balance

Tai Chi has many benefits, and one that we might not realise is that it helps us with our relationships to man’s best friend – the dog.

Interacting with animals as pets, and dogs are a common pet, can be a physical activity as well as an emotionally rewarding one.

To help care for our pets, we should be walking them often, and engaging them in exercise to keep them healthy.

“Falls, ankle sprains, back injuries and even broken bones are common when walking dogs who are boisterous and if the dog handler is not in tune with themselves and their body alignment and balance” explains Sifu Leo Ming.

“Tai chi is a discipline that helps the dog handler to develop more balance and strength, as well as the inner composure, to handle their dogs better.”

This wonderful article by Christine Green outlines a number of principles that we learn from tai chi, that help with interacting with our furry friends. These include:

Using our waist for handling jumping dogs, by being flexible to move with the push of the dog, rather than being pushed over.
Incorporating back muscles for bad leash manners, by developing the tai chi upper body posture which activates the right back muscles to keep our center of gravity more stable.

Weight shifting for dogs who keep pulling the leash, so that we maintain our balance and strength.

Rooting our weight and energy down, to handle those dogs with bad leash manners, or a dog jumping up, so that we are able to keep grounded and stay in control.

Relaxation, gained from the meditative style of tai chi, is good for everything, but specially for improving reaction time to deal with animals.

Read more about how tai chi can help you enjoy your time with your dogs more, in the article.

To experience some of the techniques explained, join your Sifu Leo Low Ming for a complimentary introductory class. Contact him on 0833780468 to learn more about his Tai Chi Classes in Parkview, Johannesburg.

Impaired balance is one of the symptoms of those who suffer from Parkinson’s disease. They also tend to fall often, and are less able to function on a day to day basis as the disease progresses.

Exercise is encouraged – yet until this research, few forms of exercise had been shown to be effective. This study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine , was conducted in 2012. It found that tai chi was the form of exercise that consistently helped patients with Parkinson’s disease.

These patients were taken through a tailored tai chi programme to test if this form of exercise could improve their ability to control their posture.

The other forms of exercise that were compared to the tai chi were stretching and resistance training. All the participants only did 60 minutes of exercise, twice a week, over a period of 24 week.

The results showed that “the tai chi group performed consistently better than the resistance-training and stretching groups in maximum excursion”. Incidence of falls were lowered too, and they found that resistance training also helped with this aspect.

It is interesting to note too that the effects of the training in tai chi were maintained when they checked in with the patients 3 months after the tai chi programme ended.

So if you would like to improve your balance and posture control, consider taking up the practice of tai chi, and come and join us for a free trail class.

To find out how tai chi can help you with managing your health challenges and improving your balance, contact your Sifu, Leo Low Ming, on 0833780468.

balance Tag

Tai Chi and Dogs

Tai Chi helps patients with Parkinson’s Disease