Tai Chi Training: Flow and Softness
I've changed the training nowadays. Different priorities. There is a season for fighting and a season for healing. A time for speed and a time for slowness.
I'm in the second phase. Embracing the slowness brought by dying mitochondria. Embodying the art of simplicity. Enjoying timeless chunks of frozen gravity and stillness.
How is my training routine in these times?
Soft and deceiving. No rest between exercises and sets. A long continuum of flowing exercises of qigong - around 20 -, followed by the over 100 postures of the main form of Yang tai chi - you can call it taiji or taijiquan if you like, names are unimportant.
Paced breath, low postures. Meditation in movement closed by continuous sets of isometric holds - planks, bar hangs, etc - that completes the session.
Curious about how this approach fits into modern training theory? I asked Claude AI to break it down.
The tendons thank you for the slowness. No sudden jerks, no loaded joints screaming under momentum — just long, honest time under tension. The connective tissue adapts quietly, the way old wood hardens. You build a whole-body strength, not the kind that shows in a mirror but the kind that holds, stabilizes, resists. The muscles nobody names in gym talk — the deep stabilizers, the postural chains — they wake up and stay awake because the movement never lets them drift.
The nervous system has nowhere to hide. Slow is hard. The body wants to cheat, to swing, to use momentum as an escape. Deny it that, and what remains is pure control — motor precision, balance, the ability to feel a subtle shift in the hip before it becomes a stumble. Interoception, the scientists call it. Old masters just called it listening.
The breath slows with the body. The cortisol stays low. No adrenaline spike, no inflammation hangover the next morning. The parasympathetic nervous system — the rest-and-repair side — gets trained as deliberately as the muscles. You finish tired but not wrecked.
I also asked about the limitations of this gentle training - there is always yin and yang.
The gaps are real. No illusions.
You will not get stronger in the way that moves a heavy object you've never moved before. Maximal force output atrophies if you never chase it. The body is specific — it gives you what you train, and only that.
Explosiveness goes too. The fast-twitch fibers don't fire in Taichi. No sprint, no jump, no sudden violence of movement. That quality, if it matters to you, requires its own separate investment.
And the flesh won't grow. Hypertrophy needs progressive overload and sufficient stimulus — more than slowness provides. This training builds density of a different kind. Not mass.
Three real costs. Worth knowing. Worth accepting.
Well, well. You must pick your battles. Forty years in martial arts. Twenty in tai chi. Enough damage accumulated to last a lifetime. Now I’m training for longevity, not dominance.
Time to heal - or at least stop adding new scars.