{"id":2872,"date":"2013-03-31T02:00:51","date_gmt":"2013-03-31T06:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/?p=2872"},"modified":"2013-04-01T16:00:21","modified_gmt":"2013-04-01T20:00:21","slug":"psychological-health-benefits-of-taiji","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/2013\/03\/psychological-health-benefits-of-taiji\/","title":{"rendered":"Psychological Health Benefits of Taiji"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/p>\n
In several previous articles I have reported on the health benefits of Taiji.\u00a0 Recently a new review paper “Psychological Effects of Tai Chi Chuan” has been published [1].\u00a0 The paper reports on a review of published literature on the psychological benefits of Taiji.\u00a0 A summary of that paper is reported here.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The paper reviewed literature in seven electronic data bases:\u00a0 Medline-Pubmed, Scirus, Pascal, ScienceDirect, SportDiscuss, Science Citation Index, and BIOSIS.\u00a0 It searched using key words that are different combinations of the terms:\u00a0 Tai Chi, Tai Chi Chuan, Taiji, Tai Ji Quan, psychology, cognition, stress, anxiety, depression, mood, sleep disorder, well-being, self efficacy, mental health, self-esteem, quality of life, and fear of falling, as well as their Spanish translations.\u00a0 It looked at publications that were published up to June 2011 in either English or Spanish.\u00a0 The search excluded those which did not have the purpose of measuring the effects of Tai Chi Chuan (TCC) on psychological and mental health.\u00a0 Forty-three articles were found, with eight of them being review articles.<\/p>\n
There were several Taiji styles used in these studies, and the most commonly used was the Yang Style.\u00a0 The form sets used were mostly the shorter form sets, such as 24, 16, or 10 movements, instead of the longer form set of 108 movements.\u00a0 The mean duration was 14 weeks, frequency of 2-3 times per week, for an average duration of one hour per session.<\/p>\n
There were several sets of studies.\u00a0 Here is a summary of the findings:<\/p>\n
There were also several other interesting findings:<\/p>\n
In summary, this paper has reviewed the literature on studies on the psychological health benefits of Taiji.\u00a0 Many studies did find that practicing Taiji can result in significant improvements in several aspects of psychological health.\u00a0 However, the results are not always uniformly consistent and the sample sizes are still small.\u00a0 It is possible that other types of low-to-moderate intensity exercises could also lead to positive results, although there are advantages for Taiji over other types of exercises due to Taiji not requiring any equipment, flexibility in location and time of practice, and its almost zero-adverse impacts on the body.\u00a0 More studies are needed with two or more control groups to differentiate the results from performing Taiji exercises and other types of low-to-moderate intensity exercises.<\/p>\n
_____________________<\/p>\n
[1[ P. J. Jimenez, A. Melendez, and U. Albers, “Pshchological Effects of Tai Chi Chuan,” Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics<\/em> 55 (2012) 460-467.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In several previous articles I have reported on the health benefits of Taiji.\u00a0 Recently a new review paper “Psychological Effects of Tai Chi Chuan” has been published [1].\u00a0 The paper reports on a review of published literature on the psychological benefits of Taiji.\u00a0 A summary of that paper is reported here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2872"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2872"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2872\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2929,"href":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2872\/revisions\/2929"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}