Cui’s dan tian gong:

“In summer, my grandfather would normally sit in our courtyard practicing his taiji while wearing a dalian (Chinese sleeveless wrestler’s jacket). When the mood took him, he would let me feel his belly. To me, it felt as if there was a rubber ball in his belly which could move around to follow your hand. If you pushed on it, it felt as though your hand was ‘sucked’ in and you couldn’t pull it back. Then, the ‘ball’ would suddenly ‘spit’ your hand out, bouncing you back several steps.

Another time, we saw my grandfather sitting shirtless on a stool. He had stuck a flattened lump of dough onto his belly; as he went through his ‘seated taiji’, not only did the dough not fall off, it moved around with the movements of his belly. This kind of gongfu was amazing! Even now, I don’t really understand how he did it. ‘This gongfu of mine you won’t be able to practice, it’s a taiji training method called dan tian gong, most normal people can’t practice it. I’ve been training it since I was a kid. In pushing hands, I’m not afraid of people pushing directly on my stomach; if they do, they won’t be able to get away.”

It is obvious that the taijiquan that Cui practiced contained training methods that produced intense dan tian development. Do these training methods still exist in Yang style or have they been lost over time?

excerpt extracted from

https://wulinmingshi.wordpress.com/page/2/

for teaching purposes only