Intro to Tai Chi for Veterans

Please consult your primary care provider before the start of any exercise program. Please ease out of any of the tai chi movements if you feel any discomfort and take frequent rest breaks as you progress through the tai chi program. Welcome everyone to your tai chi class for veterans. My name is Debra and I'm an active movement therapist at the Portland Oregon VA and I'll be your instructor today. Tai chi is both a very slow gentle martial art and also a mind body practice. Some benefits you can experience from regularly practicing tai chi could be increased circulation to your hands and feet, increased leg strength even if you perform the entire class from a chair, a decrease in stress levels, improved balance, better memory and plus it's fun. Please take a few moments to gather a sturdy chair without armrests and we'll begin. So today we're going to start our exercise our tai chi class with the warm-up exercise from qigong and that is called opening exercise. Our arms are out in front of us to the side we reach up over our head and our hands come down for the seated version. I'm going to show you that again. Join in when you're ready. A couple more seated and then standing. We raise our arms up and over our head as high as comfortable for your shoulders and then sinking down as we press our hands down rising up as we come up with our arms and you can synchronize your breath with this if you like inhaling and exhaling as you come down and sink down toward the ground and with tai chi and qigong you can just have your gaze be wherever you like whether that's ground in front of you you can even close your eyes if you like. Last one. Next one is called bear and it looks like this just a quick demonstration. So for bear you want to come to the front of your chair so you have plenty of room to swing your arms and you let your arms just be real heavy kind of like noodles and then if you like to continue seated you can do that. I'm going to stand up and show it to you in standing. So bear would look like this standing. Slow gentle motion just warming up the upper body and for any of the exercises you can let your gaze just go down in front of you find a treat focus on whatever's comfortable for you and then we'll slow that down and then go back to our chair for sitting down. So those are some of the qigong warm-up exercises. We would normally do a few more and then move into the tai chi portion. For our tai chi I like to start off with an activity called opening the channel. So seated it would look like this taking your hand your your left hand and your left foot out in front of you off to the side opening up the energy channel and after that we begin our centering part of our class. So for that we have you come to the front of your chair if you can it's comfortable for you getting an upright posture let's begin centering and tuning out the world around you listening in to your inner world maybe noticing where your feet are in relation to your knees maybe noticing your sits bones are you sitting to one side or the other sitting up tall and if you like placing one hand on your upper chest and one hand on your lower abdomen to begin to just feel the natural breath happening in your body taking a few deeper breaths if you can and then if your eyes were closed you may feel free to open them bringing your hands down to your sides we'll do that also in standing. So for standing since it is a balance exercise we like to try to focus in on our balance points on our feet by coming up onto our toes just slightly and that's feeling that front corner of your foot tipping back just slightly maybe those toes can come off the ground searching for that heel turning the ankles out a bit to feel that outer seam of your foot inwards for the inner seam and then just comfortably coming to rest a little bit on the heels or posterior bending the knees slightly taking a relaxed position now that we're centered and grounded we'll take a few deep breaths noticing how with each inhalation you have a sense of expanding at the spine and each exhalation a sense of grounding through your feet taking a few breaths and from there we'll go back to the seat to show you the next actually the first tai chi exercise this exercise is called holding the ball so I'll show it to you seated just a quick demonstration work through it together seated and then in standing so we want to come to this front of the chair if that's possible for you just to cue the body in to paying attention to the inner self not the outer world and ground through our feet maybe even pressing a little bit down into the heels of your feet activating the legs we'll take our bottom hand and place it on underneath our abdomen upper hand close to where the collarbone is and away from the body just a few inches and your ball might be smaller or might be larger depending on the day so now that we've formed our ball we can practice turning it over and then we're going to do what's called weight shifting we're going to shift our head shoulders upper rib cage and our arms over to one side and when we're over there we'll turn the ball over and then we'll shift slowly back and turn the ball over you can join in whenever you like and then I'll show that to you in a moment standing so standing holding the ball would look like this taking our ball shifting our weight from one side to the other for tai chi it's very slow very gentle movements the slower the better and the purpose of having the chair here is in case you do feel like your balance is being challenged feel free to have it for your safety let's do a couple more on each side and then our hands can come back to center and I'll have a seat and show you the next one our next and last tai chi for today is called fists to opponent's head for that I'll show you the brief demo all right that's the seated version and then I'm going to stand up and explain it further so here I want to talk about the tai chi stepping so for stepping it looks like all of your weight is coming over to one leg you lift up your foot bring it out placing the heel first and step forward bending your knee bringing your weight forward and back for tai chi stepping on the other side shifting the weight and stepping we can imagine a clock face on the ground and our foot would be stepping out to two o'clock and to ten o'clock and that is also done seated in the chair so I'll show you the whole thing called fists to opponent's head in standing with the weight shifting and you can join in anytime you like either seated or standing we're just going to continue doing a few more of these fists to opponent's head two more on each side and again you can bring your arms up as high as comfortable for your own body great so that would conclude the tai chi part then I'm going to do the more the cool down with you in the seat some more qigong exercises just one more today which is called playing with the wind for that one we would take our hands palms facing away from us and then begin to weight shift and draw the hands across the body as if we're pushing the wind ourselves kind of a playful thing to do feel free to bend forward and push your wind through the if you like so that's the quick demonstration then I'll show you standing version standing version we want to have our feet a little bit further apart from each other for our balance and also in case we want to get a little bit deeper with our squats for the strengthening of the legs playing with the wind and you can go whatever pace is comfortable for you and then slowly bringing ourselves to closing some of the final things we do in our class is we close our channel we opened it in the beginning and now we'll close it the same way with our left arm out to the side and stepping with our left leg back in and finally the conclusion we take our right fist and make a fist with it to symbolize strength take our left hand wrap it around to symbolize restraint and then there's a small nod or bow if you like where we say I honor you and I thank you for coming I hope you've enjoyed this introduction to tai chi class currently we're holding these classes online through the virtual care manager application our class sizes are from two to eight veterans and each class is approximately 60 minutes in length when you feel confident in these basic tai chi and qigong movements we encourage you to answer your own call to action by contacting your active movement department and scheduling your first tai chi class