What’s this about?

We hold free, informal gatherings to practise push hands. They take place on the last Saturday of the month in Reading, from 10am until midday.
Check the main page for the date of the next gathering and where it will be held.

Everyone is welcome, as long as they have some experience in one of the Chinese ‘internal’ martial arts such as taijiquan, xingyiquan, yiquan or baguazhang. However, you don’t need to have done any push hands before.

Location

The meetings take place in one of two places: Palmer Park, or a room in the nearby Park United Reform Church. Check the announcement for each month’s gathering to find out which one we’ll be using.

See the directions page for information about how to get there.

Guidelines

We ask that you conform to the following guidelines when pushing hands, especially when you haven’t worked with someone before:

1. We change partners every 10 minutes.
2. Decide with your partner what to do in that 10 minutes (e.g. sensitivity exercises, taijiquan-style pushing hands patterns, yiquan-style pushing hands, freestyle, qinna, etc.).
3. Treat the encounter as a cooperative, exploratory exercise rather than a competition.
4. If your partner asks you to be softer or less aggressive, please conform to their wishes.
5. Unless you are already your partner’s teacher (or unless your partner asks for help), try to avoid telling the other person what to do. (This probably doesn’t apply if your partner is a complete beginner or you’d never get started!)
6. If you and your partner mutually decide to ignore the above, that’s fine – go wild! The only exception is point 1, when obviously everyone present must agree to a change.

Complaints/problems

You can see by the guidelines above that we encourage soft, sensitive and cooperative partner work. However, things can always go wrong and accidents do happen.

These sessions are completely free and informal, so you must take responsibility for yourself and anything which might go wrong. If you aren’t happy with that, don’t take part!

Getting in touch

If you have any questions, leave a comment. Comments are moderated and not normally published, so include your email address or phone number in the comment and someone will get back to you.