Soft on the Streets
Soft on the Streets
Inside Kung Fu Magazine February 2004
by Adrian Corrales
Tai Chi Push Hands for Self Defense
It seems that everyone has a different idea about what will work in a fight. Ask a thousand martial artists what kind of training is best for self-defense and you are likely to get a thousand different answers. Some say that punching and kicking is the way to go. Others claim that training on the ground is more practical. By dealing with what happens between kickboxing and grappling, tai chi push hands training can help prepare you for whatever comes your way.
No-holds-barred tournaments have shown time and again that it is very difficult to stop an opponent who is determined to take you down. Once things end up on the ground, much of a striker’s power is neutralized. The argument against grappling for self-defense is that it is effective only because no-hold-barred fights occur in a controlled environment. Dropping to the ground is harder to do on the streets when fights aren’t always limited to two people and you don’t know what kind of weapon your opponent might have hidden in his back pocket.
Charging Opponent
Tai chi offers an excellent supplement to any fighter’s routine. A skilled push hands player is an expert at staying on his feet. At the same time, he is capable of controlling an opponent with the expertise of a grappling master.
Sifu Ming Lau, chief instructor of the White Dragon Martial Arts School in Mira Mesa, Calif., is a student of sifu Don Tittle in grandmaster Doc-Fai Wong’s Plum Blossom Federation. A veteran of numerous push hands competitions, Lau maintains that push hands is an effective tool for self-defense.
“Push hands is a great self-defense exercise because it forces you to adapt to oncoming force that is constantly changing,” says Lau. He adds this adaptability is a valuable skill for anyone that wants to learn to fight.
Push hands teaches practitioners to either neutralize or redirect the force. Neutralizing works by applying pressure to an opponent to negate his incoming force. For example, let’s say a force is being applied to your left shoulder. By taking your right hand and placing it on the opponent’s left shoulder, you can easily turn your body and direct his energy back toward him. The force has been neutralized because he cannot push any further without disrupting his own balance. Redirection involves changing the course of an opponent’s attack. Small amounts of pressure are applied to the attacker’s arm or torso so that his force misses your center of balance. Advanced tai chi practitioners can accomplish the same thing merely by turning the body in response to an attacker’s force. This leaves the arms free to counter.
Neutralizing the Attack
Students are trained to neutralize from stationary positions. One person pushes and the other attempts to diffuse the attacking force using as little energy as possible. In the beginning, both people sweat and strain to maintain a static position. The defender eventually learns where and how to put pressure to stay on balance. Eventually, he can defeat his opponent’s pressure using minimal force. In real life no one will stand still and push you at one angle for long. Freestyle push hands play is necessary to make neutralizing techniques second nature. You are forced to develop adaptability by working against an opponent intent on knocking you off balance. The good push hands player flows from one neutralizing movement to another without hesitating or losing balance.
Redirection is much more difficult to develop. You need to stay relaxed to feel from where a push is coming. Relaxing too much causes your stance and posture to fail and you lose balance anyway. A good tai chi teacher can describe how to redirect a push, but it is only through practice against actual force that a student learns the best angles and the correct amount of tension necessary to actually handle the pressure. The opponent’s force must dictate the defender’s response.
Neutralizing and redirecting skills allow you to control an opponent’s force without relying on muscular strength. Relaxation allows you to become more sensitive to your adversary’s actions. This sensitivity can greatly improve your ability to execute throws or submission holds. From a neutral and relaxed position, a skilled tai chi practitioner can feel were an opponent is putting his weight. If that weight is coming toward him, the push hands player can redirect it and apply explosive power to drive the opponent to once side. If the weight is back, it may be easier to slide in past an opponent’s attack and drive the person backward in a straight line. Relaxation also allows you to sense weaknesses such as raised shoulders and elbows during your opponent’s attack. These points can be manipulated to offset his balance so you can strike or throw him if the situation requires.
Turning the Tables
The manipulation of incoming force is one of the most important skills to have when faced with a real-life fight. If you can weather the storm of an opponent’s first attack then push hands can help you turn the tables and put him on the defensive. If someone rushes forward and makes you backpedal, your strikes will lose some of their power until you get your footing. Get your attacker stepping back and you can move forward as you hit. This adds a lot more weight and power to each shot.
Unlike sparring where you know that an attack is imminent, an attack on the street can come without warning. A surprise attack often begins with a sucker punch or a restraining move of some kind. A push hands player has a better chance of sliding out of a grab and taking control of a close-in situation than someone with striking training alone. If the opponent strikes with no warning, there is little that can be done to neutralize the effects of the initial attack. A push hands player, however, has a good chance of tying up his attacker until he can recover from the initial blow.
While push hands can set up other techniques, the pushes themselves can also be effective self-defense tools. Pushes alone may not hurt much, but they can cause a lot of damage if you use your environment. Dropping someone quickly onto hard asphalt can be painful. Throwing an opponent forcefully into a brick wall or a parked car can also cause damage. This is where tai chi’s fa jing comes into play. Fa jing is the explosive power that comes from using external and internal force together. A push delivered with this type of power can put an opponent off balance and leave him open to a follow-up attack.
Many misjudge push hands based on what they see in competition. Tournament push hands often appears harmless to spectators. Rules vary, but basically the goal is to control the other person by making him take a step off balance or by forcing him outside a ring. Some rule systems award more points for taking your opponent down without going to the ground yourself. Skeptics claim that these moves are too soft to resemble what happens in a streetfight.
Lau claims that the softness of push hands is exactly what makes it such a good way to train fighting attributes.
“The paradox is that safe training methods lead to better fighting skill, he notes. “Because push hands seldom results in injury it can be practiced more often and a great deal of skill can be attained.”
Freestyle Push Hands
A word of warning to those planning to add push hands to their routine: developing real skills takes serious time and energy commitments. Push hands training without practicing tai chi hand forms is virtually useless. You may learn to wrestle, but you will not learn the relaxed, effortless real push hands. A good school is also a necessity. Look for schools that work freestyle push hands instead of just fixed patterns. This type of competitive push hands practice is essential in developing self-defense skills.
“Your push hands partner is doing his best to stop you, which is exactly what you need in your training,” explains Lau.
No-holds-barred competitions have given the martial arts community an inside look at what can happen in a fight. An attack may begin standing up, but it can very quickly move to the ground. A striker with good push hands skills stands a better chance of staying on his feet and controlling the range of a fight. Grapplers can benefit by increasing their sensitivity and helping them find opportunities to apply locks or takedowns. Push hands alone won’t make you a great fighter, but it can definitely help take your skills to the next level.
Tags: Tai Chi in San Diego
November 11th, 2009 at 11:50 am
Excellent article! Thank you for making clear the benefits and advantages of proper push hands training when facing an attack. You have opened my eyes to the value of melding push hands and grappling techniques.
March 14th, 2010 at 5:48 pm
My youngest son, who is a freshman in high school, benefitted from his push hands classes during pe earlier this year. Here in Temecula, PE classes focus on ’sections’ throughout the semester, and during the wrestling ’section’, my son discovered just how much of an advantage push hands knowledge can truly be. In the initial days of the wrestling classes, he was the only student that could not be put to the ground because of his ability to ‘root’ himself. In later days, when the coaches were pairing up students by size, they paired my son ( who is about 6 ft and 180 lbs) with the largest boy in the class, assuming that he would be able to uproot Sean. He wasn’t able to move him. It was a practical and memorable lesson for my son, and it drove home all of his training. Push hands is definitely an important part of any serious martial artist’s regimen.