Zhou
肘
Literally: elbow
Zhou, elbow, is one of the eight gates of taijiquan: a light, relaxed elbow strike powered from the body's center and from the ground.
Quick Facts
⚠️ Common Mistakes
When training against a striking pad, the target is placed wrong: the practitioner either misses it, or the strike stops too early because the pad is held behind the body.
About
Zhou (肘), in English elbow stroke, is one of the eight gates of taijiquan. Taiji-forum.com describes it as a light, relaxed elbow strike whose impulse comes from the body's center or waist and is powered by force from the ground; egreenway.com speaks of whole-body striking energy, in which the practitioner uses the front or back of the shoulder depending on the direction of the attack. In practicing the strike, as taiji-forum.com describes it, the elbow moves in a spiral, upward and out to the rear. It belongs among the four corner gates of the Thirteen Postures together with cai, lie and kao, and corresponds to the trigram dui (lake); classical texts, according to egreenway.com, stress that before using zhou one must master the six preceding energies. The corner gates, unlike peng, appear only in specific forms of the sequence; for zhou, egreenway.com gives the posture Turn and Chop with Fist. In tui shou practice, the eight gates serve to unbalance, displace or fell the opponent.