How to calculate your tai chi skill level

Do you know how good you are at tai chi? If you have only been doing it for a for a few months it's pretty obvious you're only a beginner. Likewise, if you've practiced every day for 40 years you're going to be at a pretty high level - but most of us are somewhere in the middle.

Working out how good you are is not straightforward. Unlike external martial arts (like karate) there is no belt system to gauge progress [irrespective that most belt systems are primarily about revenue generation rather than true skill level, but let's not go there]. Although push hands can theoretically be used to gauge how good you are compared to your peers, it takes quite a high level of skill before this is actually a meaningful measure of tai chi skill, rather than just a form of "wrestling" and a result of hard strength rather than technique.

What I am going to do here therefore is set out a formula that you can use to calculate your approximate level of tai chi skill.

This calculation came about through two experiences that I had recently. First of all reading the The five levels of taijiquan book by Master Jan Silberstorff. This book defines some approximate time periods needed to achieve specific levels of tai chi skill. It gives some constraints which (combined with some assumptions) can be used to construct a formula for calculating your level of tai chi skill.

The second experience was attending a recent Easter training camp with Master Wang Hai Jun. Master Wang frequently speaks about the amount of training and effort required to progress in tai chi. Again he gave some specific numbers, combined with traditional teachings and sayings, that can be used to derive a tai chi skill calculation formula.

Plug in some numbers and out pops your approximate tai chi skill level - at least that's the idea. The premise of this approach is that "there are no secrets" as Cheng Man Ch'ing famously said. There are no secret techniques or shortcuts, the only way to get good is to practice. A lot.

Show your working

So, let's begin with the derivation, like any good maths student should. [For those of you who are not mathematically minded, or are simply not interested in why I have done what I have done, I suggest you skip over these explanations and graphs, to the end of this article and the "results" (such as they are)].

The first postulate that I'm going to make is that learning tai chi is a cumulative process. The more you practice, the better you get. I'm also going to assume that your skill level increases in a linear fashion. If one person practices twice as much as another person, they will be twice as good - which I think is a reasonable simplification to begin with. Basically, how good you are is directly proportional to your total practice time.

Now in order to gauge skill we need some objective measure of performance. Master Silberstorff's book expands upon the well-known five levels of tai chi skill outlined by Chen Wang Xiao. The result of my formula is therefore going to tell you what level you are using this yard stick. The only change is that (without loss of generality) I extend this concept from these discrete levels, to a continuous function so that more than likely you're going to end up being level 1.34 (or something).

The other thing I am going to define is that it is exponentially more difficult to go up the levels as you progress. This is a bit of an arbitrary assumption, but I can't really find any quantitative information on how much better someone at level 1 is compared to level 2 (say). So I'm going to define that each level results in a twofold skill level increase. Hence someone at level 4, is twice as good (whatever "good" means) as someone at level 3. And someone at level 3, is twice as good as someone at level 2. Level 2 is twice level 1, and so by implication someone at level 4 is eight times "better" than someone at level 1.

We can now put the bare bones of our formula together. As this is cumulative and linear, we can say that our tai chi skill is purely a function of how many hours of training we have put in. All I need is to introduce some constant that allows the mapping from number of hours training to skill level. Something like:

Skill level = constant *  number of hours training

Now I use the five levels book, to determine what this constant should be. The book gives the following two reference points. That a practitioner should be able to reach level (the top of) 1 after one year of training and (the top of) level 3 after seven years. The crucial point though is that this is for a student in the traditional model i.e. a young chinese disciple who gives up his life to live with his master as his apprentice, training extremely hard every day. [Note that it is one year to level 1, a further two years to get to level 2, and then another four years to get to level 3 = 7 years in total, which does fit with my exponential increase in skill level assumption that I made above, if you assume the student progresses at a continuous rate].

An assumpton is now required here. I'm going to say that this dedicated disciple is probably going to train on average about four quality hours per day. This is unlikely to be in one go, so if you allow time for warm-ups and occasional rests on top of that, you're more than likely talking about 5 to 6 hours of actual training time per day. I think that this is a reasonable long-term sustainable level (if it is your primary "job") but I'm happy to be corrected and would not be surprised if it was more.

This now allows us to calculate the constant which turns out to be 0.000018265. Below is the plot of this simple function on a graph of time versus skill level for this traditional student. We can see that the student is approximately at level 1 after the first year and approximately at level 3 after the seventh year. Note that the both the scales are logarithmic.

