Yang Tai Chi Chuan

Yang style tai chi chuan, despite its enormous popularity, still remains a mystery, among its practitioners as well as in hard style circles. Hard style devotees see the Yang style as an “old people’s dance”, “hospital tai chi chuan”, far from an effective self-defence.

But folklore has it that Huang Sheng Shyan of Malaysia, the student of Cheng Man Ching, demonstrated push-hands applications in which he sent people flying without apparently touching them. Nobody could believe their eyes, so they dismissed it, happily concluding it must be some sort of hoax, a prearranged exercise or a case of mass-hypnosis.

Since master Huang’s death in 1993, several of his best students have continued passing on the skill as taught by him. Practising push-hands with one of them, how does it feel? On a good day, I can feel it as five to ten percent physical movement, ninety to ninety five percent energy wave.

	SHIFU DAMIR TENODI, 1982
	SIFU DR. TSAO DE TSONG AND SHIFU DAMIR TENODI, 1980
	SHIFU DAMIR TENODI, 1992, A SINGLE WHIP, ANAN-DO LONG YANG FORM