Conscious, intentional feeling and movement of the wrist is a huge factor in expressing internal power. Wrists are designed to be dynamic participants in arm movements, and wrists that are Song make it much easier to be Song throughout your body.
Many Tai Chi teachers advise their students to not lift weights…and with good reason. The rationale is that weight training builds muscle and may encourage a dependency on muscular responses rather than internal power. While I respect this thinking, particularly for those just beginning their Tai Chi explorations, there comes a time when judicious use of resistance training is not just helpful, but necessary, to grasp the nuances of the internal arts.
Big movements allow us to bring a magnifying glass to all the little components, stuff that might get overlooked otherwise.
In Part 1 of “An Jin: The “Push of No Push,” I broke down Jin and what makes it so powerful. I then explained the mysterious An Jin, the “push of no push,” and how it needs both Song and Fang to work. This post gets right down to how to train it.
