It's true that many Tai Chi instructors focus primarily on health, relaxation, meditation, or the cultivation of chi. Those are worthwhile aspects of the art.

But Tai Chi was originally created and developed by the Chen family as a martial art. The "energies" and methods of Tai Chi were developed to help you maintain your own balance, structure, and composure while causing an attacker to lose his.

This is the essence of Tai Chi as self-defense: maintaining your center while using the various energies—Ward Off, Roll Back, Press, Push, and others—to detect force, adapt to it, neutralize it, and then counter when the opponent becomes vulnerable.

Ken Gullette hasn't been in a fight outside a ring since he was 18. He doesn't plan to be in a fight, either. But he loves Tai Chi, and he is fascinated by how every movement in a form contains practical martial meaning.

Even if you never use these methods in a self-defense situation, understanding them can transform the way you look at Tai Chi. The forms become more than choreography. The movements begin to make sense. The art becomes deeper, richer, and more complete.

If you study only the health aspects of Tai Chi, you're learning something valuable, if incomplete. If you want to understand why the art was created and what the movements were designed to accomplish, this information is essential.

Tai Chi is practiced slowly when students are learning the proper body mechanics. Then they do push hands, where they learn sensitivity to an opponent's force, how to remain balanced, and they work on timing. It is not an easy process.

Chen Taijiquan includes a lot of explosive movements, jumps, kicks, and as you train, you often practice those moves very quickly. Doing push hands is also often fast, because you are learning to respond at close range to an opponent.

When properly trained, Tai Chi methods are applied at whatever speed the situation requires. The slow practice is the training method; it is not the fighting method.

There is a famous Chen saying: Move like thunder; issue like lightning.

The information and concepts you learn from this DVD will certainly help you understand push hands better, but this material is actually a step higher than basic push hands training. Push hands is a training method that helps prepare you for this. In push hands, you learn the patterns -- single and double-hand -- and you develop sensitivity when someone pushes on you. Then, you start learning how to put them off-balance and counter.

The instruction on this DVD takes the "energies" of Tai Chi and applies them to close-up self-defense, showing you how the concepts are used in real life.

The Tai Chi forms, body mechanics, push hands, and applications all lead to the concepts taught here.