Pushing Hands practice is a fundamental requirement if you hope to use TJQ as an effective martial art. But it should be noted that excessive focus on these skills can deceive practitioners into over estimating their true martial ability often because they don't understand how the pushing hand skills are adapted for use in combat.

One of TJQ's main strategies is using the skills of: connect, stick, adhere and follow. Put simply this means when an opponent attacks you should evade the attack and then try to make contact with your opponent so that you can engineer an opening to counter attack.

Doing this effectively requires a good deal of practice and the ability to remain relaxed under pressure. Pushing hands practice is used to help develop these skills.

Training usually starts with simple single handed exercises that establish basic skills and an understanding of body mechanics. Practice would then move on to double handed drills and stepping drills.

Stepping drills are particularly important as they improve footwork and evading

skills.

Once a degree of understanding has been reached practice can then move onto "free style" practice. This involves trying to use all of the various skills developed in the fixed drills in a more spontanious unplanned way.

One comparitvely recent development in pushing hands is that of pushing hands competitions.

These usually involve some type of freestyle practice where competitors try to throw each other over, out of a

given area or off a raised platform.

Competitions can be great fun if you are competitively minded. However the danger is that practice regimes can become unbalanced. This is similar to other martial arts that focus on various types of sparring methods. Again great fun and a useful training tool but each method is restricted in certain ways; pushing hands no strikes, semi contact sparring limited power, full contact sparring restrictive range of targets etc. All methods should be used to ensure balanced practice and the avoidance of developing bad and potentially dangerous habits. If you're a reading this and you are an experienced practicing martial artist ask a training partner to spar with you with the understanding that strikes to eyes, knees and groin are allowed (no protection gear).

If you've never done this before you will almost certainly find it an unnerving experience and most worryingly you'll find that most of what you have trained in will suddenly leave you feeling very exposed! When I've suggested this to people in the past some have told me that they didn't even have to throw or receive a punch to realise that their entire training method had to be reviewed.

I first experienced this during free fighting for senior grades when I was training in Lau Gar Kung Fu in the 1970's. This understanding and several years service in the Police Force have been used to evaluate all applications I have learnt or been taught, sad to say the vast majority of martial applications that I have been taught invariably fail the reality test.