I am very happy to present this video Bob Amacker produced to give an idea about what is involved in the Yang Style Taichi curriculum.
As you may know from my previous posts I have been studying Taichi since 1971. During that time I studied with many teachers and I feel I learned a lot. Unfortunately, looking back, I see I learned a lot of pieces and I thought it was my job to integrate them into a complete art. I was doing this, of course, out of necessity because I could not find a teacher that knew “the entire art”, until I found Bob and Olesya.
I have been studying with Bob and Olesya Amacker for the last few years and I am very happy with my training and this system. They teach the system created by the Yang family in the 19th century. They teach the entire curriculum: form, single hand push hands, two handed push hands or Touishou (also known as Peng, Loi, Jai, An), Da Lu, 3 Step Push Hands, and Sanshou and, ultimately, freestyle sparring. You see all of this demonstrated in the video above.
The beautiful thing about the curriculum is that it progressively teaches the skills you need to learn in order to use Taichi as a martial art. It is fun, nobody gets hurt because we are being cooperative in order to learn new skills; there is no competitiveness. The skills are definite and you can learn from students at every level, you don’t always need to work with those who are better than you are. Women love studying this way because they are the equal of men; progress is measured by skill development and not by who is stronger or faster or more aggressive. I found another great feature of learning this way is that all the students in the school learn from each other. For several years Bob was traveling and only gave workshops 2 or 3 times a year. Yet during this time I was able to train weekly with several advance students and several times weekly with students at other levels and we all made progress.