Sabres and Shoulders; Three Minutes Well Spent

The traditional tai chi chuan weapons include the sabre, the spear and the sword. Like the hand techniques the weapons are learned and practiced both by doing “forms” as well as practicing the individual self-defense techniques. I started learning the right-handed sabre form, in earnest, last summer. It’s about two and a half to three minutes long from start to finish, but as a matter of priorities I was still working on the last of it at the end of the year. Since then doing the sabre form has been a part of my four days a week forms practice.

Like all tai chi forms and all other steep learning curves, everything was extremely difficult in the beginning. There are many places where the right arm is pulled all the way back and the sabre follows the line of the thigh; not too tough. There are several other places where the sabre is swung around the body, the arm brought around and over the head. This is done after a slashing down motion and before a thrust, but at the same time there is a jump, a 270 degree spinning around of the body, and a kind of studder step.

The point of all this is that not too long ago while attending the Thursday night class that I help teach, the instructor had us doing a shoulder flexibility exercise which we had not done in a very long time. To my great surprise and delight, my right shoulder – the one that had been handling the sabre for nine months – was way more flexible than ever before.

It took only a couple seconds of thinking about it before I realized that while I had been doing all that concentrating on the correct performance of the sabre form; while I was noticing that it was slowly getting easier and easier and slowly getting smoother and smoother – I was also developing increased shoulder flexibility. I had noticed how heavy the arm sometimes feels and knew that strength and endurance were developing. I had experienced the soreness in one of the calf muscles and the inside of the thigh near the knee on one side, and knew that that was my body adapting to the “different way of moving” referred to by my teacher. And I had noticed how tight I continue to be, realizing that ever so slowly that too will change and I will be able to relax throughout the form. What I have found and have come to expect with tai chi chuan is that with a modest amount of regular effort (read practice) it will deliver benefits that compound over time.

A great way to loosen up the shoulder and… three minutes well spent.

DD