reTrek

Tai chi walking: what it is and how to do it

The short answer

Tai chi walking is walking slowly and deliberately using the principles of tai chi. The Tai Chi for Health Institute, whose founder Dr Paul Lam developed and teaches this version, describes it as “walking with mindfulness of Tai Chi principles: mindful weight transfer, maintaining balance, upright posture, and awareness.” It is less a way of getting somewhere than a balance and focus practice that happens to use walking.

How to do it

These are the Institute’s instructions, step by step:

  1. Stand tall. Spine upright, “as if suspended from above”, not leaning forward, back or to the side.
  2. Shift your weight first. Move your weight onto one leg and find your balance on it before the other foot leaves the ground.
  3. Heel first. Place the moving foot heel first, touching the ground gently, then lower the whole foot flat.
  4. Then shift again. Transfer your weight onto the new front foot, settle, and only then lift the back one.
  5. Breathe slowly. Through the nose when you can, deep and relaxed rather than shallow and tense.
  6. Go slowly. The Institute suggests at least three to five seconds per step.

Start next to a wall or a counter if your balance is unsteady, so there is something to touch.

What the research shows, and what it does not

Tai chi has strong evidence behind it for one thing in particular: falls in older people. A Cochrane review of exercise for preventing falls (Sherrington and colleagues, 2019) found that tai chi reduced the number of older people living in the community who had a fall by about 20%, rated high-certainty evidence, and may reduce the rate of falls by 19%.

That evidence is for tai chi, not for tai chi walking on its own. The Institute says so itself: “Most if not all Tai Chi research is based on modern, simplified sets,” not walking alone. Tai chi walking uses the same principles of weight transfer and balance, so a link is plausible, but it has not been tested as a separate practice in the studies above.

It is not a step-count workout

At three to five seconds a step, tai chi walking is 12 to 20 steps a minute, so ten minutes of it is somewhere between 120 and 200 steps. That is the point of it, not a flaw: it trains balance and attention, not distance. If you are counting steps, treat tai chi walking as something you do alongside your ordinary walks, not instead of them.

Your ordinary walks, counted toward somewhere

reTrek is built for the other kind of walking, the everyday kind that adds up. Your steps from Apple Health or Health Connect move you along a real route, with a short film about the place waiting at each milestone, and Everest Base Camp is free. Tai chi walking for balance, regular walks for distance, and a trail on the map to show for both. Start the route.