Time vs skill level for a traditional student practising for  4 hours every day

Even at this stage, this simple formula now allows us to do a bit of experimenting. Imagine (and this may not be too hard) that you are not this traditional disciple, but are only able to practice a bit each day. The following graph is a demonstration of how long it will take you to reach the top of level 1 given a different amount of practice each day. Note that I express the amount time for daily practice in the number of Laojia's (the chen style 74-movement long form) performed per day. This is the way the Master Wang Hai Jun expresses training. 

A Laojia takes about 15 minutes to do, so 15 laojia's represents about ~4 hours of training/day (but remember you need to add warmup time on to that). This graph shows that if you only do about a quarter of an hour of training each day, it's going to take you about 5,500 days (~15 years) to reach the top of level 1. If you do somewhere between 1 to 1.5 hours per day you'll be there in about 3 years. Our disciple does 4 hours a day and gets there in 1 year.

Number of days to reach the bottom of level 2, given different amounts of daily regular practice.

The uphill battle

Now we need to add in the second major component of the skill calculation formula. Master Wang describes learning tai chi as like riding a bicycle uphill - if you stop pedalling you go backwards. He also talks about the commonly used traditional saying that "one day missed is 10 days back". In other words you need to train absolutely every single day, otherwise you are seriously hurting your efforts. Tai chi skill is a cumulative thing, but every day you don't practice, you have to add "negative skill" to your current level.

Working out how to represent this analytically turns out to be a bit tricky. After all, what if you missed two days of practice in in a row? Are you now 20 days back? 11 days back? What about if you missed 10 days in a row? Equally, if you happen to have trained twice as long as normal for the previous 10 days, surely if you miss a day it's not going to be as bad as if you had not trained twice as hard?

The "one day missed is 10 days back" is a reference point, but it is only saying as Master Wang acknowledges and goes on to elaborate. He says that once you have reached a higher level, this fact is less of an issue and you can take the occasional day off without significant detriment. What this means, is that the amount of degradation in your tai chi skill, if you don't practice for a day, is dependent on your current skill level.

For simplicity of my formula I choose to make the degradation inversely proportional to your current skill level. The higher your level of tai chi, the less skill you will "lose" if you miss a day's training. Tai chi is like cycling up a hill, but the higher up the hill you get, the flatter the gradient becomes. Intuitively this makes sense, someone who has been practising for decades could miss a month or two (say through injury), but would be able to recover reasonably quickly. Someone who goes along to a few classes and then has several months break, is likely to find themselves back at square one.

Skill level change per day with no training = constant / current skill level

In order to work out what this second constant should be I make assumption that this "one day missed is 10 days back" saying is really aimed at someone who is just starting to learn. It is designed as encouragement to keep consistency in the early phases. I arbitarily choose this to be someone who is at level 0.5.

To quantify "10 days back", I will assume that student is following the advice of their teacher. Master Wang says that in order to make progress in tai chi you need to be doing at least five laojia's a day. However to only maintain your level (i.e. for health) he says you need to be doing two or three (i.e. ~30-45mins) per day. Hence, missing a day when you are at level 0.5 is equivalent to losing 25 laojia's worth of training. Using this constraint, it turns out that this degradation constant is 0.0014.

Impact of taking days off for people in the early years of their tai chi training.

The above graph shows the effect of missing days training for someone who is in the relatively early phases of learning tai chi. Each of these four curves represent the same total amount of training per week (one laojia per day). However in each of these cases the distribution of training and rest days is altered. The graph clearly shows that unless you train each and every single day, you never really get off the ground (if you only do 15mins per day average). I believe this is what the traditional wisdom is trying to say. Other graphs show that if you start at much higher level, say at level 3, your good work is not undone so rapidly, and you can maintain your level with days off. So that's a bit of a reward to look forward to after earning it with your initial years of dedication and hard work.

The formula

So here we go then with the tai chi level skill calculation formula. I have set it up to be a recurrence relation, so your level at (the end of) day n depends on your level at day n-1 and the amount of practice you did on day n. My units for "the amount of practice", p, is a points system I previously thought up for my particular style. However, for use in a different style 15 minutes is effectively 10 points. But remember, you can't include warm-ups etc. You only get points for concentrated effort, not for time spent standing around in your dojo. The reason I prefer points to time, is to reinforce this distinction. 

