Push Hands

Push hands (推手, Tuishou) is the two-person method of Tai Chi Chuan. Solo form trains the shapes; push hands tests whether the shapes survive contact with another person’s force. It is the laboratory of the art, and the Taijiquan Treatise is its rulebook.[1]

Method

Partners face each other and maintain forearm-to-forearm contact through a fixed cycle: peng (ward off), lu (roll back), ji (press), an (push). The four directions grow into four corners, and the corners into free practice. Sensitivity — the ability to read the partner’s balance through contact — is the skill the drill exists to build, and it transfers in only one direction: from compliant drilling to freer rounds.

The four errors

The Treatise defines the disqualifying faults: lifting the head and leaning (仰之則彌高), butting in (頂), losing contact (丟), and resisting (抗). Each error is a failure of the same principle — force meeting force, or force evading contact. A round in which neither partner commits these errors is by definition a round of listening energy, and this standard, not winning, is what the classical texts set for the practice.

In the Yang curriculum

Yang Chengfu’s teaching — documented in his biography — placed pushing hands beside the form as one unit of method: the form develops the vehicle, push hands develops the reading. The Golden Eagle schools taught both fixed-step and moving-step push hands as a required pairing with the long form.

[1] Treatise of Taijiquan — four errors passage; archive translation with source text.