I appreciate your candid honesty. For those of us who can never seem to develop or apply this skill (and I have been trying for over 30 years) it was encouraging to hear that a master of the skill is also unable to apply the skill 100% of the time. Of course your 80-90-95% (or whatever the percentage is) is far better than my 0%
I had this problem for years too. When you do your form, try imagining that you are spooling a very fine (silk) thread around each wrist, you'll soon (in a minute or so) find yourself making micro adjustments to keep the thread taught and constantly wrapping. It turns out a guy's arm is way easier to feel and keep contact with than a weightless thread so after a month of doing the set like this everyday people should find you pretty sticky. There's all kinds of cues for doing the form but they all run into the language ambiguity and it's hard for others to see if you are doing things correctly. If this is helpful, you should notice results in one day. If not, there's probably another cue out there that will solve your problem.
Thank you for describing and teaching this sticking technique, and also being honest that it doesn't work on everyone. I always thought that was the case, but never heard any teacher actually say it.
Liang De Hua, thank you for your many videos both here on youtube and on your facebook. You are very kind to share your knowledge and experience with all of you. To the non-chinese speaker you offer a very clear and understandable way of explaining and showing important concepts from taijiquan (like the zhan, nian, lian, sui in this video). I wish you many dedicated students!
not only you have a great understanding about the skill but you also can explain it very detail and above all what an attitude (as a master to say this honestly to public like this is really awesome). that makes me want to learn from you.I hope I have that luck one day and I hope you will teach me .
Nice explanation. What people don't understand is the opponent is giving the energy that Sifu Liang Dehua needs to show the technique and teach and share something on RU-vid. It is a way for people who already have Tai Chi skills to learn the technique and get a better understanding. If he tries to demonstrate on someone who has no skills most likely it can't be done. If you train this sticking energy and the energy comes out in an altercation it can be used to your advantage. That is why the skill is trained. I am grateful for all of these videos because I learn something new every day.
This is one of the best explanations I have found. However, Douglas Wile's translation of the oral transmission in the Yang Family Touchstones book is unambiguous. Stick-Adhere, Join-Follow, is the curriculum for 4-Sides Push Hands. Slightly out of the usual order, Stick (Peng), Adhere (Ji), Join (Lu), Follow (An). So, the difference between Stick and Adhere is: Ward-off is for first-contact and implies lifting to up-root the opponent; Press is to stay-attached, as well as to "Listen" to the opponent's energy. For Join-Follow: to Roll-back is to move as one-unit with the opponent; and Push is (or requires) to not detach as you follow.
What an excellent video, thank you! Sharing this is invaluable for those of us trying to understand and thus develop these skills. The explanation is very clear but what I like is the honesty. I too practised Tai Chi for a long time until I was able to relax and let go enough to feel the jing or soft wave power. When I did finally feel it it was like starting Tai Chi all over again and everything made a little more sense. Thanks to Liang de Hua for adding to that!
Aikido training was designed to develop this skill, which is why the founder banned competition and sparring. But most people revert back to using force, because it is much easier to do so. Personally, I find that it takes a lot of patience to listen and learn, and you need honest feedback from your training partners.
Great to see more frequent uploads - always great to see such lessons on technique and philosophy - taichi as a 'sticking' art is fascinating, particularly the use of it in the 'clinch' range. Reminds me of bridge in the hakka arts.
Fa jiin makes them light maybe, or maybe they just cannot be in the same place as the jin going out one body and overriding theirs entirely. Amazing to watch the practicality of the skills, and such experience and knowledge! A very fine teacher indeed! I want to study some of this and the hook hand for my piano playing. I also really liked the single whip, horse stance video. Thank you Sifu Liang De Hua.
Sifu Liang De Hua must make a friendship Sticking Hands with Master Adam Mizner. They are a great Sifu and Master, it certainly have many good Explanation and structure, Qi, etc also.
Can you tell me what exercises to do to be able to eventually have your skills. I know it takes a long time and I am willing to take the time but I need a track to follow. I can see that you have very advanced skills tbat were developed in a good way because you do not need to position yourself. So please tell me where to begin.