So we actually have quite a simple formula. I'm sure the constants could use some tweaking, but the aim of this is to give a first order approximation to your skill level. A sort of mathematical rule of thumb.

My temptation would be to spend a long time trying to refine and extend the formula to include second-order effects, but I'll resist as I don't think that's actually a very fruitful thing to be doing. This is supposed to be a guide, not an accurate measure. Everybody's situation is different, and so for any particular individual the formula is going to be more or less correct, but on average across everone, it should be a good approximation. As an aside however here are some thoughts on refinements and second-order effects:

• Natural talent: Some people are going to be naturally more suited to tai chi than others and are going to improve faster. Equally other people might lose tai chi skill on days off at different rates. It's a fact of life and nothing can account for that.
• Your teacher: How good your instruction is will make a big difference, as will how often you attend class. Mathematically I can imagine this is as an additional term in the function related to the difference between your skill level and your teacher's skill level. When the difference is big (your teacher is at much higher level than you), you will improve more rapidly.
• Intensity: There is no doubt that it is not quite a linear cumulative process. Training for 20 hours over five days is better than training for 20 hours over 20 days. In formula terms, I imagine representing this as a derivative - a feedback so that the steeper the gradient of the recent past, the greater the improvement per "practice point".

A lookup guide to your tai chi skill level (a.k.a "the results")

So we're done with the maths now. [Welcome back all those of you who jumped ahead!].

Having developed a formula we can now put it to work. Of course you can use the formula yourself for your own circumstances to calculate your skill level estimate, but at this point it's probably sufficient to provide a few examples. Hopefully, one of these is reasonably close to what you actually do, and you can just use these guides and a bit of a fudge, to guess what level you might be.

Below is a table that sets out the amount of training time needed to reach level 1.0 and level 3.0 given a daily training regime. Remember though this is a rigorous daily training regime which means training each and every single day, without exception.

Training regime	Time to Level 1.0 (years)	Time to level 3.0 (years)
15 mins per day every day	15	127
30 mins per day every day	8	64
1 hour per day every day	4	32
2 hour per day every day	2	16
4 hour per day every day (the traditional chinese disicple)	1	7

The problem is that most of us mere mortals find it difficult to train every day without exception. The next table therefore shows some more realistic training regimes, for those of you who are only doing tai chi as a "hobby" rather than your life's purpose.

Training regime	Time to Level 1.0 (years)
1 hour class a week	Never
1 hour class a week and 20 mins practice by myself a couple of times in between	Never
1 hour every other day	Never
1 hour per day but take Sunday off	Never

Bummer - what a kick in the teeth! Now we can see why Master Silberstorff says that 99% of tai chi practitioners are below level 1.0. By Western standards, doing an hour every other day would seem quite impressive in the context of "going to the gym". But we see from the table that even doing this supposedly prestigious amount is still never going to get you any real tai chi skill. Health benefits - yes, real tai chi - no.

But do not despair, the formula shows us an important aspect of training: the detriment of missing days is more pronounced at lower skill levels than higher. In practical terms, what this means is that when you're just starting, there is a crucial and necessary intensity/continuity period that is required. Once you get over this hurdle, you can slack off a bit (if you wish) and allow yourself a more interrupted training regime. If you slack off, you hamper your progress to the next level of course, but at least you won't be going backwards anymore.

The next table shows some examples with an initial period followed by a consistent period of doing one hour a day but taking one day off a week. The point of this table is to show how much and how long you need this initial period to be. There is a threshold where the amount of training outweighs the negative effects of number of rest days. If you are above this threshold you make progress and get there eventually, if you are below, your good work is always being undone and you never make any "real" progress.

