Tai Chi walking: Why ’meditation in motion’ has taken over TikTok

There’s a new exercise trend making the rounds on the internet: Tai Chi walking, inspired by a centuries-old Chinese martial art that incorporates flowing hand and foot movements with breath and mindfulness.

Also know as “meditation in motion” (and dubbed “medication in motion”), Tai Chi is a gentle form of exercise that has a number of reported health benefits, primarily strength, flexibility, and balance, and, to a lesser degree, aerobic conditioning, according to an article from Harvard Medical School.

Without using weights or resistance bands, you can gain upper-body strength through arm exercises that use your core and back muscles in a similar way. Another signature of Tai Chi is it prioritizes walking heel-to-toe with focused attention.

In Tai Chi walking, exercisers adopt a Tai Chi gait, paying special attention to how they hold their posture and utilize the body’s muscles. The slow, low-impact movement is touted as especially good for older people.

Search “Tai Chi walking” on Instagram and you’ll find endless posts lauding the benefits of the trend, with some fitness influencers claiming it takes “just 7 minutes” a day to see results, while others explain how the movement helps people get grounded. Looking to get started? One of the best primers comes via this TikTok user.

It’s the latest exercise trend to hit the internet, following the “10,000 steps” craze. Popularized back in 1965 as a marketing slogan in Japan, “10,000 steps” first gained popularity in the U.S. in the 1990s, but didn’t become a daily habit for many Americans until the last 15 years. That trend ended up inspiring a whole industry of digital trackers, from Fitbits to Apple Watches.

Walking 10,000 steps a day, or roughly 5 miles, takes most people 1.5 to 2 hours to complete, though it doesn’t have to be done all in one go. Researchers have mostly debunked that as a magic number and gold standard for exercise, emphasizing that frequent movement should be the goal.

“There were no actual studies that had looked at ‘10,000 steps’” at the time the Yamasa pedometer was developed, I-Min Lee, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, tells Popular Science. “It was a made-up number in the sense that 10,000 sounds good, it’s easy to remember.”

As opposed to the 10,000 steps trend, Tai Chi walking is a conscious movement, which pays more attention to how one moves instead of how much.

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