| Author |
Message |
    
Blackjack
| | Posted on Friday, October 31, 2003 - 21:53: | |
Some people say that Tai Chi exercises the meridian system and that Tai Chi movements were devised in relation to the meridians. Can anyone explain about this? |
White crane
| | Posted on Saturday, November 01, 2003 - 18:29: | |
Every physical activity exercises the meridians, every movement in fact does. As far as I am concerned there is no evidence that Tai Chi movements reflect the meridians in any way. Most of the Tai Chi movements are taken from martial art stances and mimic combat postures. Many of these movements have classical martial art names BTW. |
almost anonymous
| | Posted on Thursday, December 18, 2003 - 18:11: | |
Martial arts (good martial arts, anyway) require a complete range of motion to be conditioned in the body.
Fighting is one of the most stressful things that you will ever ask your body to do, so the martial art schools (including traditional T'ai Chi Ch'uan) train us to take our body through that range of motion repeatedly until we get used to it. Then we train that range of motion under greater and greater work loads until we get used to them, in T'ai Chi this is accomplished with Pushing Hands and weapons training (forms and sparring).
These trainings - if they are done well and with some intelligence for a l o o o n g time - coincidentally stretch and invigorate our meridian systems. Indeed, they do it better than anything else ever devised by Traditional Chinese Medicine. The T'ai Chi Forms and Pushing Hands were preserved and refined over the years by generations of dedicated practitioners to be more and more effective both martially and for health reasons. The refinement of T'ai Chi Ch'uan by competent, qualified teachers has continued uninterrupted for hundreds of years, to the point that the modern T'ai Chi forms taught by the orthodox T'ai Chi families (not so much the forms taught by the Chinese govt.) are masterpieces of work for consciously balancing the meridian systems in the human body over time. |
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Tai chi and the meridians