Joshua T.

I have 9 years experience training others in Tai Chi and other forms of Chinese martial arts. I currently have an open, bi-weekly class and many private students which mostly range from teenagers to those in their twenties.

Currently, I teach every second and fourth Thursday on Linden Avenue in Dayton, Ohio, and also teach at Smith Park locally in Middletown, Ohio. In addition, I will also travel to students' private homes if necessary, or to a suitable nearby neutral location.

I have practiced martial arts for 17 years. My first class was in 1999, just before I was 15, with the late Dr. Michael Steward Sr., at Miami University; it was also here I taught my first class. In college, I started the Jiang Hu Society, a society for traditional soft martial arts originating in China, their philosophy, their history and their application. It was here I pushed hands with others, sparred, and taught what I knew. During college, I spent several months training intensively with a famous teacher, Stephen Watson, of Branford, Connecticut. Here, part of my responsibility was teaching the beginner and children's Tai Chi and Kung Fu. After college, I taught privately at my residence in Middletown, Ohio or at someone else's home when I found dedicated practitioners who wanted to take their skills to the next level. Then I spent time abroad in Shenzhen, China, where I taught English and sciences, as well as teaching Tai Chi on the side while using opportunities to travel and meet other masters and train with them. In that time, I spent several months in the Wudang Mountains, especially White Horse Mountain (a smaller mountain within the Wudang range), learning from various Taoist monks or other martial laymen in the area. After returning to Shenzhen, I found a Chen stylist by the name of Wang Minfu, who is a special "closed door" disciple of Chen Yu, Chen Tai Chi's current family head and grandmaster of Tai Chi. I became an official student of Wang Minfu in a private tea ceremony and dinner at Master Wang's home. After leaving China, I traveled to Cambodia, Hong Kong, and then to Ecuador and Colombia. Each time along the way supplementing my income by teaching Tai Chi. After returning to the US, I have continued my instruction.

In my time and travels, I have developed high stages of Neigong and Internal Alchemy. These skills are used with Tai Chi to produce some of its most devastating effects, increasing strike magnitude, decreasing effort, and simultaneously increasing the pain threshold. And while it often takes many years to develop these skills (14 years, in my case), I plan to shrink that time substantially for my students by focusing on the most effective exercises which produce the most reliable results in the Tai Chi repertoire.

Most Tai Chi instructors spend several years teaching slow forms with little to no martial approach. We will be training softness, sensitivity, and self defense from day one, and we will pressure test these skills with various types of sparring. We will start with basic stances, and a game called "push-hands." In this game, we learn to feel the opponent's center of gravity, and learn how to use relaxation to counter force. You will receive take-away exercises, and learn ways to train all day long, non-stop. We will work on joint locking, strikes, pressure points, explosive energy and neutralizing. We will also train "internally," and you will learn the secrets to inner softness and Tai Chi's effortless power, including "steel wrapped in cotton."