Can you fight with Tai Chi?

My personal martial arts journey started with ITF Taekwon-do, I then moved to MMA (Muay Thai + BJJ), and finally arrived at Taijiquan (also known as Tai Chi in the west).

As an MMA guy I'd like to explain to people completely foreign to Chinese Martial Arts how Taijiquan would work like in an actual fight/sparring.

TLDR; It doesn't work most of the time, but it can work under certain conditions

What is Taijiquan

I will not even attempt to give a full description in here. There are lots of other places you can find if you really care about this. For the purposes of this article, let's say Taijiquan is a Chinese martial art.

It emphasizes relaxation, softness, and never going force against force. It uses Taoist philosophy. Your posture must be soft, but not too soft.

Nowadays it's mostly known as a health exercise, and compared with things like Yoga.

How does Taijiquan fight like?

A common way to fight with Taijiquan is trying to take your opponent's back. So closing the gap as soon as possible, then grapple for a better position.

The techniques themselves, or body method, varies from style to style. Chen guys incorporated some Shuai Jiao -- or Chinese wrestling -- into their style, so it looks quite similar to those with a Judo, Wrestling, BJJ background.

Other styles, like the popular Yang style, use a lot of arm-to-arm contact and a slightly longer distance. A training method known as tuishou or pushing-hands, looks like this:

In combat, as demonstrated by Yang-style practitioner Liang DeHua, it looks something like this:

The goal is simple: Make contact, try to take the back. Takedown when possible. You can also add some strikes when it makes sense, but that's basically it.

How to archieve it

Now the thing is, that is not easy to do, at all. It is doable, but you need way much more practice than, say, boxing, where you can beat most average people in sparring in 6 months or a year.

Taijiquan (and most CMA) take a lot longer to be able to actually use it, and most people never dedicate the time to do so. It's not easy, it takes lots of training, and it might not even be worth it, if all you want is win a fight.

But it has so many other benefits, and that is the reason I practice :)

To fight, you need to actually train fighting

While I agree you can get away with just using Taijiquan, as some purists say, I think it's quite important, almost mandatory, to have trained something else before.

This is because Taijiquan barely spars, and if it ever does, only advanced students do, in a very Taijiquan-way. If you don't know what other styles, or even untrained people, feel like when sparring, then it's very hard to make your style work.

On the other hand if you already have some experience, you know what would work and what wouldn't. If it doesn't work, there's something wrong with your technique.

But Why?

After all this, why would you ever want to practice Taijiquan as a martial art? Well, the health aspect is huge. I was ~25 years old when I started practicing. I had prior MMA experience, I thought I was healthy, I certainly didn't have any illnesses or stuff like that. But after I tried Taijiquan, I noticed my body was all hurt and contorted.

Relaxation just feels great. A different kind of health, a higher quality of life. At first it might not seem as important but once you have it, you don't want to let it go :)

The health aspect can be a double edged sword too. Nowadays, most people practice Taijiquan "just for health", and ignore the martial aspect. That is sadly very bad, as the martial aspect is some kind of "reality-check". The martial aspect is great for testing your structure, your techniques, your over-all progress level. Without it, you could be something wrong for your whole practice, and never realize it. It's also easy to get distracted, and out of the Taijiquan way.

While rare, there are still some places which care about both aspects. 

The third aspect of Taijiquan would be spiritual. Not many people care about this one, but it's quite tied with the philosophical aspect. 

I personally haven't got too far into Taijiquan, only having ~6 years of experience at the moment of this writing, but I've been lucky enough to touch hands with advanced Taijiquan practitioners, and see what they can do, and how it feels like. A lot of the time, they act as "confirmation" than all this theory can be applied and it can exist in real life.

So Taijiquan becomes a tool to transform your interpretation of philosophy into reality. Taijiquan can become a literal way of life. And it's a great, healthy way of life, which -- in my honest opinion -- can make the world a better place.

-- Cheers and love from Argentina.