Almost everyone I know of has heard of tai chi. The vast majority of people all believe that tai chi is an exercise that involves slow movement and is meant primarily for health training and benefits. There are several different schools of tai chi chuan. The most well-known are Yang, Wu, Sun and Chen styles.
Having trained in Yang style short form for many years, I can assure all my readers without hesitation that comparing Yang tai chi to Chen Tai Chi is like comparing apples and oranges. Chen Tai Chi, as presented by my teacher, Master Yu Guo Shun, is very clearly a combative training approach to true martial art, real Kung Fu.
In every class, my teacher takes time to present, demonstrate and show some of the martial applications of a given movement to the class. Again, having trained in Yang style and having seen many other instructors demonstrate application for what they do, there are many, many differences in application, structure and interpretation.
Beyond any shadow of a doubt, training and participating in Chen style Tai Chi as we do it, is an incredible fitness and athletic demand on the body. Generally we use much lower stances, do greater weight shifting and changes of movement within a much smaller realm of physical attribute and there are sudden bursts of energy and motion that is not seen in the Yang system.
Wikipedia has a nice introduction to Chen style Tai Chi. Here is the link/url of their page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen-style_tai_chi_chuan
Hopefully i've piqued your interest and you'll check it out.
J
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