(First published in March 2023 for the WTQA Newsletter)
The Ba Duan Jin is a very popular qigong form that is thought to have been created in the Song Dynasty (960–1279) but has more recently been standardised by the Chinese Health Qigong Association CHQA. Anyone who has been practising Tai Chi and Qigong for a period of time has likely done some variation of the Ba Duan Jin, or 8-Section Brocade. The standardised nature of the form makes it a good candidate for research.
Putting ‘Baduanjin’ into the Pub Med Central research database yields 835 results – a very impressive figure. Saving me the trouble of looking through all of these listings, a group of researchers did exactly that and included Chinese language databases as well. The authors confined their search to include studies relating to musculoskeletal pain and sleep quality in people with chronic diseases. These parameters reduced the number of included studies to 28 but still included conditions such as insomnia, Parkinson’s disease, hypertension, chronic fatigue syndrome, lumbar disc herniation, osteoporosis, diabetes, and knee osteoarthritis. That’s a good spread of different conditions. Skipping to the end of the story, no one will be surprised to hear the researchers found positive results. This review shows that Baduanjin practice reduces musculoskeletal pain and improves sleep quality in people with chronic illnesses.
Perhaps of more interest to us as qigong and tai chi instructors and practitioners is how much practice is needed to achieve these results? Most of the studies ran sessions around 5 times per week with a couple at 3 and 4 times and quite a few daily, resulting in an average of 5.8 times per week. The session times varied from 30 minutes up to 90 minutes with an average of 49 minutes per class. Due to this high variability of class duration, the authors did not make specific recommendations about the frequency and length of practice. They also noted that the study lengths were also variable with the shortest running for 4 weeks and the longest for 6 months. They suggest that 4 weeks is possibly a minimum duration needed to learn the movements. In addition, “The frequency and session length may be less important given that Baduanjin is relatively easy to learn, and that the majority of the benefits might have come from daily self-practice and not from the training sessions.” (1).
This is encouraging news for those who don’t want to do long daily sessions. Given the Baduanjin is a fairly short form depending on the number of repetitions of the 8 movements, practising around 5 times per week is quite achievable. Include a warm up and some standing meditation before practising Baduanjin and you’ll have a highly effective 30 minutes of exercise therapy.
But what about adverse events? That’s medical-speak for negative or undesirable effects caused by the form. A review of 47 trials showed that only two of those reported adverse events (2). Symptoms included knee pain, dizziness, shoulder pain, shortness of breath and more. It must be said that the participants in that study were likely starting from a low fitness base, however many of our students will be as well. I’m surprised it was only two studies, but if we keep in mind potential publication bias then that makes sense. Studies that show negative effects are often not published, so we only get to see dominantly positive results. We also don’t know how many people drop out of the study due to injury or illness.
The Baduanjin contains some quite extreme movements and needs to be practised with one’s own physical condition firmly in mind. To watch videos of the beautiful Chinese Masters demonstrating the form could give the impression that the Baduanjin is easy. But most of us have accumulated our share of wear and tear over the years which means many of those movements are not easy at all.
For mere mortals – those of us who have not been learning wushu, tai chi and qigong since we were 5 years old – we need to modify the form to suit our own abilities. In Movement 1 for example (shown above), that might look like lifting the hands forward of the head rather than directly above to ease the pressure in the shoulders and upper back; it might be keeping the palms face down rather than face up to limit the rotation through the forearms and shoulder joints, and it could be looking forwards and not upwards to minimise the amount of neck hyperextension. That’s not to say we shouldn’t challenge ourselves, of course we should, but we need to work out just the right amount of exertion for each individual.
As someone with a chronic pain condition, I would not practise Baduanjin five times a week as that would make me sore, even with modifications. That sort of repetition of movement does not suit my body, so I wouldn’t do it more than once a week. Thankfully, there are many other beautiful forms of qigong available, all with similar benefits, so we can pick and choose which forms suit us best and add variety into our practice.
(First published in November 2022 for the WTQA Newsletter. Data accurate at time of writing.)
In Australia, 238,800 adults 15+ participate in Martial Arts annually. That is 1.2% of the adult population. 60,800 children 0-14 participate in organised Martial Arts annually, which is 1.3% of the 0-14 population.
Looking at gender, in the broad adult group 56% are females, 44% males whereas in children, the vast majority are boys at 70%. And drilling in a little further, the largest share of participation in martial arts when considering age and gender is in females 65+.
75% of participants engage in Martial Arts at least once a week, 46% twice a week and 27% three times a week. Just under 5% of participants practised 7 times a week.
AusPlay conducts this survey on behalf of the Australian Sports Commission and it is the largest, most comprehensive survey of its kind. They look at participation levels across a broad range of activities, what motivates people to be active, and what barriers are likely to prevent them from being active.
This survey has been conducted annually since 2015/2016 and the figures given above are averages across this period. Looking at the data for each year, understandably the participation levels dropped over 2020/2021 due to Covid lockdown measures, however the numbers have rebounded to just above the 2016 levels for adults as at publication in October 2022.
In general (not Martial Arts specific), adults were motivated to be active for physical health or fitness (83%), for fun/enjoyment (48%), for social reasons (38%), for psychological/mental health/therapy (31%) and to be outdoors/enjoy nature (20%).
Looking at Martial Arts in the 65+ age group, the balance of motivations is slightly different with 79% citing physical health or fitness, 31% for psychological/mental health/therapy, 24.2% fun/enjoyment, and 23.8% social reasons.
Reasons for dropping out of activities in adults 55+ include poor health or injury (43%), increasing age/too old (19%), not enough time/too many other commitments (13%), disability (11%) and have a physical job (8%).
Looking at the top 10 sport-related activities for the 55+ age group, Martial Arts comes in at 7th for females and not at all for males. For comparison, swimming is number one at 653,000 where as Martial Arts has 85,000 participants (females 55+). Walking is classified as a non-sport-related activity and is by far the most popular with 4,593,000 participants over 55.
So what is included under the term “Martial Arts”? We know there are a vast number of different Martial Arts, but for reporting purposes these are grouped together into five sub-activities, which are really four specified activities with everything else grouped together as the fifth.
Tai Chi comes in first with 111,000 participants, then Kickboxing with 45,000, Qigong at 7000, Ninjitsu at 1000, and Martial Arts (other) with 140,000. These figures include adults and children of both genders. If we look at just adults 15+, Tai Chi , Qigong and Ninjitsu are much the same at 110,000, 7000 and 1000 respectively, Kickboxing drops to 39,000, and everything else drops the most to 86,000.
What do we do with this information? This offers us the chance to get strategic about how we market our classes and to whom, how we inspire participants to stay with us, what measures we might take to prevent them from dropping out.
The above figures are a small selection of what is available in the full report. For more comprehensive data please view the complete report and more here: https://www.clearinghouseforsport.gov.au/research/ausplay/results
Martial Arts Report: https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiNWFhOTA0YzItODMxOC00ZTVkLWE5ZDAtNTAzYzZmNzk1NjgyIiwidCI6IjhkMmUwZjRjLTU1ZjItNGNiMS04ZWU3LWRhNWRkM2ZmMzYwMCJ9