London Push Hands Competition 2026

I last entered this Push Hands competition in 2022, where I had two bouts in moving step and didn't compete in fixed step. I wrote about that Tui Shou competition experience in a previous article. This time I was once again curious to see how four additional years of training would show up in my performance.

1. Moving Step

I only had one bout of moving step this time. One competitor pulled out with a minor injury, so the sample size here is about as small as it gets. The opponent I faced was also significantly less experienced than I was, and less experienced than either of the practitioners I faced in 2022, so a direct comparison across the two events is limited.

Still, you can only beat what's in front of you as they say, and because I wasn't under much pressure in this bout, is gave me the opportunity to try and work some things deliberately. Overall I was pleased with how my internal mechanics expressed. The moment I was happiest with was the snap-down (Cai) transitioning into Lie, at 1:00 in the video. The Lie in particular is the sort of thing that either works because the structure underneath it is sound, or doesn't move or uproot the person at all if the structure is incoherant.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/b6a411_a80b61d4066d4c939ac8c5bbef28d537/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

One thing worth stating: I have no regular Tai Chi training partners. I essentially never get the opportunity to practice push hands under a Tai Chi ruleset outside of competition itself. Which means I'm learning on the fly, in the competition, in real time, which is a strange way to develop a skill.

This connects directly to a point I've made elsewhere about the capacity-skill relationship in internal arts training. My solo practice in Laojia Yi Lu has built the underlying capacity, the coherant Peng Jin; the Chen-style body method that everything else expresses through. My MMA grappling training has given me plenty of experience in a live competative environment, but under a completely different rule structure, with different incentives and different available solutions. What I haven't had is the specific laboratory in which Taijiquan-specific skill, expressed through a Taijiquan-specific ruleset, gets calibrated against another person playing the same game.

Competing without that laboratory is a real gap. It's genuinely difficult to develop skill expression when the total time within that ruleset is something like five minutes once a year, if that. I'd like to compete in push hands more regularly, but competitions are infrequent and scattered geographically, so the opportunity isn't easily available.

I feel I would need relatively little time in Taijiquan-specific rulesets to see a significant jump in skill expression, given that the underlying capacity is largely already built. But relatively little is still orders of magnitude more than what I'm currently getting: a few minutes, every few years.

2. Fixed Step

I last entered fixed step eight years ago. I'd never practiced it in quite the way it's done in this competition, and I didn't do well. The rules vary somewhat by competition, but specifically I felt the ruleset of this competition were fairly easy to game without using any real Tai Chi skill, it tends to reward speed off the "go" and a repertoire of learned technique transitions, neither of which requires a developed body method. Which means in my view it's testing for the wrong things, with the wrong incentives built in. For this reason, when I entered the competition again in 2022, I didn't bother with fixed step. It felt like it would be a waste of time and wouldn't even give me useful information about where my skill actually stood.

This time I was curious to revisit it and see whether a now much higher level of structural coherance would translate into a different outcome, even without dedicated practice in the format. My thinking was that at a certain skill level, I should be able to overcome the various strategies and techniques people use to do well at fixed step without actually having a well-developed internal body method.

Indeed, that turned out to be the case, and the way it did was one of the more interesting parts of the whole event for me. The primary factor being that I now have a considerably more coherent tensegrity architecture than the opponents I faced. In both bouts, it played out as I had hoped and expected: I was largely able to push straight through them rather than getting drawn into the fixed-step patty-cake exchanges the format often produces. Most points came from a single push or pull rather than an extended exchange. If it ended up going to an extended exchange, I often lost the point due to lack of experience in this game, but my body method saw me through.

I'm still not a fan of the fixed step ruleset generally. I think it tends to encourage solutions that aren't really Tai Chi solutions. But this time, for the first time, I had enough structural development to use genuinely Tai Chi-based solutions and still win clearly within that ruleset. The victory in both bouts was almost entirely body method, not specific technique. I wasn't deploying a sequence of trained responses, I was occupying a structural position the other person could do very little with. I didn't film the fixed step bouts at this competition, but I won both, and I will feel significantly more confident entering fixed step competitions going forward.

3. What This Actually Shows

What this shows, in a small and personal way, is the central claim running through the body method and capacity-skill material on this site: that the work done in solo practice, the Peng, the Song, the routing of force through a coherent structure rather than isolated muscular effort, doesn't stay theoretical. It shows up in a context that has nothing to do with practicing it in isolation, against someone actively trying to prevent you from expressing it.

It also exposes the limits of training without a same-game laboratory. I could genuinely feel the improvement in my body method from four more years of solo training. But I'm still very much lacking when it comes to feeling and capitalising on split-second opportunities under pressure, the kind of timing and decision-making that can only be built through repeated exposure to this specific ruleset, against people playing the same game. Capacity has developed. Skill, in this particular arena, is still waiting for its laboratory.

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