Empty and full – Distinguish between empty and full. Have two containers and pump the water between them.

As we discussed earlier, we put a lot of care in how we move, in order to protect our knees and avoid any tilt or torque on the joints (and with that possible injuries down the road). We move our weight off a foot before we turn it and back on when it’s oriented in the right direction and we’re ready to push our Qi Hai (氣海) point forward.

Think of your legs as two big buckets of water

A good way of reminding ourselves of that shifting of weight is by thinking of it as ‘shifting between empty and full’. Think of your feet and lower legs as big buckets holding water.

Now when you shift your weight back on your back leg, you envision how that water gets pumped out fo your front leg and into the back leg. Your front leg become ’empty’ and your back leg become ‘full’.

After you turned your hip and with that your foot, you reverse the process, imagining how you pump water through your legs and hips from your back leg into your front leg. Once the back leg is empty you can lift it and make a step.

Keep the water moving

As you make Tai Chi movements, you constantly shift between empty and full and various degrees between. Of course as you are lifting and moving one leg, the other one is 100% full in that moment. When you are in a bow stance, the front leg is 70% full and the back leg is 30% full. When you are standing in two sides of a line, your front leg will hold 10% of the water while your back leg will hold 90%.

As with everything in Tai Chi you don’t hold those static stances, you constantly shift and move, pumping the water, and with that your energy, around. You flow from Yin to Yang and back with all stages in between.

In martial arts and Tai Chi we try to learn making the most effective use of our strength and energy. We learn how to efficiently turn our muscle power into movement and kinetic energy.

Build from the ground up

The basic physics law of action and reaction applies to Tai Chi just as well. If we want to exert energy in a given direction, we must also be able to absorb the counter reaction. So if we want to push forward, we need to be firmly rooted in the ground in order to absorb the push back and not just be thrown backwards ourselves.

With that in mind, it all starts from our feet. If we don’t have firm grounding in our stance, everything else falls apart. Be rooted first.

We build up from there, the next link in our chain are the legs and knees, then the hips, our upper body and finally our arms. We need to build up in that sequence or our movement will not unfold its full potential.

Think of a tree, if the roots are weak the tree will die. If the trunk is flimsy it will not be able to withstand the wind. If the branches are too small, the weight of the fruit will have them break down.

Slow muscles first, fast muscles will catch up

A principle of movement in martial arts is to start with the strong and slow muscles first (our legs and our core muscles) and then engage the weaker but faster muscles (our arms and finally hands). That way we allow all movement to end at the same climactic point – the faster arms and hands will catch up with your legs easily. It won’t work the other way around though.

You can think of it like a rocket with its boosters. The huge thrusters engage first to get the rocket off the ground. Then the following smaller and more agile rocket engines will kick in as stage after stage gets engaged. They will further increase the speed of the rocket while making necessary adjustments to the trajectory as needed.

Your breathing controls the movement

Lets stay with the image of the rocket for a moment. The sequencing of the different stages is carefully controlled by the mission control center. What’s the mission control center in your body? Of course it’s the brain, but there is another way to think about it. In martial arts and Tai Chi your breath can help you control and orchestrate the movement.

That’s why we pay so much attention to our breath. If we smoothly exhale all the way from the beginning of a movement to its end, it is much easier to make it a smooth movement than if we stop our exhale somewhere along the way or have it disconnected from the movement altogether.

Same if we start our exhale before or after we start the movement or finish before or after we finish the movement. In that case there is a good chance that we will have stops and breaks in our movement and the different muscles will not coordinate as smoothly as they could. Use your breathing to control your movement.

Tai Chi is meditation in motion. Watch your breathing. Be mindful and delierate about how your movements build up.