Tai Chi and Knee Pain

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In previous posts I’ve mentioned that over the past few years it’s become increasingly common for Tai Chi practice to be recommended as a form of physical therapy for patients suffering from an assortment of ailments. However, as with any form of exercise, Tai Chi practice can cause more harm than good if done improperly.

The American Academy of Orthopedics Surgeons has previously indicated that knee injuries constitute the largest category of injury in the US. In their book, Save Your Knees, Fox and McGuire estimate that 1 in every 4 Americans have suffered knee pain or injuries. Tai Chi’s slow measured movements and focus on relaxation would therefore seem to be the ideal cure for this rampant condition. That's why it's such a surprise then to find that there are claims and reports of a prevalence of knee injuries among American Tai Chi practitioners.

Most people who claim that there is such a rampant occurrence of knee injuries among Tai Chi practitioners cite Dr. Jay Dunbar’s 1991 doctoral thesis, wherein 60% of the 216 Tai Chi teachers surveyed stated that they, and/or their students, suffered from knee injuries. To date I have not found any other study to corroborate these claims, nor have I personally observed any such prevalence of knee injuries among experienced practitioners. However I have observed several Tai Chi demonstrations wherein students bend and move their legs in ways that are, without a doubt, causing them to strain their knees. In The Complete Book of Tai Chi Chuan, Wong Kiew Kit states his belief that this is a phenomenon unique to American practitioners, and one likely due to improper form and faulty teaching; I believe that he is correct.

Among my students many arrive to their first class complaining of different health problems, and yes knee pain is fairly common among them. However, after training for a few months these health issues generally fade away or drastically improve. One issue that has popped up occasionally is unexpected joint pain or soreness among students who’ve been practicing for a few years. They complain that their joints sometimes feel sore after pushing hands or forms practice. This is an immediate red flag; these are people who’ve over come joint injuries that plagued them for year thanks to their diligent Tai Chi practice. Suddenly feeling sore after class means something is very wrong.

I always remind these students that one of the most important parts of correct Tai Chi practice is listening, specifically to their own bodies. Any sudden joint pain or soreness is their body letting them know that they are doing something wrong. If they don’t listen and insist on trying to push past the pain they will only injure themselves, possibly permanently. So I have them run through their practice until they can pinpoint what movements or posture are causing them pain. I have them freeze in the position where is hurts and then take a look at themselves. Where does it hurt? What is supporting, or being supported by the body part in pain? They very quickly realize that the pain and soreness are being caused by either improper body alignment or excessive muscular strain. Once they correct this the pain suddenly disappears. In other words if they relax, listen and fix their practice the pain suddenly goes away; trying to push through the pain was only making things worse and going completely against the core principles of Tai Chi.

The most common problem I’ve seen is that students try to shift their weight while 1-straining their muscles to hold a low stance and 2- shearing their knees because their legs aren’t properly aligned. To address this:

1-Always remember the Tai Chi principle, “use 4 ounces to overcome 1 thousand pounds”. Simply put, if your body is relaxed and properly aligned you will never need to strain your muscles to generate or redirect great force. However this requires the practitioner to maintain muscular relaxation and mindfulness when they face heavy pressure. It’s hard to condition the mind to adopt this as a response to external pressure, so most students fall back into the habit of trying to use brute strength and hurt themselves in the process. Always remember: Song (Relax), when you face pressure relax your body and focus on maintaining proper body alignment. Any external pressure will slide right off you that way.

2- Speaking of proper body alignment, remember to rotate and shift your weigh with your hips. Make sure your knees are always aligned with your feet. Never let your knees bend past your toes, and preferably keep your knees bent directly above your metatarsals (the center of your foot). When shifting your weight rotate from the hip, never from your ankles or knees. (For a more in depth discussion refer to my post on the Six Harmonies principle).

These two reminders alone solve about 90% of my student’s complaints. It would also fix most of the problems I’ve seen with the demonstrations I previously mentioned. This all leads me to conclude that Wong Kiew Kit is correct in his assessment that too many students are failing to apply proper Tai Chi principles and their teachers are failing to correct them, either because they don’t know any better or because they are inattentive of their students. Either way as a student and a person always remember to be mindful of, and listen to, your body; ultimately it’s your responsibility and you are the one that will pay the penalty for any wrong moves you make. Relax and listen to what your body is trying to tell you, that is always your best guideline.

“Secrets” in the Martial Arts

                I occasionally get asked about “secret” techniques or applications. While there are historical records of secret techniques or applications in history they are not unbeatable. An example of an old secret technique is il passato sotto, a dodge and low counter thrust on-the-pass (with a forward-outward step), which many Italian Renaissance fencing instructors often taught to wealthy students at great cost as a secret technique.

Historically there has been a long running tradition of visualizing martial artists as possessing supernatural levels of skill and power in the popular imagination. There have been multiple reasons for this phenomenon throughout time.  Often martial artists have sought to reinforce this stereotype themselves for that simplest and most primal of reasons; intimidation. Tacticians have always made a point of emphasizing that if your opponent is afraid of you at least half your battle has already been won. The key to successfully implementing such a boast is the same as for any other bluff; that the opponent can’t know what you’re hiding.

There is no such thing as a perfect technique or an unbeatable attack. We live in a world that imposes many physical laws on our movements and these affect our techniques whether or not we like it. As a result any and every attack or technique has a weakness or vulnerability that can be exploited. However it’s much more difficult to recognize and exploit those weaknesses if we don’t know what attack is coming our way or if it’s very different from what we have previously encountered. If we’re already scared of an unknown technique our minds slow down and it becomes nearly impossible to overcome an unknown “ultimate” or “secret” technique. Countless fighters have exploited this very phenomenon to great effect. So the word has spread, over time, of lethal and unstoppable “secret” techniques and as so often happens, memories become gossip and gossip become legends.

