Why Your Cardio Health Matters

Cardiovascular diseases include hypertension (high blood pressure), coronary heart disease (heart attacks), cerebrovascular disease, peripheral artery disease, rheumatic heart disease, congenital heart disease and heart failure. Qigong and tai chi exercises have been proven to be successful treatments, mitigating and even eliminating symptoms, of heart diseases.

Paul is particularly insterested in exploring ways to combat the following surprising and disappointing statistics that show how seriously people are suffering worldwide.

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In 2008 the European Heart Network reported that:

• Each year cardiovascular disease (CVD) causes over 4.3 million deaths in Europe and over 2.0 million deaths in the European Union (EU).
• CVD causes nearly half of all deaths in Europe (48%) and in the EU (42%).
• CVD is the main cause of death in women in all countries of Europe and is the main cause of death in men in all countries except France, the Netherlands and Spain.
• CVD is the main cause of the disease burden (illness and death) in Europe (23% of all disease burden) and the second main cause of the disease burden in those EU countries with very low child and adult mortality (17%).
• CVD costs the EU economy over 192 billion euros annually.

Heart Disease

Heart disease is the leading cause of death and disability in the United States as well. Approximately 700,000 people die of heart disease each year. In 2006, the cost of heart disease was more than $258 billion. According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), a large percent of the U.S. adult population has one or more risk factors associated with heart disease (% of US adult population affected in parenthesis):

• Hypertension—a.k.a. high blood pressure (30.2%)
• Diabetes (6.5%)
• Obesity (30.5)
• Smoking (21.6%)
• No leisure time physical activity (37.6%)

Cost of Cardiovascular Disease Treatment

According to a National Institute of Health (NIH) projection in 2007:

• Total medical cost was $219.2 billion
• $89 billion in direct medical costs
• $19.2 billion in lost productivity
• $112 billion in lost productivity due to premature death.

 

Qigong & Tai chi Exercise For Heart Health

Based on Chinese medicine, qigong, which comprises the inner workings that give tai chi its potential health benefits, is most unique because it was designed to focus on the entire human being. Qigong and tai chi exercises always start by working on the physical body before advancing to working with the energy that pwoers the body and the mind.

 

Qigong Exercise Approach

From the Western medical approach, arteries close down from fatty deposits and hardening, which restrict the arteries. This is only half the story though.

From the Eastern perspective, as the body ages or closes down, as a result of injury or illness, so too do the arteries. This is particularly true around the hips, shoulders, neck and in the torso.

Why? It has to do with the path of the major arteries leading from the heart. They spread in three primary directions:

• Down to the legs, which also feed the internal organs
• Up under the collar bone and into the neck and brain
• Through the armpits into the arms.

These spaces in the body shrink and shut down as tension—over a lifetime—mounts and builds up. The arteries in these areas, by default, also become compressed and condensed.

 

Qigong Exercise: Getting to the Heart of the Matter

Body Alignments & Tissue Lengthening

Two components of the neigong—of the 16 components responsibile for fostering healing, health and vitality in the body—are particularly helpful in relieving the compression and condensing that occurs in the arteries.

1. The first is learning and maintaining proper body alignments. Specifically, applying the correct alignments in the spine will take pressure off the arteries so they are less restricted.
2. The second method is lengthening the soft tissue from the spine out to the fingers, toes and head. Each lengthening qigong exercise will open and stretch those areas where the blood flows through and opens up the arteries in these areas.

Once you have sufficiently learned proper alignments (and you can maintain them) and lengthening, you focus on relaxing your whole body. This can potentially reduce stress and release tension in the heart, which is equally good for health, whether you're incredibly healthy or suffering from high blood pressure or some other cardiovascular disease.

One of the easiest ways to stimulate whole-body relaxation is by the use of your breath. Speciific breathing techniques can be applied to directly release the nervous system. One of the keys to Longevity Breathing is really getting the diaphragm to move up and down because it creates a full breath, thereby increasing blood flow throughout the arteries. When blood circulates unimpeded throughout the body, it naturally takes pressure off the heart.

