Tai Chi for Elderly

Balance

Balance is the key to healthy, full life. In older people, balance prevents falls and and provides confidence to sustain physical and social activities. For younger people, better balance often translates into better performance in sports. For everyone, balance contributes to a grounded sense of well-being.

Balance and your relationship to gravity involve many interacting factors such as strength and flexibility, sensory perception, neuromuscular coordination or synergy and cognitive processes. Understanding these components, how they degrade with age or disease, and understanding how Tai Chi affects them will help you appreciate why Tai Chi is often so effective at improving balance.

One of the primary reasons you should be concerned is about fall-related fractures. Some 50 million Americans over age 50 have low bone density, and fractures in this group often result in great suffering and medical expense. Tai Chi offers a twofold effect of reducing fracture risk not only does it improve balance and reduce falls, but also, preliminary studies, suggest Tai Chi may also reduce rates of mineral density (BMD) decline, particularly in post menopausal women.

In addition, elderly, frail, and deconditioned people who often have poor balance have found Tai Chi to be very safe. Since falling is a common and sometimes fatal problem for the elderly, the balance and postural control gained in Tai Chi could help to reduce the incidence of falling.

The proportion of older people in our population is continually increasing. As a result, the health of the elderly should be of growing concern to our society. If you are elderly, Tai Chi is a slow and gentle form of exercise which can be practiced with safety. Even those who consider themselves less fit than their friends at the same age can practice and enjoy the benefits of this art.

The most common and most noticeable effect of old age is poor posture, which is the result of lifetime of bad postural habits. Tai Chi proves highly beneficial in correcting this problem. Along with good posture come all the benefits which are related to it.

An important aspect to note, is revealed in a study titled 'Tai Chi for Postural Control in the Well Elderly'. It showed that elderly people who practice Tai Chi performed significantly better on tests of Balance than those who had not practiced Tai Chi.

As our population begins to age and we live longer and longer we are beginning to
recognize a growing cost from falls. By falls we are not talking about falling off buildings or over cliffs but loss of balance situations which cause us to move quickly from a vertical to horizontal position during simple acts like walking around or climbing stairs. In our earlier years such falls generally means a bruise or two and a few minute’s pain, if we are very unlucky we might break a bone or suffer more serious damage. In our later years such falls are fraught with danger often resulting in hip replacements and extended periods of incapacity. Such falls can rob us of our independence.

Putting aside for one moment the cost in pain and suffering and loss of quality of life the cost of falls is placing a tremendous burden on our medical infrastructure. This cost is not only huge but also rising at an alarming rate. Across the world studies are taking place to determine what can be done to reduce the incidence and impact from falls.

For some time the focus in falls prevention has been on the elimination or containment of situations in which falls are likely to occur. Non-slip floors and provision of proper hand holds in bathrooms. Placement of handrails, reduction of slopes and increases in tread sizes of stairs would be examples of efforts in these areas. The problem in this approach is first that the cost of securing all such areas is enormous and that second people persist in falling down in areas where such safeguards are not present. It is obviously most important that as well as eliminating fall hazards as much as possible is done to make the individual as "fall-proof" as possible. The question then is what can we do to an individual that will reduce the likelihood of falls?

Many studies have taken place in this are but so far only one form of exercise has been shown to have a significant and permanent impact in reducing falls. The name of this exercise is Tai Chi. The scientific study that was performed was carried out in the USA by Professor Xu and showed that a thirteen-week course in Tai Chi could reduce falls by 40%. Looking at this another way means that the practice of Tai Chi could in itself reduce the cost of falls to our society by almost half. A tremendous contribution.