In the same way, exercising quickly is far less demanding than if you do it slowly.  Counter intuitive? Possibly.

To slow down is lose momentum. And it can take a while to find a slower rhythm.  Meditative practitioners know that it takes time for the mind to calm down. You can’t meditate quickly. Studies have shown that meditators tend to be calmer.

Slowed down exercises allows the organism time to differentiate new and more graceful patterns of movement.  Our brains map a personal area around the body known as peripersonal space. When we exercise, we stimulate proprioceptors which are nerve cells that measure stretch and body position, and so we create new neural pathways.  Regular practice of these exercises, or any meditative practice, changes the brain over time.

The rest of this sequence is on YouTube.

Particularly for us older adults (your writer is 60) balance and flexibility matter. The law of biological atrophy is unrelenting.  In other words, use it or lose it.  The body is more than transport to get your head to meetings.  This sequence of eighteen slow movements has been my daily practice for the past twelve years.  Am I just lucky I don’t suffer the aches and pains of others my age, or does this practice have something to do with it?

An investment of twenty minutes a day can be rewarding.

Qigong (pronounced chee gung, and sometimes written Chi-Kung) has been around for a while. Well, thousands of years in one form or another. One branch  became Tai Chi, a martial art. However, Shibashi qigong is relatively new, and its origin in this form is ascribed to two Chinese doctors in the 1970′s. Shibashi qigong is a series of 18 slow and gentle movements and it isn’t about fighting.

There are wild claims that qigong can do just about anything for you, from treating diseases to making you smarter. I’ve been practicing the 18 slow and gentle movements daily for the past 11 years, and I’m no smarter today than I was when I started.  But I do feel these exercises have kept me flexible, calm, and balanced. I taught these expercises to my wife and she in turn took this into the workplace and started teaching during a lunch break.  Her classes are popular.

As educational guru Sir Ken Robinson says, we are educated from the neck up and slightly to one side. Our culture is left-brained to the extent we think of our bodies as a way of getting our heads to meetings.

Our culture has an uncomfortable relationship to the body. Because America is such a wonderfully diverse place, it might be that this anti-body attitude is changing.  There’s a large Chinese community in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live. It’s not unusual to see the early-morning  parks populated with older Chinese people doing slow and gentle exercises. I first learned qigong from Juliet Lee in Oakland. The series of 18 movements is not difficult to learn and they do promote a sense of wellbeing.

Workplace Wellness managers would do well to look at bringing Shibashi qigong into the workplace. It’s a potential low-cost employee benefit that is also likely to boost productivity, and who knows, it might make you smarter.