Hello welcome back to my blog. Today I want to discuss the positive affects that Tai Chi can a have on arthritis, but don’t take my word for it there have been several studies that support Tai Chi having a positive effect on the condition.
Arthritis of the knee is especially debilitating as it stops you getting around and living life normally. That alone can make you feel down and actually add to the discomfort you’re already feeling in your knees. Even a moderate increase in mobility can lift your spirits and start to produce all those feel good hormones. You could call this a positive upward spiral, the better you feel the better you get. Tai Chi can help to break the vicious cycle of feeling pain and not wanting to do any exercise, then weakening the muscles around your knee and making the pain worse.
A gentle exercise regime like Tai Chi can stimulate the muscles just enough to give you time and help with your posture. The supporting muscles around the knee can help to support the joint, increasing circulation and helping relieve inflammation. Quite often with arthritis the loss of muscle tone can be a significant contributing factor to the severity of the condition. With proper support from the surrounding muscles, the level of discomfort in your knee can be markedly diminished. This is obviously not true in every case, where some severe conditions will not respond positively. However, you can still gain benefits from doing Tai Chi sitting down, where only the feet help brace the body during the movements. You can deliberately put a bit more pressure on the feet, if you are able, to add a very gentle stimulation to the muscles around the knee and thigh.
By doing Tai Chi you can gently increase the circulation, taking unwanted toxins away and bringing new ones in to help strengthen the joint. By increasing circulation many conditions can be eased, or even cured, in some cases. The interesting thing about the body is it will attempt to cure itself given the right conditions.
In Tai Chi, as in traditional Chinese medicine, the idea of balance is paramount. It is when your body is out of balance that problems occur, which we call illness. So, before we acquire a chronic condition, a state of imbalance must have existed already. Tai Chi can help to rebalance conditions by calming your mind and stopping the release of stress chemicals in your body. In fact stress can be seen as a very potent creator of many inflammatory conditions. By helping to calm stress many chronic conditions can either be removed or alleviated. Obviously Tai Chi on its own could not cure arthritis, but with a good diet containing all of the building blocks of good nutrition, it could go a long way to alleviating it.
Before you do any form of exercise thoroughly warm up, especially your knees if you’re suffering from arthritis. I would go as far to say to thoroughly massage your knees prior to even doing the warm-up to get the circulation going.
A good diet rich in Omega 3 oils has proven very beneficial in some research projects on arthritis. Omega 3 can be found in oily fish like mackerel and salmon or taken as supplements from your health food store.
Another substance that has shown great promise in helping arthritis is turmeric the yellow spice found in eastern food. It is a powerful anti-inflammatory agent they can help ease the pain of arthritis.
That’s all for today I will be back in a couple of days, Have a good week.