Training regime	Time to Level 1.0 (years)
1.5hr/day for the first year. Then 1hr/day, 6days/week.	4
1hr/day for the two years. Then 1hr/day, 6days/week.	6
30mins/day for first three years. Then 1hr/day, 6days/week.	9
1.5hr class once per week. Plus: 30mins/day for one year, and then 1hr/day, 6days/week.	Never
1.5hr class once per week. Plus: 30mins/day for two years, and then 1hr/day, 6days/week.	Never
1.5hr class once per week. Plus: 30mins/day for three years, and then 1hr/day, 6days/week.	6
1.5hr class once per week. Plus: 1hr/day for one year, and then 1hr/day, 6days/week.	5
1.5hr class twice per week. Plus: 30mins/day for one year, and then 1hr/day, 6days/week.	Never
1.5hr class twice per week. Plus: 30mins/day for one year, and then 1hr/day, 6days/week.	4
1.5hr class twice per week. Plus: 1hr/day, 6days/week, from the start	Never

Effectively what this table shows is that it is the daily consistency in the initial phase that is important. It looks roughly like you need to put in about ~700hours of training without days off, to get over the threshold. The exact numbers here shouldn't be taken as gospel truth remember, this is only an approximate formula to give you a rough feel for things. The key message is:

If you want to learn tai chi seriously, you need to make a commitment to start off practicing every single day for a number of years.

The longer you can spend each day practising, the shorter the overall initial period will have to be before you're allowed to start taking occasional days off. But beware of starting to slacking off to early, as the "one day missed, 10 days back" effect will really start to hurt you, and you wouldn't want to waste all your earlier efforts.

So there you have it. The answer is simple, just as your teacher said. You need to practice every day.

The two paths

I can already here the cries.... "but I've been going to weekly classes for years, without practicing at home, and it's obvious I'm better".... Although I accept that this formula may well be too simplistic, such a sentiment would be to misunderstand the two paths of tai chi. The path I have been talking about here is the tai chi as a martial art path.

There is a second path however which is the health path, and is frequently referred to as the gentle dance path. On this path, what you're really learning is chi gung not tai chi. These skill levels and training requirements that I have been talking about, are about gaining a deep understanding, rather than how gracefully you can wave your arms around. With chi gung you can be very graceful (and healthy), but still be at a low level of tai chi understanding.

Any amount of tai chi will give you health benefits, but after all, you can get health benefits from going to dancing classes, or the gym, or sports.... If all you want is health, balance, a good way to manage stress, these levels are irrelevant - you enjoy it,  it makes you a bit healthier, that's all that matters. It is important to acknowledge this fact and be aware that you are on this path, which after all is an equally valid one.

Why is that important? Because on the health path you are not learning a martial art any more, and so you should not expect to ever gain any meaningful self defence skills or any of the really deep physiological, structural and awareness changes that transform your body. I'm sure a large proportion of practitioners, probably the vast majority, are entirely happy with that. But if you want to be in the 1% of people who are not, this formula shows you how to get there. Make sure you choose your path, because if you haven't choosen, you're almost certainly on the health one.

For me at least, this exercise has motivated and inspired me to redouble my training efforts as I want to learn tai chi, the martial art. Seeing those stark realities in black, white and mathematics has helped me to feel that I am on that path, and that every day's training really does count. I hope it might do the same for you.

Embrace science to set the chi free

For over a decade I struggled with chi. I wanted to believe it existed, but I knew scientifically that it could not. This dilemma vexed me, as I believe it currently vexes an extremely large number of scientifically minded (i.e. most Westerners) internal art practitioners worldwide. Perhaps ignorance is bliss, so if you believe in chi I say good luck to you, but just like religion, you can not make someone believe through rational argument.

The fact that I didn't believe in chi always made me feel guilty, I worried about it and tried to believe (honestly I did) out of respect for my teachers and my teacher's teachers. Fortunately, I feel I have resolved this dichotomy and internal conflict through my musings, and writings, which is a frankly a great weight off my mind. What makes me so happy is that what I have come up with both respects the traditional teaching and at the same time embraces science. It is a definition that I think is beautiful. But more than beautiful, beautiful in the way Richard Freynman means it (video):



What really opens the door to this way of thinking is the appreciation that consciousness, intelligence and mind are but the tip of the iceberg (just as neuroscience teaches us). The human body is made up of billions of neurons and nerves, each one of which is effectively a tiny sensor acting on the environment around us and also inside us. As we go up the consciousness hierarchy these sensors are grouped together into things we ordinarily call sensations, feelings, emotions, instincts, intuition and awareness. It is impossible to be able to process every neuron at the conscious level, we have to accept the emergent nature of ourselves and try to listen to our body, our feelings and our emotions. The philosophy of Enlightenment if you will (swapping my Westerner dictionary for my Eastern one for a moment).

