Tag Archives: Taijiquan

My Qi Gong birth story

I already talked about how I practiced Taijiquan and Qi Gong during my pregnancies. You might want to read that post first, because it will help you to understand my Qi Gong birth story:  My story about practicing Qi Gong and Taijiquan during pregnancy. 

First of all, I would like to tell you that my Qi Gong birth story is a natural birth story. And both my kids were born in a hospital. I will not go into bloddy details about the pain and everything, I will just share how I benefited from my Taijiquan and Qi Gong experience during those two natural births.

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Should you call your Tai Chi teacher “Sifu”?

When you want to learn Tai Chi, you will notice many more or less strange things. People wearing silk pajamas as martial arts clothes, Yin Yang symbols and martial arts weapons everywhere, not to speak of all the strange Chinese words (e.g. 太極拳 or 氣功). And if you’ve read your fare share of martial arts books and movies, you probably ask yourself: should I call my teacher “Sifu”?

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How many people practice Tai Chi Chuan / Taijiquan?

Some days ago, I wanted to find out how many people practice Tai Chi (Taijiquan). And I stumbled across a sentence in this article:

“It is estimated that Tai Chi has the largest group of practitioners in the world as a form of exercise.”

Say WHAT??? So far, everyone I talked to, told me that there are so few people doing Taijiquan. And that Yoga dominates everything. As the article is from 2008, I thought maybe it is outdated. I mean, the Yoga trend has clearly picked up some traction since then.

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Why it’s important to practice what you’ve learnt in Taijiquan or Qi Gong class

Qialance blogger Angelika Fritz with Chen Bin at a Chen style Taijiquan workshop

Recently I went to a workshop with Chen Bin, son of Chen Zhenglei. It was about the Chen style basics, so we did a lot of pole standing (Zhan Zhuang), Silk Reeling exercises (Chan Si Gong) and footwork.

And of course, Chen Bin talked to us about various other topics. At one point he talked about how important it is to not only go to class, but to practice for oneself, too. That class is to LEARN something, but it is necessary to PRACTICE it, too. He gave a really good example of that:

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