A great push hander
May 1, 2006
One of my teachers said, a good push-hander is someone whom you can’t test his intentions but end up being led away. With a great push-hander, you won’t even realise that he or she has led you away because it looked so effortless that you thought it’s all your fault for losing your own footing!
And what happens when 2 great push-handers meet? they’ll just touch each other (at the wrists of course) and know who’s less competent. Of course, that’s all speculation. It’ll be good to actually witness such a concrete example! Let me know if someone actually managed to arrange such a contest.
Such a contest might be boring to watch if all they did is touch for a few seconds and start congratulating each other’s Gong Fu! Maybe it’s ego at stake and they would like to give/keep their “faces”. We’ll never really know what happened. Only the push-handers themselves will know. That might be the main point though. Push hand is to test the push-handers, not a demonstrative sport. It’s meant to test your own skills, not to show others that you’ve pushed someone 10 feet away.
