The Benefits of Slow, Coordinated Movement for Health

When we think about exercise, we probably think of moving fast as being the thing; we might even think that the faster we move, the harder we push, the greater the benefit. But hold your horses! There are compelling reasons why spending some time on slow co-ordinated movement, such as in Chi Kung or Tai Chi, can bring benefits that we don’t get from going quicker.

One of these reasons is that when we move slowly we can move more accurately and with a much greater sensitivity to the actual experience of moving; we can have a greater sense of what is actually happening anatomically.

For instance, it may be that there are some movements which we are no longer able to do, that the range of movement of our limbs is restricted, possibly in ways which we are not even aware of. We may have come habitually to avoid certain movements, or shades of movement, without even realising it. Maybe we never completely flex our shoulder anymore; maybe we never turn our head 90 degrees to the left, maybe we never externally rotate our right leg. We probably used to be able to do these things, at least when we were a child, but gradually we have seized up in certain places, some muscles have become too tight whilst others are a bit weak and underused.

In fast moving exercise we don’t have a chance to notice these restrictions; we might even be under the impression that we are, say, fully flexing our shoulder when if we watched ourselves in a mirror we would notice that we only get to about 160 degrees, and that our arm is pulling out to the side a bit as well. When we are moving fast our sense of proprioception (which gives us our knowledge of where various parts of our body are in relation to each other) is not so accurate. Also, if we do try to push through the restriction with a fast movement, we will probably injure ourselves; our body is avoiding a certain movement or position for a reason, after all.

Slow movement, however, gives us a precious opportunity to explore our range of movement, to become aware of these areas of restriction, even subtle restrictions, and work on them. When moving slowly, we are much better equipped to exert the appropriate level of force, enough to push a little further into the restriction but not enough to sprain a ligament or strain a muscle or tendon. We can gradually restore our range of movement without injuring ourselves. Moving slowly we can feel where the restriction lies and gradually open it up.

This is perhaps particularly important as we get older. It is shocking how much movement many people lose as they move through middle age and beyond, but it does not have to be that way. Slow, deliberate movement is the way to maintain and even enhance our range of movement as the years pass. The Chinese have a saying about a door hinge not rusting if the door is repeatedly opened and closed, which is taken to mean that if we keep putting our joints through their natural movements, they will not seize up. We can do this most efficiently by moving slowly and mindfully, exploring any restrictions and gently working on them.

Moving slowly, then, gives us a precious learning opportunity; we can get to know our body quite intimately, a whole lot more intimately than we do with faster movement. As well as being quite useful, moving slowly is also surprisingly satisfying. The human body is really a rather amazing thing. Even what seems like the simple act of flexing the shoulder is a minor miracle of bio-mechanics and co-ordination. The enhanced sensitivity of slow movement can also make it intensely pleasurable.

This brings us to the more psychological (or we might even say spiritual) benefits to slow deliberate movement. I sometimes even notice this when doing something as simple as walking to the shops. Like many of us, I am habituated to being in something of a hurry, and so will probably walk relatively quickly even when there is no reason to rush (or rather, not many reasons to rush!). However, occasionally I wake up to the fact that I am hurrying for no real reason, and slow down.  Suddenly a whole new world opens up to me, a world I take for granted. This is the world of the sky above me and the solid earth beneath my feet; the world of the wind in my hair (and maybe even the rain on my face!) It is the world of my body moving, muscles tensing and relaxing in marvellous harmony with each other. Suddenly I am not walking to the shops; I am walking the earth, as my ancestors have done for millennia, a minor miracle of the evolutionary process. This might just be an occasional experience, depending on my remembering not to be in such a hurry, but with a regular practice of Tai Chi or Chi Kung, it becomes a gateway to a wholly different, and more satisfying, way of being.

Slow, deliberate exercise opens up this kind of experience for us. The adrenalin rush of fast intense exercise is pleasurable, but if we don’t do any slow movement exercise we are missing out on a more deeply rewarding kind of joy.

If you would like further information about learning the ancient arts of Tai Chi and Chi Kung, either to improve your health, enhance your sport or simply to combat stress, please visit www.lifestyles-hma.co.uk.

Benefits of Tai Chi and Chi Kung in a Busy, Fast-Paced World

Many of us live what we consider to be ‘normal’ lives. Which is to say that we live in a similar way to that of our friends, and perhaps also in a way that TV and the media, and the omnipresent advertising industry, tell us is how we should be living. But is this ‘normal’ the kind of life that thousands of years of evolution have fitted us to live? In particular, is the pace of what we consider a normal life not really rather excessive, and becoming increasingly excessive with every passing year?

Of course it is too easy to romanticise the past. If you lived in Lincoln 1000 years ago, you might have had to move pretty fast to escape from marauding Vikings, but one suspects that the average pace of life would on the whole have been a lot slower. One of the benefits of travel, of course, is that it introduces us to different cultures and helps us gain a valuable perspective on our own and to realise that what we consider to be a normal pace might look pretty rapid to people from other places. Indeed, you don’t have to go very far to see that – try the west coast of Scotland for instance.

Is a fast paced life a bad thing? Perhaps we should make a distinction between speed and haste. If we are not careful, our fast paced life means that we are always in a hurry. Sometimes we are even in a hurry when we are at leisure – we might be hurrying to the cinema to get there in time for the film, hurrying to cram a visit to the gym into our schedule, so much used to haste that we don’t even notice its presence. And it becomes not so easy to slow down even should we want to. We might take up meditation, only to find that our mind is racing from one idea to another like a demented monkey. Alternatively we may find that we swing wildly between running just to stand still and crashing out on the sofa in a sort of slothful haze.

