I’ve been looking around now at different alternatives and was wondering if anyone here has any experience with Qigong for developing real strength? Also what have you experienced with it with stamina and endurance? Thanks
If you want to get strong, lift weights. I never practiced qui gong per se, but I studied Okinawan karate and used a makiwara and other forms of body conditioning. Aside from mental toughness, I can’t say I got much out of it really.
The term qigong covers a pretty broad territory however irrespective of any supposed mystical benefits most qigong is physical exercise.
Standing like a tree involves holding weights against gravity, those weights might be your arms but it’s still weight training.
Stand with bent knees for half an hour and you leg’s will get stronger I guarantee it.
Standing with bent knees for half an hour is more muscular endurance than strength. Placing a very heavy load on the shoulders, bending the knees to a full squat then standing back up is strength. Different energy systems.
I wouldn’t really disagree, though I suspect as you train in lower and lower stances you might eventually get stronger.
The thing is I’ve met people who only trained using qigong who appeared to be fast, strong and well conditioned which is no to say a bit of hard karate training doesn’t work equally well.
Been down this road before with the word “conditioning” , some people think it means building up strength ,other would say gaining stamina, I try to avoid using it to avoid confusion.
I follow what you’re saying. If a person was seriously out of shape, pretty much anything could cause them to become stronger.
And as you mentioned with “conditioning”, the word “strength” seems to have a lot of different meanings for people. But really, strength is about 1 rep max.
I’ve been practicing Chi Gong (aka chi kung, Qi gong, qi kung) as part of my Tai Chi routine for the past 5 years. The characters really translate to “energy” “work” and the focus is (therefore?) on learning to channel your chi (ki, ji, qi, energy, it’s the force, Luke!). My instructor has a few chi gong exercises that he uses as a warm-up routine before we start working on the tai chi patterns and he would enjoy spending hours upon days telling you about each exercise and how it’s supposed to open up different channels of your body to let your chi flow and thereby keep things healthy. In this sense, chi gong is considered an “internal” art designed to teach students to generate energy from within and direct that energy throughout (and beyond) the body. Strictly speaking, then, if you’re doing chi gong properly your muscles aren’t really doing much work; your joints, muscles, organs, tissues of whatever kind are really just letting energy flow through them and reaping whatever benefits they’re supposed to receive from the energy.
But my instructor’s class is a Tai Chi class, and so he uses the chi gong only as a warm-up routine. I have also seen schools that teach Chinese martial arts devote entire classes (6pm - 7pm, once or twice a week) to just doing chi gong exercises. A close relative would probably be some types of Yoga (which I dabbled in a couple times but did not practice) in which the practitioners focus on their different chakras and their breathing and letting energy flow. I’ve noticed many Yoga practitioners have well-toned muscles, though their muscles are not particularly strong or bulky.
Back in the stone age, my weightlifting instructor (who was also the football coach and the cycling class instructor) noted, “If you want to build muscle mass: High resistance, low rep(etition)s. If you want to tone what you have: High reps, low resistance. If you want to burn fat: high reps, moderate resistance.”
In that perspective, chi gung is low reps, low resistance. In my experience, it’s more like light calisthenics.and slight stretching. Neither will build much strength. And the pace doesn’t challenge the heart or lungs much, either.
On the other hand, as noted above, doing chi gong is more than doing nothing at all and is well recommended for convalescing and for seniors who have been urged to get active but need a mild start on the road to improved health.
–G!