 This is me staying in a Taoist monastery in Sichuan province, where a few years ago I went to actually learn from traditional Chinese medicine doctors. But let's rewind about 10 or 15 years. When I actually bought a one-way ticket to live in China, I moved there when I was 22 or 23 to study with famous martial artists all over Beijing and hopefully try to find a way to learn from traditional internal martial arts teachers. Teachers of practices like Tai Chi and even learning other internal healing practices like Qigong. For someone who had lots of his own health issues, primarily digestive issues, I was on my quest a one-way mission off to the Far East to learn everything that it had to offer that I could bring back for my own health and healing in the future. And in this video, I want to share one of those healing practices with you. Hey guys, I'm Dr. Alex Hain, doctor of acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine and author of the health book Master of the Day. So let's jump in. When I moved to Beijing, China, I had hardly known how to speak any Chinese. I had just taken some night classes and for about four or five months enough to just know the rudiments of Chinese. And from there, I bought my one-way ticket to hopefully find some of these great martial artists and internal medicine teachers that I wanted to learn. One particular guy that I had studied with was a disciple of a very famous Tai Chi master. And the particular person I studied with was someone named Zhou Jige. Now Zhou Jige was a former bodyguard for the Communist Party. And even though I was learning Tai Chi from this guy, he embodied everything that I wanted to see. He was extremely tough, could fight wrestlers no sweat. He wasn't like an old man in the park doing his little Tai Chi motions. This was a guy who knew the internal and as well as how it resulted in being able to fight, which is what these traditional martial arts were for. Now I came to learn both the martial and the medicinal. And so I wanted to learn what's the martial and the medical way to approach life effectively. One thing he told me that I'll never forget was he was trying to distill the difference between external martial arts like we think Shaolin Kung Fu, right? These big punches and kicks and everything and differentiate it between that and what are called the internal martial arts. And he said the internal martial arts, a lot of it is about what you can't see unless you have a trained eye. This inner winding and unwinding, this coiling and this explosive power that comes out of it. And it's similar to Qigong, these traditional healing practices, this kind of breath work where you're trying to build this battery within yourself that is a healing force. You first come inward and then you can use it externally to heal and ideally heal yourself. And so this sent me off on my quest to find other practitioners through China to learn this practice of Qigong as it was called. Now the history of Qigong is very, very interesting. So Qigong originally comes from an earlier practice called Daoyin. And I want to show you a very interesting research paper here called Daoyin, a.k.a Qigong, the origin, development, potential mechanisms and clinical applications. Because they talk a lot about the history of this and they say that Chinese Daoyin exercise has been widely applied to medical treatment and health preservation since the ancient times. And it is also acknowledged as an effective traditional orthopedic therapy by both ancient and modern traditional Chinese medicine. The Dao character here means to guide the Qi, internal vital energy of the body so as to create an internal balance. And Yin means to stretch the body so as to gain strength and flexibility. Now what's distinct about Qigong, you may have seen old Chinese people doing Tai Chi in the park, this kind of thing, right? Qigong is a little different because while there are some qualities that overlap, Qigong is the intersection of physical movement or physical exercises, breath work, specific breath patterns and often visualization. And that is often a piece of the trifecta that creates something as a Qigong movement versus me just waving my arms around and thinking that it's exercise. But Qigong has these three inherent qualities most of the time. So what is Qigong actually for? I mean, you could translate Qigong literally as just Qi work. Maybe breath work would be another good term because a lot of it is focused on the breathing. But I had this one conversation with a monk and I was climbing up Huashan Flower Mountain, one of the very, very scenic, famous mountains in China. Stunning scenery, beautiful vistas, cliffs that drop for thousands of feet if you fall off the side and very little safety precautions which sounded like the perfect adventure for me. Now climbing up Huashan, I talked to a monk. The monk was telling me about Qigong and he said that, you know, in China what they'll often do in the hospitals for people with cancer, they'll actually prescribe certain Qigong forms to do for hours a day. And one of the differences between Qigong and just let's say going to the gym is that you do a hard workout. The next day you're sore and you need to sleep more because you feel it. You're exhausted. The difference with Qigong is that the more you do Qigong, the less you need to sleep and the same you'll feel. So if you do Qigong three hours a day, you've got the benefits of cardiovascular exercise without the impact. There's basically very little impact because you're just squatting or you're moving. It's not like the kinds of hip or knee injuries that can happen from physical exercise or ankle. It's very low impact and you're just basically using isometric sort of exercises very often to generate the elevated heart rate, generate some body warmth and that's the breathing and the physical exercise is what generates the cardiovascular benefits as opposed to physically pushing the muscle so hard, which uses your resources, what he called your yang qi. So prescribing it for cancer patients in hospitals is fairly common, he told me. So this idea of being able to build your resources without depleting it is very important in traditional Chinese medicine thought. Now, secondarily, there's actual real evidence behind how Qigong affects the physical body and I think it's worth talking about because it doesn't need to be something that's made to seem so esoteric or mystical, has a real benefit that's measurable in the body. For example, this one researcher talked about some of the benefits clinically that Qigong can have. So these two researchers took 80 middle-aged and elderly women as their research subjects, devised into the Qigong or exercise group and the control. Now the patients in the exercise group practice these together three times a week and now reach time for a total of 20 weeks while the control group did nothing. Now, before and after the 20 week experiment, each subject's cardiovascular function indicators as well as immune function indicators were studied, like for example, IgA and IgG. Now the test results suggested that after 20 weeks of exercise, the exercise group showed different degrees of a decrease in heart rate, pulse pressure, diastolic pressure, diastolic pressure, significant increase in stroke volume, cardiac output, and cardiac index. So none of that was shown in the control group. So in general, Qigong tends to primarily affect three physiological systems in the body, similar to exercise, cardiovascular system, immune system, immunological system, as well as the nervous system. So if you have an issue related to one of these three things, Qigong can really be a massive benefit. Now Qigong is one of the exercises I talk about in an upcoming program I'm launching, an online program, introduction to traditional Chinese medicine, the original science of healing. So this is a brand new online program I'm launching, it's going to be incredibly fun. It's one of the ways that I keep this channel sponsor and ad-free effectively. Rather than me giving you some random message that supports the channel, why don't I create a program that would actually be helpful for you? That's the way I think about it. So if you guys are interested, you can learn more about not only this program, but also like via patient of mine locally in Los Angeles, or virtually via telemedicine. The info for the waitlist of the program and my clinic is right in the description of this video, the bio below. And I want to leave you with one final thought, some words of wisdom. One monk said to me, to sum up Qigong and Qigong in healing, he said, where there's flow, there's life, and where there's no flow, there's pain, and there's death. So whatever you can do to embody flow, not only physically, but mentally, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually in terms of what lights you up, that will lead to healing, and that is a profoundly powerful force. So find that flow any way that you can find it in your life. Alright guys, I have another related video right here, and I'll see you soon.