Hurrying and haste perhaps imply an excessive orientation to the future, to the next thing. Life becomes valuable only in terms of what it promises for the future, not in terms of what it is actually like now. ‘Life is what happens whilst you are busy making other plans’, as John Lennon said. There is something unsatisfying about such a life, and it might not be really rather ineffective as well. More haste, less speed. Too much focus on the future means mistakes in the present.

Another aspect of this unseemly haste is that our body gets left behind; our body is our anchor to the present moment, so that an excessive orientation to the future comes with a loss of contact with our body, even an alienation from it. It’s not hard to get a sense of how this is not great for our health; the less aware of and in tune with our body we are, the less capable we are of looking after it.

One of the benefits of Tai Chi and Chi Kung is that they introduce us to a different relationship with time, and with our body, allowing us to fully inhabit our body once more, and so re-anchor ourselves in the present moment. We come to fully experience the simple wonder of our bodies and their ability to move. In a word, we rediscover harmony.

When we do a Tai Chi form, we learn to move harmoniously. The various parts of our body move in harmony with each other, we move in harmony with our environment, and as our practice deepens we develop a degree of harmony between mind and body that we may not have thought possible. Of course a regular practice of Tai Chi or Chi Kung can provide us with an island of calm amidst the frantic pace of life, but more than that it can help us begin to bring some of that harmony to bear on our everyday life.

Perhaps surprisingly, this does not mean that we will necessarily slow down; but it does mean that we will stop hurrying. It means letting go of our anxiety about the future. In classical Chinese terms one might talk about this change in terms of something called the Tao, often translated as the ‘Way’. To live in accord with the Tao is to live in accord with our true nature and in harmony with the world around us. It is to stop trying to force the world into the shape we want it to be, and to work creatively with the world as it actually is. Think of how a bird of prey rides the thermals and air currents, effortlessly attuned to the subtle movements in the air in which it lives. It can move fast when it needs to, but smoothly and without haste.

This is not a matter of ‘going with the flow’ in a vague, unfocused kind of way. Tai Chi, after all, is a martial art. It is a matter of learning how to live and move gracefully and dynamically, maximising our potential and avoiding haste, clumsiness and inefficiency.

For more information about how you can use Tai Chi or Chi Kung practice to help help you live well in this fast-paced world, please visit our website at www.lifestyles-hma.co.uk.

Mindful Movement

By now most everybody must have got the message that some sort of exercise is important in maintaining health. But something else which the medical establishment is waking up to, perhaps rather belatedly, is mindfulness; only last night I saw a snippet on a local news programme about how arthritis sufferers are benefitting from using mindfulness to help control pain.

Mindfulness is not something new; people have been practising it for at least 2,500 years! It involves simply paying attention to the present moment, a moment-to-moment awareness of what is going on in our experience. And whilst mindfulness is associated with meditation, when it is combined with exercise, it creates forms of movement such as Tai Chi and Chi Kung which are particularly powerful in terms of recovering, maintaining and enhancing health and well-being.

You can get something of a sense of what mindful movement is like by watching an experienced Tai Chi practitioner; and also by watching the way some animals move – think, for instance, of how a cat moves as she stalks her prey. Her mind is fully focused on what she is doing, in fact her whole being is concentrated on the task. (Not, however, the kind of concentration that you can see in humans who are forcing their mind on to something, brows furrowed.) She moves gracefully and harmoniously, flowing apparently effortlessly from one movement to the next. This kind of movement is strikingly different from, say, the movement of someone on a gym treadmill with music pounding through their earphones, maybe even watching a video monitor,  and a mind which, perhaps, is jumping from one thought to the next.

As the cat moves, she moves in harmony with her environment; cats aren’t usually clumsy. Her movement is relaxed and supple, muscles only contracting when they need to, again in contrast to how humans often move, muscles habitually tensed to no purpose. You can get a sense that in the simple process of prowling through the garden, the cat is exercising her whole body.

Perhaps you can say that the cat inhabits her body, again in contrast to how humans can be; the runner on the treadmill watching TV has their attention away from, outside of , their body. Even, we could say, they are alienated from their body. It is as if their body is something separate, which they know they need to look after, rather in the way they might walk the dog, but which they only experience at arm’s length. Without mindfulness, body and mind are not harmonised.

Of course there is no reason why the person on the treadmill cannot make mindfulness part of what they are dong - ditching the earphones is a start. But the beauty of things like Tai Chi and Chi Kung is that mindfulness is so essential to their practice. It would be hardly possible, for instance, to do Tai Chi or Chi Kung whilst at the same time watching the telly.

Of course humans have a lot going for them that cats can only dream of. In a way the price we have paid for the much greater mental sophistication we have is the loss of the natural and supple way the cat inhabits her body. It is not that we can go back and become animal again, even if we want to. Rather, the mindfulness we develop through the practice of things like Chi Kung and Tai Chi gives us the opportunity to re-acquire something of the grace and fluidity of, for instance, the cat, without sacrificing the best of what makes us human. This is a deeply satisfying experience in which we re-connect both with our body and with the world in which it moves. Indeed the combination of our distinctively human self-consciousness with the body awareness of the cat makes for an enhanced level of being in which we feel deeply at home in our body and fully connected with the world without losing our sense of our individuality and distinctness, which is in fact enhanced. We have all the languid connectedness of the cat combined with the pristine self-awareness of the human.

.