Preliminary Taiji Stake Work and its suitability for use in physiotherapy

Stake work is a basic skill of Taiji, and it provides Taiji practitioners a simple but highly effective way to improve their competency. At its most basic level, the purpose of stake work is to develop muscles and tendons to improve balance and the practitioners ability to do Taiji, and in the past, the original purpose of Taiji was for defense-offense: but in modern times it has evolved and practitioners now may practice Taiji as athletes for competitions, and as a method to aid fitness-health and self cultivation. These Taiji routines are often a careful combination of postures, that are practiced and trained repeatedly until gradually they are mastered. Therefore, stake work ( used in developing both strength and balance) must support three separate aims in Taiji. These being; classical competition and defense-offense; fitness-health and self cultivation; and the third is the new development of Taiji routines for art performance1, where the creation of art is combined with freestyle Taiji movements. The problem though is traditional stake work, is static, and it mainly improves the center of gravity. This means “Gravity Stakes” are only able to partially meet the needs of those who practice fitness-health, self-cultivation and Taiji routines or art performances, and it does not support those who are involved in competition and defense-offense. So, modifications have been made and we introduced the concepts of External Force Stake and Dynamic Stakes. Together these three stakes (Gravity, External Force stake, and Dynamic) were designed by the authors to create very simple exercises that fully support the three modern purposes of Taiji. It also, in part, illustrates that the “continuous transmission” in classic theory is the continuous transmission of internal force and strength (or momentum). This paper will discuss the muscles being strengthened and the possible application of these exercises for general use in physiotherapy. The paper will also focus primarily on External Force Stakes, and we will discuss Dynamic Stakes in a future article, which will be published next year.