| Actually, having seen Ma Yueliangs sons at non-cooperative pushing hands training aka wrestling, I have a bit of a problem accepting all those folks in toto as "grandmasters" (only the very old ones who might have seen better days). Hopefully they wouldn't refer to themselves as such, it's a label put on their teacher because it makes themselves more important ("first row student of grandmaster John Flash" instead of "student of Johnny the taiji teacher"). The Mas did the very same stuff as seen above, albeit WITHOUT getting out of balance and staggering like drunk, and looking much more nimble despite of both being 50+ back then. They played a kind of grappling chess moving more like you know from wrestlers, most of the time to a stalemate, until one made a mistake and was pushed around. Not getting out of balance every second move. I don't like the whole architecture of some the folks above, bracing all the time, losing balance from bracing, planting their feet with no nimbleness whatsoever, and so on. You need very solid skills to afford not bracing but using neutralizing moves, but that is the whole point of acquiring them. It's not Taiji if you resort to simple techniques.
To understand this, you need to know, from experience, that when you reach a certain level of internal strength, you can push around "normal" people like kids. That on the other hand means, you don't have to develop extremely sophisticated skills, like you would need in wrestling to beat all the other very strong competitors who train like yourself. As long as you just want to push around your students, it's enough to reach the entry level. As long as that strength level lasted, I pushed around hobby athlets outweighting me by 80lb. However, after I lost that, and the guy posting here under Necronos reached the level of internal strength after some odd 4 years where you could speak of internal strength, I couldn't bully him anymore, but he could do it with me. I would have had to work hard and dig deep into the trick pool to still be able to compete with him, and that would have worked only as long as he doesn't pick up the tricks.
So, I attribute the missing depth of skill to the factor that after a certain stage you don't have to perfection your real Taiji skills to bully around normal folks, that's why they don't bother to really perfection that (or to be blunt, reach BASIC levels of more sophisticated technical skills). Don't let this sort of "grappling" fool you into thinking this is "masterful pushing hands".
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"Killing them all didn't make it any better..." - "Are you a freak or something ???" - Max Payne
"Theft is a crime, even in Iraq." - Me. | 
