What is Tai Chi?

Welcome to my blog. It's dedicated to helping you know a bit more about me and a little bit more about Tai Chi and other internal martial arts.
Tai Chi means "Supreme Ultimate" or "Grand Terminus" depending on which English words you like to use to translate the Chinese characters. Its full and proper title is Tai Chi Chuan or using the pinyin Romanization: Taijiquan. The name is pronounced "Tie- Jee- Chuen" regardless of how it's rendered in English.
Tai Chi Chuan is a Chinese martial art which means it is one of the different schools of quanshu or fist arts. Most people in the west use the words Kung Fu to denote Chinese martial arts and maybe in a later blog we will get into what Kung Fu means but for now we will restrict ourselves to Tai Chi and the internal martial arts.
Now then this segues nicely into the question: "What does that mean? An Internal Martial Art?"
Well specifically we can look at martial arts as being divided into roughly two categories:
External and Internal.
An External Martial Artist runs for stamina, does push ups or weightlifting for strength, and hits bags to build forceful strikes.
An internal martial artist relies on building up chi (qi in pinyin pronounced "chee") to create glowing health and tremendous physical power. Chi is cultivated through breathing and specific exercises that create effects on a par with the External methods at the basic levels. When an internal martial artist progresses further he or she will find that their strength grows with age. That they become more formidable the older they get.
The External martial artist will start to see a decline in their performance and their tough training will have to slacken as their bodies age. Where an internal martial artist of advanced years will have glowing health and be far more powerful than his or her external appearance will show.
Inevitably, people have opinions about chi and internal training. They will pontificate for hours how it is not this or it is not that. That is rather sad. The best thing to do is find a real teacher who can show you how to use and harness chi and then practice for a while and see what results you find.

Until next time remember to breathe from your belly.