being told the right things to do by my real live instructors and the authors of the books I've been using, I have found it hard to know when I'm doing it right and when I'm doing it wrong.

Again, as in earlier posts, I attribute that to a radically underdeveloped "body sense" on my part. I'm anything but an athlete. Too much "in my head" as a way of life, I've spent 57-plus years pretty much blocking out what my body is telling me. Now I'm doing something, Tai Chi, which poses something of a chicken-and-egg conundrum. It's intended to develop my "body sense" or "mindfulness," but at the same time it requires me to use a mindfulness I don't yet have to avoid doing it wrong and bringing on minor injury.

posted by eric @ 9:14 AM