Practise Makes Perfect - In answer to a question

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This video is in response to a question from a viewer asking: What is the key to being good at Tai Chi? (Please note; a small section of this video - the Chinese practising techniques is from an old video - I do not own the copywrite for this material and it is shown here under fair use policy for educational purposes).
One simple way to answer this is to tell you the story of a great martial arts master that was dying. His number one student came to him on his death bed and wanted to know the secret to his great skill before he died.
Master please tell me what is the secret to your great skill, How can I be as skilful as you?
The master looked to his student and with his dying breath he said “Practise”.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary
PRACTISE means
To perform an activity or exercise repeatedly or regularly in order to acquire, improve or maintain proficiency in it.
A Skill: is the ability to do something well.
In the martial arts I would say that in order to develop your chosen art or arts, you need to repeatedly perform your arts in a mindful manner, regularly in order to improve, maintain and develop the skills that lead to mastery and not just mindless repetition.
For me and many others this is the meaning of Practise.
It is not enough to just go through the motions, you must apply yourself, to honing aspects of your forms, techniques, skills. Usually one at a time, sometimes more than one at a time as you perfect each one you can add them together and hone them as a skillset.
The Key to any art is practise.
Think about the classes you go to: your teacher will teach you a certain amount then let you practise under supervision to give you time. This Supervised practise is good to help iron out the early mistakes but personal practise is just as good.
Real teaching is only a small amount of the time you spend in class even in the academic fields.
The real learning is through practise with an aim to achieve something more than just, OK I’ve done my drills I’m off to school or work. With mindful practise, comes understanding. Such training leads to questions with questions and answers comes a greater strengthening of your knowledge. Until you begin teaching and then your students questions challenge you more leading to even greater understanding.
So within a class you have about a third of the time teaching and the rest is practise - Unless you are in the type of class that is spoonfed where a teacher will take you through each part of your exercise at every moment. Which is fine for some types of exercise class but slows individual learning to my mind as personal practise forces the student to focus, remember and develop.
Daily personal practise is a great way to begin developing your skills. Add to this by meeting with your class mates to go over partner training like Push Hands, techniques/ applications. It is also good to discover what each of you are good at that the other lacks and share the knowledge with each other to help improve together. There’s no point leaving anyone behind because you will have no one to train with.
The key to mastering any art or skill is to practise.
Grandmaster Lam would often say to my teacher
“Everybody wants to shine who likes to polish?”

[@markdonovan1540]

So true, this is a great reminder to anyone slacking. Oops, that would be me then...

[@spinningdragontao]

We are all human 🙂

[@alanwood9822]

Practice does not make perfect, it just makes perfect practice. Pressure testibg makes perfect.

[@spinningdragontao]

Whatever one practises it is still practise including pressure testing.

[@tmaeer5446]

great reminders - perhaps the effortlessness of tai chi (no 'false' chi' as my sifu calls it) can be hard to measure - or echoes the sentiment 'don't try too hard' which just never makes sense...

[@spinningdragontao]

Indeed - a bit like "Invest in Loss" :)

[@smoggie2833]

It's quite clear to me what is meant by the video title and in what context it should be understood. However the German translation reads: "Übung macht den Meister" which literally translates word for word back to English as training/exercise/drills makes/forms the master... which is perhaps more apt to our chosen arts.

[@spinningdragontao]

Nice. I like it. 😃👍🏻 Thank you for your kind comment.

[@spinningdragontao]

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[@xride64]

Practice makes permanent...no such thing as perfection...its only been accomplished once..

[@spinningdragontao]

It's just an old saying. 🙂