Learning From Videos

Not! Well, let's set the Wayback machine to around 8 or 9 years ago. My friend Marie was telling me about her Tai Chi experiences and I'd seen clips of Chinese people practicing in the park and I thought, hey, I can do that! So of course, instead of seeking out a class I went to the video store. I think it was Borders in Santa Fe. At any rate, I looked through all the titles like "Tiffany's New Age Tai Chi Workout," and "Relaxercize," and (don't even think about the David Carradine one-- although he was pretty cool in Kill Bill) and so forth. I finally settled on one by Dr. Paul Lam. Dr. Lam has a whole series of Tai Chi videos like "Tai Chi for Arthritis," "Tai Chi for Back Pain," and so forth. Sounds hookey, but what he has done is to modify Sun Style Tai Chi into shorter forms that focus on specific parts of the form that seem to work well with certain health problems like back pain, etc. It turned out much later that I would learn two or three of those modified forms from Ron (teacher #2)... but I digress! I think I might have learned the opening form (raising hands) from the Lam video and got the idea that relaxing was crucial. I learned the very important technique of placing the tongue against the roof of the mouth, but other than that I was pretty lost. You will miss a lot unless you know what to look at. You can't see behind the person or ask them to turn around. You will not have any feedback or corrections. And because the video is "frozen in time" the movements you watch will never vary; this is significant because you need to adapt the form to your own sense of space, time and movement rather than copy something exactly. I do use videos as reference quite a lot, sometimes watching a sequence hundreds of time (really) until I think I understand it. But nothing can substitute for a teacher and a group of other students to follow in real time.