I've heard from a few Masters that not everybody feels this energy. Most women don't feel this energy. So it is not a martial art really. It's a kind of energy that has not yet ben explained by modern science. Maybe one day it will be. This guy is great though, he's one of a few Masters who are honest about the nature of this energy.
Gross physical contact is just force, some people misunderstood it.. The deepest in taichi is using earth heaven and soul energy, which is interpreted as negative positive and etheric energy.. When one cant fully empty their mind whn in physical contact then it will be just brute force,... Energy cant be describe by word, only one attain into a empty state will understand,.. Its like the fragrant of a flower that cant be describe...
Well, it was a general overview of the names and a description of what is needed and what is wrong when talking about or doing sticking, but Liang, again, doesn't give away the actual technique, which is interesting anthropologically. I thought it was only the Japanese who used this way of talking to keep people interested but not fully knowledgeable about how it really works. I guess that's OK since if you gave all the secrets away to everyone, you would no longer be a tai-chi teacher with a tradition, lineage, and moral goodness to impart and monitor in the development of your students. You would also not be needed anymore..! Since everyone would be able to teach tai-chi..! Sticking is easy once you know how it is done. It takes some practice to make it consistent, but I guess (I don't know), maybe bad people could also use it to destroy people, at least destroy other people's balance and start fights that way. I also think, like you, that it is important too to keep most things secret, even keep it a secret the fact that there are secrets. That way we can maintain morality and not give potentially dangerous techniques to people who will misuse them. In Buddhism, knowledge is not neutral for those who are enlightened. We can only give advice to the right people at the right time and only to those people who are on their way to developing wisdom and inner peace and only to those who through long practice and association you know are good people. To teach otherwise is to cause violence, even if this violence is indirect. Any violence will return to us threefold is the Buddha's teaching, which is why I think Liang is so careful. Karma is true as all truly honest martial artists will tell you. I don't know if Liang is Buddhist but I can tell he is a moral person. Thank you Liang. :)
Hi, i'm going to try to give an answer to this because if i understood you correctly you feel Liang didn't divulge the quote unquote "secret" to Sticking. And a that this is a technique that you can just explain in a video and then people would be able to do them. I'm afraid its not that simple. Its quite the long answer and i hope it doesn't sound like a rant or anything, it certainly not meant as one :) First off lets just differentiate between principles and techniques. This may not be your definition, but i'm stating mine for ease for conversation and understanding. A technique, like a throw or a joint lock, is a single move or coordinated movement that will yield a specific result in a given situation. A principle is a concept that holds true in any situation. f.ex in judo a throw can be a technique, but breaking someones balance to open up throws is a principle. Sticking is a principle in which you use a set of condition in your body to make someone feel like they are stuck to you when you are in contact with them. It is most effective when combined with the principles adhere, join and follow (you follow to lead btw). The principles of stick, adhere, join, follow are in turn based on other principles and conditions in your body, that takes time to develop, through quite bitter training. Much of it is training standing, where you stand in postures for several minutes, making sure to keep structural alignment in your body correct. Once you can stand with correct structure for several minutes, you need to start releasing (often mistakenly called relaxing, which is not the same thing) muscles so they are contracting as little as possible while keeping the pose, this is a very long and bitter process, and progress is slow in the beginning leading most people to just quit, or find something else. This is the process of developing "song" or release. The easiest way to sum it up is that your muscles should hang on your body like branches on tree, feeling like they are melting off the bones. This is painful, because when you release the muscles your ligaments and tendons take over and they stretch. Meaning the standing actually gets harder and harder the more you do it and better you become at being released. When doing this you also need to be mindful of your own body and feel what is going on inside, to develop the "ting" or "listening". First you must be able to listen to your own body, then you can later listen to others as well. If you are being trained correctly feel a quite tangible feeling of heaviness, and being filled. Once you can stand in correct structure and release, you need to start releasing in certain sequences through the body, to open it up to transfer energy through it like a wave. opening up the body, and "sinking the chi". basically this "chi" is the