How Tai Chi Helps Relieve Back Pain?
Tai Chi is a form of exercise that has recently been gaining popularity as a way to relieve and/or manage back pain and neck pain. It is often easy to associate Tai Chi with groups of people in parks or gyms moving slowly and deliberately in synchronization.
Basic elements of Tai Chi
- Requires the practitioners to be tranquil and calm, emphasizing slow and soft movements.
- Tai Chi involves a greater degree of movement as compared to yoga.
- And unlike many types of aerobic exercise (such as running) Tai Chi does not involve any jarring motions that create impact on the spine. It is a slow and deliberate, flowing movement of the body.
Components of Tai Chi
From a more scientific standpoint, Tai Chi is not unlike other forms of low-impact exercises; however, Tai Chi focuses more specifically on posture and alignment.
The practice of Tai Chi entails three key components:
- Movement - slow and fluid movements improve the body's alignment, posture, strength, flexibility, coordination, balance, and stamina. Many of these benefits of Tai Chi are consistent with many other forms of low-impact exercise, with the added benefit of focus on improved posture, balance and alignment.
- Breathing - focused and rhythmical breathing emphasizes a relaxed body and encourages strong circulation. Oxygenated blood flows to the muscles and brain during Tai Chi.
- Meditation/state of mind - a meditative state of mind during Tai Chi, coupled with these movements and breathing is said to dissipate stress and anxiety, which helps relieve pain caused by psychological and emotional factors.
Posture and alignment in Tai Chi
- Training the body to avoid slouching and rounding the shoulders through better posture and spinal alignment reduces stress on the components of the spine.
- Practicing Tai Chi may therefore reduce the practitioner's back pain through application
Tone and strength of muscles Tai Chi
- The weight bearing aspects of the Tai Chi exercise have even been shown to stimulate bone growth, which may be beneficial to help prevent osteoporosis
- Many of the Tai Chi movements use the spine as a pivot point, gently flexing both the spine and the muscles around it back and forth and around
- Through repetition of Tai Chi movements, the muscles around the spine, including the abdominals and hamstrings, strengthen and become more flexible, both of which are important to improve posture and reduce back pain
Benefits of Tai Chi
A number of studies have shown that Tai Chi provides several benefits - physical as well as mental.
Tai Chi has demonstrated usefulness in the prevention and treatment of certain problems such as back pain.
- Tai Chi is non-invasive
- Relatively inexpensive
- Gentle on the spine, so many people with back pain are starting to try it as an adjunct to (or sometimes instead of) traditional medical approaches to manage back pain
- Furthermore, Tai Chi does not require any expensive equipment and can be practiced anywhere
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