However, increasing the blood flow through breathing practices before the alignments and lengthening work is done will yield only partial results. Increased blood flow can also raise blood pressure in some people, so the alignments are a critical first step.

Tips on Body Alignments for Cardio Health

Another aspect of keeping proper alignments that will improve blood flow and breath is making sure your shoulder blades are not too far back. They will restrict the movement of the diaphragm and put pressure on the heart, which restricts blood flow in and out of the heart. The shoulder blades separate, the back rounds and the spine raises. This opens up the major flows in the body—not the least of which is allowing the blood to exit the heart and travel unrestricted in the three primary directions (toward the legs, arms and head).

When the neck is correctly aligned, the blood will shoot up to the brain and, more importantly, return again. When the elbows are extended out from the spine and the fingers extend from the elbows (after the shoulder blades have been rounded), the blood can fully flow to your fingers tips and back.

When you sit in the kwa (the leg connection through the pelvis to the spine) you drop the sacrum and tailbone. This lengthens the spine down and opens up the torso, taking out the big kinks in the aorta and the vena cava—the largest blood vessels in the body. Sitting in the kwa and extending the knees out the spine and opening the feet out from the knees allows the blood to shoot down from the legs and return to the heart.

One of the main issues for those with low blood pressure is that the blood from the feet does not return to the heart. Simple weight shifting and squatting exercises—with specific alignments—can really improve the way the veins behind the Achilles tendons shoot the blood back up the legs towards the heart.

Increasing Blood Flow for Cardio Health & Fitness

In many exercise regimes, the name of the game is increasing the heart rate to pump more blood. If you take someone with incredibly restricted blood vessels and ask them to perform aerobic exercise, you may pump blood around the body. So this is okay to a point.

However, an enormous amount of back pressure to the heart will also be created because the whole vascular system is shut down to some degree. This makes the heart work overtime to push the blood through the restricted blood vessels.

Conversely, if you open up the body through the alignments and lengthening of the soft tissues, and only then perform aerobic exercises, the heart will pump through an open system. This will alleviate any extra pressure on the heart, yet the heart will work stronger than it was before.

In both cases, the heart is working harder, but with the proper alignments and lengthening—simple non-aerobic qigong and tai chi exercises—the heart must not undergo any additional stress. This is why first opening up the vascular system fully before initiating aerobic exercise is safer, more gentle and much more reliable for maintaining a healthy heart.

More about Blood Flow

There are a seemingly limitless number of ways to improve blood flow. They all start with proper bodily alignments to take the kinks out of the “tubes” (arteries and veins) and extending open the soft tissues of the body. This allows the tubes to stretch so that blood can flow through unimpeded rather than become blocked through poor posture and contractions.

Alignments and tissue stretches, along with Longevity Breathing techniques, are used to increase blood circulation using these principles. Your blood delivers oxygen and the nutrients necessary to feed and repair every cell in your body. Restricted blood flow will downgrade every function in your body. So optimising blood flow is critical to maintaining and building health and vitality.

All the neigong—from the simple to the more advance—work the major blood vessels of the body and therefore the vascular system. teh purpose is to take pressure away from the heart by pumping blood around the body since reducing the heart’s output is necessary to relax and balance blood pressure throughout the vascular system.

Qigong Cardio Health

My mission is to educate people about how simple movements—including basic alignments and tissue stretching—because they have been used ad refined for more than 4,000 years in China as a part of maintaining good health and well-being. Prevention is the key.

At least one-third of the world’s population is suffering from some form and degree of cardiovascular or other stress-related diseases. Depending on how you consider the numbers, it could be closer to two-thirds.

Stress is the disease of the modern age. —Bruce Frantzis

• Tai Chi Circling Hands is probably the simplest tai chi exercise method for getting a lot of blood moving in the body without complex choregraphy.
• Energy Gates Qigong, specifically Clouds Hands, is used to pump more blood.
• Heaven & Earth Qigong is the most effective single exercise in the Relaxation Meditation System with the most wide-ranging potential benefits for the least amount of input.
• Bagua Circle Walking Meditation was designed 4,000 years ago to take the vascular system to its pinnacle.

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