Single Pushing Hands
Single Pushing Hands for Beginners
Alongside form practice, new Tai Chi students learn pushing hands (Tui Sao), also known as sensing hands. This exercise involves working with a partner to test each other’s balance, teaching you to adopt correct Tai Chi posture and alignment while understanding and applying the techniques learned in the form. Pushing hands and form practice are complementary, helping to develop your Tai Chi practice.
Pushing hands begins with basic pre-determined movements and progresses through increasing complexity to ‘free play’ pushing hands, which is unscripted. Although pushing hands is part of the martial aspect of Tai Chi Chuan, it is not fighting and should be practiced with a sense of cooperation rather than competition.
This video from the Lancaster School of Tai Chi Chuan shows two practitioners performing simple single pushing hands, the first exercise taught to beginners. I recommend watching the video several times and paying attention to the following:
Continual Shift Between Stances: Observe the transition between front and back stances. As one practitioner moves into front stance, the other shifts into back stance, and vice versa.
Front Stance Differences: The front stance in pushing hands is slightly different from the form. It involves a bent front leg holding about 70% of the weight, with the front foot turned in 45 degrees and the back foot turned out 45 degrees, making the feet parallel.
Hand States: On the ‘push,’ the hand is Yang, with the palm facing outwards, wrist flexed, and fingers pointing upwards. On the ‘yield,’ the hand is Yin, with the palm facing inwards, wrist gently curved, and fingers pointing sideways.
Body Rotation: During the ‘yield,’ the body rotates outwards, deflecting the force of the opponent’s ‘push.’
Hand Position: Whether ‘pushing’ or ‘yielding,’ the hand remains in the centre line of the body, directly in front of the chest, always engaged with the body and never disconnected.
Single Hand Use: For this simple exercise, only one hand/arm is used, while the other hand hangs by your side to simplify the practice for beginners. As your pushing hands skills develop, you will use both hands.
Breathing: An in-breath on the ‘yield’ and an out-breath on the ‘push’ might not be visible in the video but is essential to the practice.
I hope you learn a lot from this video. It is a great example of simple, single pushing hands demonstrated by two very experienced Tai Chi practitioners from the Lancaster School of Tai Chi Chuan.
Single Pushing Hands - Demonstrated by Maya and Bennie from the Lancaster School of Tai Chi Chuan