In a combat situation, your body weight can be a powerful tool, a tool that many fighters do not know how to use to their full advantage. If someone hit you with a 150 pound sack of potatoes at you, they could do some significant damage, especially if they landed it on you correctly. If you weigh 150 pounds and you use your body weight correctly, you can have this kind of effect. Even if you only weigh 100 pounds, that's still an incredible amount of impact.

Using your weight can also work without a lot of effort. If you know how to use your body weight well, you don't have to use nearly as much physical force in your hits and kicks. You can hit harder while using less sheer strength. If you add speed to the weight of your body, you can hit even harder. Imagine someone throwing a bowling ball at you. No one would want to get hit by a bowling ball and they only weigh about 16 pounds. If you add speed to the force of your body, you can do a lot more damage than a 16 pound ball.

Relaxation is a major part of learning to manipulate the distribution of weight within your own body. In addition to enabling you to add a lot of force to your hits, relaxation also has many health benefits. Excess tension causes headaches, it can raise blood pressure and even cause heart attacks. Tai Chi reduces the risk of all these problems by teaching you how to control the tension in your body and use it only when where and how you need to.

However, relaxation can also be one of Tai Chi's most challenging aspects. The following exercise that can help you relax more deeply. It can help both with Tai Chi and with relaxing more in general. This exercise can be done while sitting, standing or lying down. It can also be used in any Tai Chi pose that you might be having problems with. Here's what you do:

1. Breathe in. As you do so, gradually tense all the muscles in your body.

2. Hold your breath. Also hold the tension for a few seconds.

3. Breathe out. While you are breathing out, relax. Let all the tension melt out of your body.

4. Repeat the first three steps a couple of times.

5. Now instead of breathing in and tensing, breathe in and relax your entire body.

6. Breathe out and relax some more. Repeat steps 4 and 5 a couple of times as well.

If you have an injury or if you are simply having problems relaxing one specific area of your body, you can also do this exercise focusing on that area tensing the muscles there rather than over your entire body. Or you can do this exercise working your entire body and then repeat it focusing on the area you are having trouble with.

This exercise can help you immensely increase your ability to relax both in Tai Chi and in other aspects of your life.