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The Second Exercise: In Tai Chi, one of the fundamental postures is called Ward Off. You stand in arrow stance with your arms out in front of you as though you're hugging a big beach ball. The palms face inward, the back is curved like a C, and most of the weight is on the lead foot. The knee never goes beyond the toes and the soles of lead and trailing feet are flat to the floor. It's a powerful position that transforms easily into a two handed push. The push is often practiced by taking this stance in front of a wall and pressing steadily but lightly against it.

Ward Off is different. Ward Off is a deflection of an incoming rush, usually to one or the other side. An opponent comes in, and they roll off to the side. That also makes good sense, but this isn't the most unusual application. Ward Off also absorbs a direct charge and throws it back, with an upward force that exceeds the power of the attack. That takes special strength and special ability, and I've never had either of them. I've done some of the strange things of Tai Chi but not all. This is one I've puzzled over, and I'm approaching the task of learning it by doing exactly what I've done before when confronted with things I can't do: I try to do it.

One thing the people with this ability can do is support weight from the arms in that same Ward Off posture. Their students can suspend themselves from the teacher's arms and the teacher remains unchanged. I don't know how that works, but I know processes from having learned other things. I'm applying those processes to the task of learning something new, and it might work. I might even discover something else. It's an interesting hobby.

All I'm doing in this second posture for now is standing for five minutes in horse stance with the 25 pound Tai Chi Ruler dumbbell between my hands. I keep my hands rather low, but not simply hanging. I raise them high enough towards Holding the Tree posture that I can feel the strain. Some days I practice exerting the upward pressure in coordination with my breath -- as I exhale I raise the weight and as I inhale I ease it down.

So far there's been nothing too unusual except for a gradual very slight increase in ability. Lots of subtle shiftings in posture and arm alignments as my body adapts to the challenge, and hopefully I'll pick up some of what the old masters discovered as I keep trying.

Follow up:

For over a month now we've been practicing our basic routine, which consists of the Flying Tiger Chi Kung (adapted to include some basic Yi Jin Jing exercises) and one chi kung weight lifting posture. After that a short sitting meditation -- except for this, life as normal, which means a lot of sitting and typing, an occasional bout of running either outside or on the treadmill, and sporadic workouts of an ordinary kind. And I admit, I'm not doing as much of that as I should. Like everybody, I have to work. The last three or four days I've skipped nearly everything, because I find that I need a break in my workout routines. I'm not the sort who can keep going with daily practice that never changes. Problems arise physically that take time to heal, and mentally I get bored. I like the interesting parts of the martial qi gong, and they happen just about as often if your practice happens three times a week as they do if your practice is daily.

I'm not doing this like a monk or a martial hermit from the old days. We don't have financial benefactors and we have many other commitments of time. Yet we do make progress, and I'm confident that some of the old rules of practice -- the ones which stated that an hour a day of stance training was the absolute minimum, or that daily practice was the source of progress -- aren't completely accurate.

Observing my own progress with the Tai Chi Ruler Weightlifting in Holding Up Heaven posture, I see patterns that may not be entirely physical. After only a few days of practice -- five minutes daily with a 25 pound barbell -- I was able to hold the weight above my head for the entire five minutes. It wasn't pretty, and I made lots of noises, but I did it.

Then my strength crashed. I've always had a dead spot in lifting that has to do with a bad left shoulder. Some days when I move it, it sounds like a broken gearbox. If I'm lifting weights sometimes I'll invite people to listen to the tearing noises, and in certain slow movements from Tai Chi Yang style it makes noises loud enough to hear clear across a room. But, I know from past practice with forms like Flying Tiger that continued gentle effort makes those noises go away. Medically maybe that shouldn't happen, but it does. I've still always had that dead spot, a position in an upward lift where my left shoulder collapses.

Holding Up Heaven posture works on that spot, just on the edge of the problem area. With the weights it focuses on the place where the weakness is, and as that place came more and more into play my progress collapsed. Instead of 49 breaths, suddenly I could do just ten before a river of fatigue flowed up my left arm and the weight came down. So I kept working it, doing ten breaths and a two breath rest, then ten more, maybe by the end of the five minutes only managing to hold the weight up for two before it came inexorably down again. That's where I stayed for about two weeks until very slowly I started seeing progress again, and the dead spot began to go away.

I have a theory about chronic injuries that's only a theory, but I've seen results in my own self from tinkering with it. Chronic injuries don't heal because we get used to them and the body's healing processes turn off. We compensate for the injuries by moving in ways that don't stress that muscle system. Usually that works, but some movements depend on those particular areas, so we can't do them. Chi kung seems to be very efficient at healing those chronic problems, because it doesn't let us skip that part. As other muscles tire, the load shifts to the weak part we'd like to ignore. The body's healing system turns on again.

After about a month of persistent effort, I got stuck about five seconds away from completion. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't last the five minutes, always five seconds short. Instead of trying harder I decided to try less. The old systems of strength aren't just based on muscles. Muscles were the first stage. Ligaments and tendons are the next. Learning stances and movements which depend on those elastic and structural strengths increases strength. You find those other positions by relaxing. So I tried that, looking for ways to use muscles less, dropping into a less stressful form. Now, consistently, I'm able to hold the weight for the full five minutes. My form still improves, and so is my strength.

This has me even more curious, and we've added another version of the weight lifting to the routine -- a low version of the stance. Eventually it will be the Ward-Off posture of Tai Chi, but right now it's the gathering energy posture from Lam Kuen's The Way of Energy, only holding a 25 pound dumbbell.

Totally against current Tai Chi theory, but I've noticed that there are a few Tai Chi masters out there who can do unusual things, and the rest of the people can't. Every now and then I get a glimpse of what the real masters do, and it isn't all slow movement in the park. In the early 90's when I started training, I didn't have a regular teacher. I learned by reading books, watching videos, and attending occasional seminars. The classes I took never lasted more than a few weeks, so I did what I thought made sense.

I started learning striking, using jing force and chi, even though one of my teachers had told me there were no strikes in Tai Chi Chuan. The old books say different. A few people still teach the old combat styles, and strikes are a part of them. The system isn't entirely soft, like the modern variety. The old combat form was half soft and yielding, half hard and forceful. Just recently I watched a video online of some Tai Chi fighters in China demonstrating some moves by striking trees in a park. Everybody was very impressed. Those were the same moves I learned on my own, so I feel like I was on the right track, and now I want to do better.