That bottom-up way of thinking is complemented by the top down view. How does one command the body? Just as we cannot perceive an individual neuron, neither can we consciously command it. The body does not understand logic, language or conceptualisation. We can not talk to the body using syntax and grammar. We talk to the body using visualisation and feelings. If you imagine yourself performing an action, you will get better performing it. If you imagine yourself being happy, you will become happier. This visualisation and concentration is a core part of traditional meditation and tai chi teaching and in the latter is called yi/shen (translated as "mind intent").

So back to chi

Chi is not energy. A fact that I think should be almost indisputable. [Before anyone of a traditional background objects, please note  it is not for me to prove that it doesn't, it is for you to prove that it does. After all, if I claim that pigs can fly, the onus is not on you to prove that they don't, but on me to prove that they do. In the centuries that chi as a concept has existed, no experiment has yet been devised to prove its existence, a fact which I think speaks for itself.]

Chi is not energy, but do not despair traditional reader, I am not dismissing it out of hand like some arrogant philistine. Chi is an incredibly sophisticated visualisation framework (in the top down sense). It also does indeed feel like there is an "energy" inside you if you truly listen to your body and practice hard (bottom up sense). The crucial distinction is that there is a difference between what something feels like, and what is actually there. In scientific terms, chi is not energy, but in practical terms if you actually start paying attention to your body it feels as if it is.

This is a beautiful realisation (at least to me). What it means is that the full body of literature and teachings on controlling and directing chi is valid and useful, as it directly corresponds to how things feel. It is not wrong, and I can look my teachers in the eye again, as it is just a way of describing a feeling or emotion, like any other. At the same time, although the model is entirely valid and extremely useful, it is subjective, and so there is no need for chi to actually be energy in reality, and science breaths a sign of relief. Let me draw an analogy here - consider love:

Q: Can I devise a scientific experiment to measure “love energy” directly?
A: No.

Q: Is love a way of describing an internal subjective sensation using a common language to exchange ideas and thoughts about feelings and emotions?
A: Yes.

Q: Does love actually exist?
A: No.

Q: Do I feel like it does, so it doesn’t matter anyway?
A: Yes.

So there it is, when you deal with other people, the better the interaction is, the more love you feel. Perhaps a better word for love is the Buddhist concept of metta (i.e. loving kindness), along with it's allegory, hate. The better your interaction is with yourself, the more chi you feel, and of course it's allegory is pain. Chi is not energy - it is an emotion, a feeling, a sensation - a realisation that rather than invalidating it, emancipates it. After all emotions may not exist in a pure physical sense, but they certainly have real world effects. Love is about society and relationships. Chi is about internal physiology and well-being. Love and chi are in a sense the same thing but in different contexts. It cannot be a coincidence that they both originate in the gut.

Developing tai chi mathematics

I believe that tai chi is a self-consistent and multi-layered system. By which I mean there are some fundamental building blocks which form a set of non-contradictory principles. These building blocks can be combined together to produce higher level layers which in turn have their own properties. These higher-level layers can then themselves be recombined into even higher layers.

To give an analogy from science, let us consider the structure of matter. A physical higher-level object, like a car, can be broken down into components such as wheels, glass, foam padding etc. These materials are made up of molecules (and crystals), which are themselves made up of atoms. Atoms are made up of protons, neutrons and electrons, and these are themselves made up of quarks. And I will stop there. Another object, say a tree, can similarly be broken down, but it is still made up of the same atoms and quarks, just in different quantities and arrangements.

Tai chi is slightly different to the above as it is a system of movement, a process, and hence it is not physical. So we could have a tai chi form, which would break down into a series of movements (or postures, although to my mind the word posture lacks the necessary connotations of dynamics) e.g. 'Single whip' or 'Cloud hands'. These movements are themselves built up from a number of characteristics, which in Chinese theory are called the eight methods: Peng (ward off), Lu (diversity), Ji (squeezing), An (pushing down), Cai (plucking), Lie (splitting), Zhou (elbowing), and Kao (bumping). Finally these eight methods are all themselves made up from yin and yang. This is Chinese yin yang theory as it applies to tai chi.

Discovering the layering

The multilayered aspects of tai chi are self-evident to me. The more I practice, the more I "discover" the lower layers and the connections. When doing a movement X, I will suddenly noticed that a part of it is fundamentally the same as another movement Y. In other words, I have suddenly realised that both movement X and Y have a common building block. These small epiphanies are enlightening, and I try to teach students using a similar approach, "...this bit of movement X is just like the bit we did before in movement Y...".