feeling of being filled up, of being full. Without all that, and several other things that teaches you, not only move in a new manner based on both principles of release as and engine instead of using muscle contractions, but also bodymechanical principles of movement where you maintain a balance between something called opening and closing joints in harmony (so there is no gaps in your mechanics basically) you can actually have the principles you need to be able to properly stick and adhere and join and follow. At this point you can touch someone, and if they are less song than you, they feel stiff and easy to move, and through the use of na jin (seazing energy) you can control them in such a way that they feel stuck, because letting go of the contact point will make it feel like they are letting go of their balance and they will fall, thus it feels like you cannot let go. I've just told you about 15 different quite well held secrets of taiji in as many lines of text, and i'm absolutely certain that if a thousand people read this, there will not be a thousand people who can do it the next week. basically Liang summed this down to the line "and then i song" for simplicity The secrets keep themselves in most cases. because even if you know how its done, its not something that you can just go ahead and do without quite spesific training, and very spesific instructions and corrections along the way. This is still an extremely simplified explanation, probably with several kind of erroneous passages, and doesn't even cover the brunt of the work needed. TL;DR You need to develop a whole new engine for moving your body to the level where that becomes the natural way to move before you can do this, even if you know every answer to how its done. so there's not really any point in trying ot cover all that in a video on youtube. if you wanna learn this skill for whatever reason: find someone who can do this; who also has students who can do it, and do exactly as they instruct.
@@codexdelux I am fully aware of what you described. I used to stand at stake for 1.5 hours per day for years. I have twenty years experience, or rather twenty years exposure to Yang tai-chi in the tradition of Huang Sheng Shyan. 'Sticking,' I agree with you is a principle but there is something you need to do that is different to all the things you just mentioned. Tai-ji is vast. There are many ways of doing things, as vast as the human body is internally. I also agree with you at another level. "There are no secrets" except hard and consistent training. But, learning is also important. Asking yourself "how do I do this.." As Confucius said "If I show you one corner of a square and you can't figure outthe other three corners, I won't teach you..." In the same way, it is a kind of unspoken rule that teachers do not teach, they only show...and they show people what they need to know next, only when the time is ripe. There is no point and just too much work to show someone higher order mathematics, if they are still working on addition and subtraction. But the right word(s), at the right time, for the right person, even just a touch or a gesture, the way your Sifu looks at you can give you hints and these hints are principles, transmissions. It is also useful to be relaxed and Sung when receiving a push...this way you can reverse engineer the moves later. The natural function of the nervous system and brain is to problem solve. As such, it is important to ask question...and your body-mind-heart will answer them for you. You can do tai-ji when you become your own teacher. Past teachers then become friends and inspirational. We begin to develop gratitude because of how much they helped us wordlessly.... The best feeling in the world is to discover something on our own and own it for ourselves. This kind of personal learning means you have it for life. Second hand teachings though, simply from the outside, does not 'stick'...
Thank you both for your comments. I think they are really insightful. I kind of compare watching taiji RU-vid videos to someone learning to drive a car. I can describe driving a car to someone, show them a video, and even drive them around, but until they get into the car put their hands on the wheel and their feet on the pedals and feel the particular tension of the steering wheel and the power and weight of the vehicle, they cannot understand driving. Even more, they can’t yet understand what it’s like to drive fast or drive different vehicles. Until they’ve driven for years in many different vehicles in different situations and at different speeds, only then they might understand what it’s like to be a racecar driver.They will never get to be a racecar driver without putting in the years of bitter training of learning to drive. Even after many years in taiji, I feel like I’m just getting my learner’s permit.😄
@@QuentinKLEau These are things that even relative beginners are told to do and repeated ad-nauseam by many teachers, in this sense there are 'no secrets'. However, their depth, purpose and relationship between these exercises are rarely spelt out and explained systematically; it is this aspect that constitutes the 'secret' eluding most practitioners.
Follow, stick, adhere, and so on, are ONLY trained in tcc? What an ignorant thing to say. My friend , you should get out more or at the very least, open the windows...
