{"id":294,"date":"2025-10-30T18:27:02","date_gmt":"2025-10-31T01:27:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/earthfarm.ca\/?p=294"},"modified":"2026-06-10T11:18:01","modified_gmt":"2026-06-10T18:18:01","slug":"the-missing-class-tai-chi-pull-not-push","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/earthfarm.ca\/?p=294","title":{"rendered":"The Missing Tai Chi Class – Pull your body forward"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I missed the tai chi class about shifting body weight.\u00a0 I continued to miss this class for over 30 years until encountering Master Stephen Hwa’s teaching.\u00a0 “The most important step<\/strong> is when you are stepping forward the body weight does not go with the foot until the foot is on the ground and then bring the body weight forward… engaging our core muscle … to pull on the leading foot so you are pulling yourself forward<\/strong> ….”\u00a0 Master Hwa explaining pull forward movement<\/a><\/p>\n

I can choose to pull or push.\u00a0 Shifting to a pull forward movement model remedied years of nagging leg sciatic nerve pain.\u00a0 Pain that would ebb and flow\u00a0 and yet got worse over time despite increasing\u00a0 tai chi practice.\u00a0 I thought it impossible that my tai chi\u00a0 was the root of the nerve pain.\u00a0 In hindsight, tai chi was not the problem, it was me pushing my body mass and jamming muscles, tendons, ligaments together cause nerve irritation.\u00a0 Pulling opens the tissue much as pulling opens the space between a bow’s stave and string.\u00a0 It is useful to think of the human as a single strut bow tensegrity structure.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Missing class summary:<\/p>\n

A body is everything inside its form and has mass.\u00a0 A force is the agent changing movement between the bodies.\u00a0 Force can be external or internal.\u00a0 Force has direction and magnitude.\u00a0 Force can be push or pull.\u00a0 Force\u00a0 applied behind the body\u00a0 is Push.\u00a0 Force applied in front of the body is Pull.\u00a0 Gravity is a pull force from Earth’s mass and pulls my centre of mass to it’s centre.\u00a0 Applied force requires contact with\u00a0 Earth’ s surface to move my body’s mass from here to there .\u00a0 Proprioception is our sense of body position, force, and movement and we feel the\u00a0 applied force as weight or pressure through feet and other contact points.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Skeletal muscle contraction create the internal force applied through contact with Earth’s surface.<\/p>\n

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I missed the tai chi class about shifting body weight.\u00a0 I continued to miss this class for over 30 years until encountering Master Stephen Hwa’s teaching.\u00a0 “The most important step is when you are stepping forward the body weight does not go with the foot until the foot is on the ground and then bring […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-locomotion","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/earthfarm.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/earthfarm.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/earthfarm.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/earthfarm.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/earthfarm.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=294"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/earthfarm.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":510,"href":"https:\/\/earthfarm.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294\/revisions\/510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/earthfarm.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/earthfarm.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/earthfarm.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}