Learning tai chi is the process of trying to understand these connections, and normally happens via mini epiphanies, either when your teacher tells you/corrects you, or more powerfully, when you notice for yourself. If you train hard, once in a blue moon you will have a major epiphany. These cannot be learnt, they must be discovered. Your teacher told you for years to "drop your weight as if you're sitting on a chair", and you feel that you are, but one day, you suddenly GET IT and you understand the meaning (at least at the next layer down). You yourself might try to explain it, but are reduced to saying things like "drop your weight as if you're sitting on a chair", as that was really all there was to it.

Indeed, this layering, and its connections are really what people who practice tai chi are trying to discover. It is why generally in advanced classes we can often find ourselves standing for prolonged periods, or working on the foundation exercises just as total beginners do. That is contrary to popular perception that in advanced classes students jump around all over the place doing incredibly exotic and complicated movements. That is because in advanced classes although externally we are doing the same movements as beginners, what advanced practitioners are training and trying to understand, is at a deeper layer.

An advanced student is really one who knows depth rather than breadth. This is fundamental tai chi training philosophy. Someone who can do one movement perfectly (e.g. standing) can do the entire form perfectly. Why? Because if you understand the deepest level then you understand the building blocks, and which order you put them in is trivial.

Mapping the layers

Although I use the Chinese yin yang theory, in some ways I find it unsatisfying. Perhaps this is because I have yet to reach that layer, but perhaps not. I find it unsatisfying, because it does not meet the requirements that I set out for myself in my robotics thought experiment framework. Could I program a robot to do tai chi using yin yang theory? I doubt it, and the reason this matters (to quote myself) is because:

"It is often said that you only really understand the limitations of your own knowledge when you try to teach someone else. By extension therefore if we take the ultimate "dumb" person, a robot, and metaphorically try to teach it tai chi, we are in fact deepening our own understanding."

Therefore, if I cannot teach a a robot (who is anatomically identical to human) to do tai chi, that is a failure of my own understanding, or perhaps even the collective understanding.

What I'm looking for therefore is to define and understand the mathematics of these connections. To be able to write them down as formulas, as tables, as processes, as science (something my robot will understand). To return to my structure of matter analogy before, in mediaeval times we had theories of matter, but it was only when the structure of the atom was discovered and matter could be understood in a systematic manner (e.g. the periodic table), that a revolution in understanding took place. The periodic table ushered in this revolution of understanding, because it was able to make testable predictions and identify previously unknown elements. It now provides a structure and a framework to enable discoveries to be made on a daily basis in chemistry, physics and material science that we all rely on every day.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could achieve a similar thing in tai chi? After all it would be arrogant to assume that everything we (collectively) know now is all there is to know. Searching for a systematic science of tai chi is therefore not a Westerner snubbing Chinese theory, but a researcher searching for a breakthrough. If you could unify the eastern and western sciences of our bodies I think we can all agree that would be the foundation of a healthcare and lifestyle revolution.

So to come back down to earth again, what I'm looking for, as a step on the journey, is a way to codify tai chi so that it can be manipulated and reasoned about logically. We need to put a "tai chi mathematics" in place before we can begin to apply it as a science.

Tai Chi Mathematics

As with all science, it's best to "stand on the shoulders of giants" if at all possible, so the question is whether there is anything already out there which might be applicable? My initial thoughts on the subject were to look at dance choreography. Is there a system that is used to score a dance routine in a similar way to which you might score a piece of music? It turns out that there is (but how widely used it is I'm not sure) and it is called Laban Movement Analysis (LMA).

The LMA syntax is a language for interpreting, describing, visualizing and notating all ways of human movement. At the top level, Labour described movement using four different categories: body, effort, shape, and space. What I initially find very promising is that the effort category which "is a system for understanding the more subtle characteristics about the way a movement is done with respect to inner intention". Tai chi principles dictates that movement should follow intention, and so having the ability to represent this already built into core system gives me some reassurance that LMA will indeed be suitable.

It seems that this technique has yet to be widely applied to tai chi, however I have found a website called movement psychology that has a long description about the linkages between the two. There is a lot to process here and so I will take my time. Although I cannot find any specific conclusions, it appears to be an excellent start to the process of codify tai chi systematically. The next step now then is to try to characterise a very simple movement sequence and see what it looks like... watch this space!