How to.. Each week, ET entertainments reporter Duncan Hall tries out a new activity. This week, Duncan tries out:
How to.. Tai chi
WHEN I was on holiday in San Francisco I saw a group practising tai chi in a city garden.
I remember taking a well-earned breather from struggling up and down the sheer vertical heights of the city and admiring the complex movements that every member of the group was carrying out.
I remember thinking it seemed a lot
easier than lugging yourself around a roasting hot city, but the complex moves put me off ever thinking about trying it myself.
That was until I joined the Taoist Tai Chi Society of Great Britain’s meeting in Millfield Community Centre last week.
The group, which is run by volunteers, meets on Wednesday mornings for a couple of hours, with different classes available according to ability.
I joined the main class, and was taken through the first four moves of the 108 that made up the Taoist Tai Chi set.
Leader of the class Jean Gayler took up the activity after she had a replacement hip, and found it helped her so much she wanted to share it with
others.
A fairly formidable taskwoman, she took the whole class back to the beginning to re-learn the first few moves by doing them three times on her own, doing them three times with us and then watching us do it three times.
Each move seemed simple, but I soon found it was all in the execution. Every move is very deliberate, and required my greatest fear – moving your arms and legs at the same time!
It wasn’t long before I found myself entering a co-ordination nightmare, but with a bit of help and guidance by Jean, long-time club member Felicity Russell and the rest of the extremely friendly class, I was soon grasping the bird’s tail with the best of them.
The true extent of the 108 moves was demonstrated to me at the end when I tried to keep up with the whole class as they went through it.
The unique form of Tai Chi, which was developed by Master Moy Lin-Shin, takes between four to six months to learn and takes a good quarter of an hour to go through.
As I attempted to follow everyone around me I could feel my joints creaking and long-unused muscles stretching. In fact, only a few hours after I finished the class I could feel stiffness in stomach muscles which had obviously been worked out by the session.
But it felt good as I moved around almost in sequence with the people around me – and when I stepped back and saw the class moving as one it was very impressive.
Several members told me they had initially felt self-conscious when carrying out the moves until they realised everyone around them was doing exactly the same thing and didn’t give a hoot what they were doing.
Jean said: “We don’t claim it cures anything. But it helps an awful lot with concentration, it helps with balance, it makes you more flexible, we work on the spine to make it more flexible.”
The form the group used was developed to make it easier for Westerners. It was suitable for all ages, although the group does not take under-15s, and you did not have to be 100 per cent fit to do it.
She added: “It works the whole body, every movement you make works some part of the body, even the internal organs.
“We do it from an elementary level down to a sophisticated level so you are always learning something from it.”