On the surface, the Elongated Wrist resembles the well known Fair Maiden’s Hand of the Cheng Man Ching Tai Chi style.

However, our Elongated Wrist has a lot more within its practice than the Fair Maiden’s Hand. I had learned the Cheng Man Ching style more than a decade before I started with Yang-22. I do not remember my teacher ever teaching anything more to the Fair Maiden’s Hand.

On the other hand, there’s a ton of stuff within the Yang-22 usage of the hand. They all begin with the Elongated Wrist.

The principle behind the Elonaged Wrist calls for us to stretch open the wrist joint. Yup, to elongate the wrist is not just a matter of relaxing the wrist and posing with a straight, loosened wrist. Instead, we have to stretch the wrist to straighten it.

On top of straightening the wrist, we also need to straighten the hand and stretch out the fingers. As if this is not complicated enough, we are required to add on the use of intent to imagine that we are grasping a Small Chi Sphere.

This is only the beginning. There are a few more things to this Small Chi Sphere which for the moment we will not go into.

The Elongated Wrist sounds pretty simple to practice, right?

If you do a survey of the videos that are out there on the internet of fellow practitioners of Yang-22, you will notice that it is the rare practitioner who is able to keep a proper Elongated Wrist throughout their performance of the entire form.

Coming from the Dong style variant of Yang Tai Chi I too had a problem adhering to the Elongated Wrist principle. It took me a long time to nail it down.

The Elongated Wrist is one of the key components in the process of fajing. If you want to nail the Yang-22 method of fajing, then you really need to master this principle.