Health benefits of Tai Chi
health.harvard.edu
health.harvard.edu
IMO, in theory it's even more useful for desk workers than yoga.
If you look at the history of Ashtanga Yoga, it was primarily developed for the traditional life. Where even non-laborers spent a significant amount of time on their feet and moving around. This is why doctors, nursers, actors, laborers, retail workers, etc... sing praises about yoga. I struggled to get much out of it, as I found it stretched the stuff that wasn't that tight for me and didn't focus on my problem areas.
The martial arts background of Tai Chi, alongside the pivot to longevity focused practices in East Asia, makes Tai Chi uniquely suited to the woes of a desk worker.
Unfortunately Tai Chi lacks serious standardization or centralization, so it's hard to know if a particular school/class will work for you nor is it as easy to self-study.
Of course, you don't need the Eastern traditions to obtain these same benefits. Dynamic stretching, Pilates, and functional strength training can work too, but I find that the eastern stuff has a meditative/spiritual aspect that regular training does not.
Well, as far as I know Tai Chi was already cool in the west, when the communists were still fighting the practice inside china.
I highly recommend it in any case.
So, if you want the best of both worlds (to learn Tai Chi AND avoid modern China's soft-power influence), sign up to a school that traces its roots back to Taiwan from that era.
What is practiced today is a health-preserving exercise derived from that martial art.
This is the same as for what is today called "karate", whose origin is from a 19th century martial art practiced by professionals, i.e. bodyguards and law-enforcement officials, but from that in the 20th century health-preserving exercises and sportive competitions were derived, which do not look at all like the original art.
There are people who claim that they still know which were the martial art techniques from which the movements of the Tai Chi forms were derived, but at least for most of them the claims are unlikely to be true and if they demonstrate a supposedly original movement there usually exists no evidence that it truly was transmitted from the ancient masters and it is not just a modern guess of how the original movement might have been.
As a health-preserving exercise, Tai Chi is indeed one of the best.
Erm, with martial arts it is really easy to find out, if something has any (combat) value simply by trying it out in a (training) fight. So I do lot's of martial arts and I can say with confidence some technics of Tai Chi helped me become better. And I know many other fighters who also do Tai Chi. But .. I also don't know anyone who has done just Tai Chi, but also do it.
If the one who made the guess is competent, it may be an excellent technique. However, the fact that it is a good technique does not mean that the guess is right.
The problem is that there have been far too many examples of martial arts experts, especially among those from Asian countries, who instead of saying that they have invented some techniques themselves, or at least that they have altered them significantly in comparison with what they had learned, they claimed that they had learned them from some older master exactly in the form that they demonstrate, and that the older master had in turn learned them exactly in the same form from even more ancient masters.
So when someone claims that some technique has been transmitted from their masters through several generations, that is more likely to be BS than truth. In Japan there are better sources of historical evidence, because the martial arts were practiced by professionals and there is a lot of written evidence from their training schools, but in China the martial arts that used non-military weapons or no weapons were more likely to be practiced by outlaws, with few exceptions like the bodyguards of various VIPs, including the emperor, so the written evidence is more scarce.
Unlike these claims of false antiquity, which I strongly dislike, there are also many attempts done nowadays to reconstruct the original movements of the forms of Tai Chi and of other Chinese, Okinawan etc. martial arts, which are presented as what they really are, i.e. guesses.
Those attempts of reconstruction, carefully done based on various lines of evidence, which are presented openly, are very interesting and I enjoy them very much.
If there still exist people who have preserved non-public details about how Tai Chi really was 200 years ago, they are likely to be found in Taiwan, because in mainland China after WWII there was a period of oppression of all former martial art experts, so few masters of Tai Chi or of other arts have survived through it, therefore most of the knowledge that has been preserved was that of the beginners, who according to tradition were not taught the complete art.
Yeah, that is a old thing I guess. The more mysticism around his ancient mystic technics, the more respect for the master. But it used to be worse I think, the boxer rebellion cleaned up with lot's of superstition in the area in general, as martial arts masters turned out not to be bullet proof either https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxer_Rebellion
(I learned that fact actually in a Tai Chi book)
I just know that I don't care about ancient wisdom/tradition, but about things that work here and now. And Tai Chi people taught me good things and I know some of them were also good fighters. And the non fighting technics are useful as well.
Many of these 19th century masters cross-trained in all of the related arts from that era and proceeded to carry down these traditions to their students.
Therefore, the original movements can, indeed, still be found in the world, and you can still learn them. You just won't see any of these movements displayed in Hollywood (because they're not flashy enough for the big screen), or in an MMA ring (because they're not designed for sport fighting), or through any school or lineage that remains or currently exists in China post-Cultural Revolution (because all of the true practictioners fled to Taiwan and elsewhere).
But you're right in that it doesn't AT ALL look like the Tai Chi that most of the world practices today. Many of the movements and forms have kept the same names... but they are trained and performed VERY differently from what most people would recognize.
(1) https://linnatural.com/about-our-martial-arts-school-in-coro... (2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Lutang
Full disclosure: I mentioned Grandmaster Lin specifically because I've met, witnessed, and learned from him directly having attended seminars that he's run in the past.
Learning Tai Chi in the way that it was meant to be learned means cultivating not just your external body but also your spiritual self, mental wellness, and internal organs as well.
Fajin or the explosive use of power is practiced (after a few years of training the moves slowly) and is necessary from time to time to help remind the body the actual speed of the martial application as well as to test that you are standing right, not overreaching etc. It is very easy if you do the moves for a one time slowly to get into bad habits very gradually and have poor posture, resetting with the faster moves helps to expose those weaknesses. We always warm up a lot before doing those moves or you can hurt yourself.
Should also look up the spear form, which is also done quite quickly.
1. Getting otherwise sedentary people moving.
2. Giving people a way to form social bonds with others over a shared hobby.
Anything beyond that is probably speculative and may depend on the school/teacher.
Tai Chi, like many other exercises that have been derived from former martial arts, is a complete exercise, for all muscles and articulations, especially when one of the older long forms is practiced, not one of the modern compressed forms.
There are a lot of examples of sports or gym practices that are not very good as a health-preserving exercise if they are the only exercise that is done.
Tai Chi is among the exercises that can be sufficient even if it is the only exercise that is done.
It is not difficult to compose a routine that exercises all the parts of the body, but those are usually more boring than exercises like the Tai Chi forms.
... And yet this article doesn't link a single one. This is just a marketing post, nothing interesting here. I'd expect better from a university.