Sadly this has lead many adept martial arts students to wrongly believe that such a thing as an “unbeatable secret technique” exists. This is not true of course, there are countless powerful techniques which are difficult to counter, especially if they are not known to the opponent, but they all have some weakness. Continuing with the example of the passato sotto mentioned earlier fencing historians all agree that as the technique became more widely known it stopped being a secret (obviously) and counter movements began to appear.

On the other hand, many young students have, in their ignorance, bought into the legends. This can lead to two different problems; they either underestimate themselves because they feel that they have not received any “secret” technique and are therefore less able than those who claim to have learned such techniques, or they actually believe that they have learned some unbeatable technique from their teachers (sadly there are many unscrupulous “teachers” out there) and now think that they are invincible. Both are very wrong and can be very dangerous mindsets for the student to have on the day that he/she needs to apply them in real self defense.

The fact is that the only “secrets” some teachers do hide is attention to detail. The student is taught a form and that’s it; no explanations about the correct posture, body alignment, weight distribution, breathing, timing, applications, focus, intention, vulnerabilities, possible combinations  with other movements, possible counters, etc. This usually happens because the teacher has either lost conscious awareness of these minute details after years of personal practice, or simply is unfamiliar with them himself (in the case of the latter this lack of mindfulness in movement is visible to an experienced fighter; as with any expert athlete when they execute their technique it should look flawless and effortless).

Another possibility is that the teacher would choose to hide this knowledge from all but a few students. This was a popular practice in the age before firearms, when knowledge of martial techniques could mean the difference between life and death by giving the practitioner the power to hurt or kill opponents. Some teachers felt a moral obligation to hide some or all of the applications from those they did not deem of high moral fiber. Others chose to hide the details behind the movements for personal benefit; after all if no one else knew their techniques they could hardly defend against them. However the value of martial arts purely as a form of self defense has decreased as firearms have become preferred tool of defense. Therefore moral and self defense issues have ceased to be a reason to hide the details behind techniques.

Therefore know that the so called secret techniques or secret applications to known techniques are merely a matter of learning proper body mechanics through diligent and mindful solo practice and employing them in partnered practice to identify what techniques and applications work, and when and how best to employ them. The only real secret is finding a qualified teacher who can help you learn the techniques and all the little details within them then practice until it flows naturally and smoothly. That’s what kung fu is, high skill acquired by diligent practice. That is all the “secret” really is.

On folklore

It is common practice with any group to see stories swell in their scope with every telling. Facts become blurred, and certain truths are lost. The “fish” gets bigger the longer it's been since it got away. This happens for several reasons, not the least of which is the way our memory works so that only those things that most strongly impact us are held strongly in our minds while everything else becomes blurred. As a result things that felt huge at the time become ever larger in our minds as time goes by.
This mental phenomenon is only one part of the change in stories. The other is the so called “poetic license”. Storytellers need to enrapture their audience one way or another, and a very simple and effective method is to make things viscerally powerful. Things that are larger than life jump out at us and capture our attention. We all wish we could be the mighty hero who overcomes incredible (often impossible) odds, going far beyond the limits of ordinary humans (and well beyond the laws of the natural world). Thus a brave man who performs a bold act slowly becomes a superhuman warrior of legendary feats, a hero immortalized for many generations to come.
Lastly, over time, we hear the same story so often that we become accustomed to the bold act, becoming desensitized to how amazing it truly was. Like a junkie who needs increasingly higher dosages, the deed needs to become greater with each telling in order for the audience to continue to be impressed. As a result stories and feat become ever greater in a constant exercise of “one-up-manship”, a perfect example of which is Monty Python's skit about a group of older gentlemen who complain about the ungrateful nature of the younger generation who don't appreciate how much easier their lives are as opposed to the difficult childhood each of these men experienced. They then take turns telling how horribly difficult their lives were, each one worse than the last. Things quickly go to ridiculous extremes, with the gentlemen claiming their entire 20 member families lived in a shoebox in a whole in the road, worked 36 hours each day at the nearby mill, without food, then returned home and were killed by their father before going to bed each night.
Cultural tales of heroism suffer from these same phenomenon, doubly so the stories of mythical martial artists of the past. As I mentioned earlier this comes at the cost of losing important an important truth, since the feat has been blown so completely out of proportion we can't really know what the true original feat was. Without a realistic measure of what happened we can't know what truly happened, and therefore we can't gauge how truly great the ancient deed truly was in comparison to our own efforts.
However not all truth is lost. The dramatics and theatrics that obscure the realism of the tale also work to highlight lessons and teachings. The oral stories and traditions should not be blindly accepted as factual truth, but rather as moral stories. They can highlight important messages and teachings. They may simultaneously preserve and obscure unexpected applications of certain movements or techniques. They preserve an ideal (and therefore impossible) goal for the individual practitioner and the art as a whole, which functions as the carrot on a stick that helps them continuously move forward and evolve, always striving to improve.
Therefore listen to the stories, to the myths and legends. Hear them carefully and with a critical eye and you will find nuggets of wisdom and great lessons. In this way they become more than blindly believed tales, they becomes lessons to help us learn to analyze and be critical thinkers rather than to be indoctrinated fools. Listen and be mindful, open your heart, your ears and your mind; if you do you'll find that the tales become truly do become more amazing with each telling, teaching us more each time.