Competitive Push Hands

I’m not a big fan of competitive Push Hands in practice. Here’s why.

Competitive Push Hands rewards those practitioners with bad technique. Someone with stiff technique will use their Li, or brute strength to push or pull their opponent off balance. For a master, it would be easy to knock this person off their feet, but since almost no one these days has a high level of yielding skill, it looks as though the brute is more skillful.

In theory, I like Push Hands competitions because they bring together people from different schools and backgrounds and they let people escape their isolated little bubbles of education. Unfortunately, almost everyone forgets the most important rule of learning Taijiquan: Leave your ego at the door.