Tai Chi Aspects tape deck series – Part Three: Fast Forward
Let’s speed things up a bit!
Try to do the form faster than your usual pace, maybe up to two times as fast as usual. This Tai Chi Aspect may be used at every level – for different purposes.
Video “Fast Foreward”
Beginners
Going faster helps you to check your knowledge of the choreography.
In the beginning, speeding in fast forward mode will be a mess, because your body and brain are used to slow pace and may not spot the similarity at once. Just try again and you will see progress. If you always get stuck at different points, just try again later. – If you tend to get stuck at the same points regularly, this is a hint where you could start to revise your postures.
Advanced
You manage the speeding up quite well? Congratulations, this is a big achievement! – You now have enough experience to look inside yourself, if you have taken the body mechanics with you while speeding up or if parts of it got lost on the way. Try once again in fast forward mode, checking your movement axes as you speed up. Which ones need some fine-tuning?
Bonus: I want to go really fast! Tell me how!
Our fast forward button has a limit – exactly like the one on our old tape deck. While practising faster, you may have noticed that your breathing changed. To work on „meditative“ breathing requires slow movement.
Going really fast requires accentuation. That means you will have to sacrifice the flow to a certain extent. Accentuating the extremes will also add some additional activations to the original flow, which at meditative pace are not visibly accentuated and consequently not counted as postures in their own right.
There are no rules where to put the accents – they depend on the application you have in mind. So if you want to go really fast in the form, it will be by shaping this fast form on your own.
The best way to lay the basics for this is partner work. Beginning to hit fast with a partner is a practical approach to find out about possible accentuations and to work on expanding into these shapes. Besides, practising together with a fellow Tai Chi buddy it is the most fun way to go through the legendary 10,000 repetitions, your projected endeavor is rumoured to take. 😉
Author: Tai Chi Studio, Gabi Kannenberg
Images: Nils Klug
