Tai Chi!

I signed up for a Tai Chi class this fall. Why Tai Chi? It didn't seem too strenuous and it looked interesting, something where I can work on my flexibility. I'm not flexible at all. It does however seem to be graceful, I'm also not very graceful, but Toni is signing up with me, I sure hope she's not graceful either....that would be nice so I don't have to look like a dork by myself, although I'm sure used of it. Here's a little exerpt on Tai Chi shamelessly stolen from wikipedia.org



As the name T'ai Chi Ch'üan is held to be derived from the T'ai Chi symbol, the taijitu or t'ai chi t'u (太極圖, pinyin tàijítú), commonly known in the West as the "yin-yang" diagram, T'ai Chi Ch'üan techniques are said therefore to physically and energetically balance yin (receptive) and yang (active) principles: "From ultimate softness comes ultimate hardness."

The core training involves two primary features: the first being the solo form or ch'üan, a slow sequence of movements which emphasize a straight spine, relaxed breathing and a natural range of motion; the second being different styles of pushing hands or t'ui shou (推手) for training "stickiness" and sensitivity in the reflexes through various motions from the forms in concert with a training partner in order to learn leverage, timing, coordination and positioning when interacting with another. Pushing hands is seen as necessary not only for training the self-defense skills of a soft style such as T'ai Chi by demonstrating the forms' movement principles experientially, but also it is said to improve upon the level of conditioning provided by practice of the solo forms by increasing the workload on students while they practice those movement principles.