Knee pains are really common in Tai Chi. I remembered my first time (!) when I had a knee pain from doing tai ji training. It was quite frustrating especially when I asked the teacher and all the teacher said was... "yes, there must be something wrong with your stance". The teacher might have good intentions by wanting me to find out on my own, but I wasn't buying it. After that remark, I stopped going to his class completely...
It was not until 2 years later did I find the real reason for the pain in the knee. I must be really unlucky or did not have much fate in meeting teachers. I wonder if this is one of those things you hear about that "when the student is ready the teacher will appear"! I guess I wasn't ready for a long time.
Anyway, just to hope that you don't fall into this trap as well, I hope I can share a bit of my thoughts here on knee pain.
A popular correction for knee pain is that "your knee should point in the direction of your toes". I've tried this for ages, and everytime I find my knee not pointing in that direction, I literally move the knee into that direction. This works for a while, but it's difficult to see where the knee is in some postures (unless you have a mirror or an experienced person who can spot these things!). By the time your head moved round to see where your knee is, you would have moved your knee, thus invalidating your observation. Remember Schrodinger's cat from your physics days? (I can't claim I could, but visually, this theory is easy to remember just because there's a cat involved.) So, what do you do in such a situation?
The answer to this is a seemingly unrelated aspect, SONG KUA! A lot of body pains can be related to this "song kua" but we'll focus on the knee in this article. It's not the knee which is pointing the wrong direction, it's the kua that's not relaxed enough resulting in a wrongly pointed knee! (This was such an epiphany for me at that time!) By relaxing your kua, your knee is automatically allowed to move wherever feels natural, and the natural position is the same direction as the toes! Correcting the knee itself is actually the wrong approach to solving the knee problem. Relaxing the kua is. But correcting the knee is easier to understand and teach. Because, how would you explain what the kua is? Maybe this post might help.
Another common thing I do during training is to "bounce" up and down to test whether I'm in the correct position, and whether the kua is relaxed enough. This, as I've just found today, is very bad for the knee! The knee is already under a lot of pressure, and you're still adding more stress to it! When in the form, just move on, and don't try dance half-way doing the form.
Let me know if these techniques help.
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Tried to test the pingback feature to see if it worked on your blog. Anyhoo, put the comments on my blog:
http://wujimon.wordpress.com/2006/05/04/knee-pains-in-taiji/
Hi, I just found your blog through searching for kua-related info. (I've been researching this for quite some time and IMO, the best info available anywhere on the web can be found at the Internalartsia site, in his interview with Chen master Chen Zhonghua.) FWIW, here's my experience with taiji knee: through hard physical work at my job, and bad taiji practice (which I've hopefully since improved) I messed up my right knee pretty good. For months thereafter, I could get serious stabbing pain - to the yelling stage - when doing normal activities. I never did see a doctor. I babied the knee as best I could, and gave up learning taiji. Later I felt better, and was lucky to discover maverick exercise specialist Matt Furey (he's also a past wrestling and kungfu champ). His "Hindu Squats" exercise fixed my bad knee, seemingly permanently. Now I can do anything I want, squatting-wise, even challenging stuff like Pigua style stance training. And I'm back to learning Chen forms in which I feel I've made progress. Buyer beware; but it worked for me 100% ...Now I'm trying to fix some shoulder issues using Furey's techniques.
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