At Last! After about 4 years I finally learned and performed the final piece of Lao Jai... I can die happy now!

4 years? I've just checked and its only got 78 moves.... I shudder to think how long it'd take you to finish our yang style 108 long form!

Well done mate - I got my first student all the way through his first form a couple of months ago and he said he felt like he'd just graduated from uni! When I finished my first form it felt like a real achievement, far more so than any kata I've ever learnt. I don't know, there's just something very special about finishing the form. Trouble is, as my sifu rightly said, "Now the real work starts!"

Yeah, it's just been a problem with training regularly (in a club esp) etc and my sifu being a bit of a perfectionist. I learned a 19-step somewhere along the road.

Today I arranged to meet sifu in the forest. He asked what I wanted to do, "Finish the bloody Lao Jia! I have 2 minutes of it left to learn!" 15 minutes later I had most of it and finally completed it. I wouldn't say it's perfect (and there's a lot of my other moves which need sorting out) but it's done.

In the classics they say, "First you learn tai chi in inches, then hundredths of inch, then thousands of hundredth of inch...etc" So its a slowly slowly catchy monkey situation. I wrote an article that deals with the subject here that you might find useful... although training with Sifu in the forest sounds far more enjoyable!

http://themartialarchive.com/index.php?o...t&Itemid=64

It's very enjoyable, apart from the mozzies!

Can't seem to download the article (me, not the mozzies).

Worked ok for me?

Maybe my chi aint strong enough but it still aint doing nowt for me...

Curious?

Try just clicking here or if you go directly to the Archive use the search box in the top right hand corner and type in 'stealing the inches' you'll find the article.

no joy with the links. Maybe there's a block outside UK.

Finally got it by Googling (although even there there was a prob)

Try this link mate. It's going through a proxy based in Poland. Click Here

Are you accessing the net from work? That might be blocking the sites you can look at?

Sorry, I got it earlier on. Thanks. A good article. Funnily enough, I was told a similar thing trying to teach Present Perfect... "Maybe you gave them too much!"