Qigong for Athletes
Could something as gentle as Qigong support the intensive athletic training of an athlete? Yes!! In fact, a series of Qigong postures called the Ba Duan Jin were created over 1,000 years ago by a military general of the Song Dynasty to help his soldiers hone their mental and physical abilities for war. Through all types of Qigong, athletes can discover new athletic potential, enhance performance, support physical health, support mental/emotional health, and streamline recovery.
Qigong asks us to engage the mind in the details of physical movements. Learning to connect the mind more deeply with the body will enable athletes to explore and understand their physical limits. When we explore and understand our physical limits or physical blockages, we often release the energetic blockages within them and become able to stretch our physical limits, maximize ROM, add intensity, or add complexity. Attuning to subtlety equips us to expand our abilities.
Qigong postures involve hybrid movements, meaning they involve movement at multiple joints at the same time. Many postures also involve multiplanar movements, meaning a single posture will move through a combination of the sagittal plane (example: forward-backward), transverse plane (example: lateral rotation), and frontal plane (example: side-to-side). Mentally, this multi-joint and multiplanar movement practice helps us improve coordination and proprioception. Physically, multi-joint and multiplanar movement helps us strengthen kinetic chains of muscles and teaches various muscles to work together in harmony.
Many Qigong postures ask us to focus on balance, both mentally and physically. Balance is an energy that begins in the mind, so as we cultivate a sense of mental or emotional balance, we can extend that to the bones, muscles, tendons, ligaments, and organs. Practicing Qigong postures helps us increase our awareness of skeletal alignment and feel when certain muscles are dominating others or compensating for others. Observing the body without judgment is a central tenet of Qigong. Judgment is not neutral, pulling or swaying us in one direction or another, and so judgement puts us off balance. When we observe the body without judgment, we can notice more and allow the body to come back into its natural alignment and allow muscles to return to their synergistic relationships.
We connect the breath with the body when practicing Qigong. Breathing is life, quite literally. We inhale new energy and exhale energy that is extra or no longer serves us. When we connect the inhale and exhale to physical movement, we help energy flow through distal areas of our body or through tense/stuck/lethargic areas of our body. Consistent, relaxed breathing is enough to release muscle tension, ease digestive blockages, release toxins through the lymph system, and flow blood and nutrients to all areas of the body in need. Coordinating breathing with movement also brings power to movement: when an athlete learns to time breath with an action, that action explodes with power, efficacy, and elegance.
Qigong asks us to build our sense of presence, to bring all aspects of our attention to our body and mind in the present moment and present location. Through practice, we build a behavior of focused attention that follows us into every area of our lives. Focused attention or an increased sense of presence helps us become more efficient and effective in professional tasks; helps us have more fun in and get more out of recreational endeavors; helps us feel more connection and openness in relationships with other humans and animals; helps us feel when our stress level increases; helps us identify what emotions are flowing through us and determining our actions; help us access sleep more readily; and can help us slow down our frequency waves significantly to deepen our sleep. For athletes, increasing a sense of presence will help them use kinetic muscles chains more efficiently, help them collect and direct their energy more powerfully, and help the mind and muscle fibers recover more quickly. For athletes - truthfully, everyone - increased presence helps us become aware of our intention and helps us strongly root an intention. Intention, or belief, is where the energy behind an action or behavior comes from, and thereby is the power, or lack thereof, within an action or behavior.
Athletic training is often intense, and often the point of it involves breaking down muscle fibers. In a way, we are doing war on our body, yet with the intention of building it back up stronger. Qigong can be a wonderful complement to athletic training because it is subtle and gentle, yet powerful. In fact, the subtlety and gentleness of the practice is its source of power. When an athlete attacks an exercise with high energy and aggression, they may at first succeed but they will eventually hit a ceiling. When an athlete learns to feel subtle energy and learns how to gently hold, direct, and release that energy, the athlete will know no bounds. When we treat our bodies with subtlety and gentleness, we honor our bodies and love our bodies, and they respond to that honor and love by blossoming with potential.
