A firm stable foundation ground work is a building block to success

Weight transfer is one of the most important principles in any sports (such as dancing) and in the internal martial arts (such as Tai Chi). By doing weight transfer well, it could make your movement more breezy and flexible.

Tai Chi basic step is very good to catch the feeling of moving weight. This weight transfer is one of the most crucial elements in Tai Chi for all practitioners, as other sophisticated moves are generated from this point. Weight transfer may appear to be easy, but to do it well, it took a lot of time and quite often, people overlooked this crucial element when doing Tai Chi.

However, a well-trained sophisticated practitioner knows well,
“The reason why we practice the basic first is that the foundation work is the utter most important thing, not because it is easy.”

Knowingly, a well-trained sophisticated practitioner’s ability does not built up in a short time frame, it is grounded from doing the basic foundation work over time, practicing, shaping and making its their own 100%. By doing this for a long period of time, they could feel the weight transfer, and be able to control it tightly to their leisure during training, thus ultimately advance their level.

Thus, they always treat the foundation ground work very sincerely, and practice it over and over whenever they are free.
You could distinguish a higher level well trained practitioner from a lower level practitioner by how well they treat and train in the basic foundation ground work such as weight transfer. A low level trainer always treats the basic foundation ground work lightly. They practice the basic roughly as they think it is easy, so anyone can do it. They try to hurry to learn high level skills only. This is impossible as their basic foundation ground work is not stable and firm.

On the other hands, a high level trainer treats basic foundation ground work very important.
The basic starts in an earliest time to build a stronger, powerful stable foundation building block for later advance sophisticate steps to build on top of. We need to think carefully why we want to master the most basic foundation steps first in order to build for later use, not because it is easy to do.

The powerful and stylish skills come from having a firm stable basic foundation ground work naturally.
I request all trainers to practice the basic foundation ground work over and over again, until you can do it very well. Everything comes from building a good foundation ground work in order to succeed. Next time, I will discuss more about weight transfer which is one of the foundation ground works.