Seniors Find Tai Chi Helps Prevent Falls
While balancing on one foot, Thomas J. Grenier can put a sock and shoe on the other.
For Grenier, who is 75, this is not merely an act of everyday living. It is a result of exercise training. The retired engineer in the Atlanta suburb of Tucker, Ga., has been learning the Chinese art of tai chi. He was a subject in an experiment to see whether the exercise forms could help older people improve their balance and prevent falls.
They can, the researchers said. And Grenier agrees. He has stuck with the tai chi program over about five years, continuing after the experiment ended. “It has helped me so much since I started it,” he said.
Grenier took part in an Emory University study of 162 women and 38 men with an average age of 76. All were free of debilitating conditions such as crippling arthritis, Parkinson’s disease or stroke. Some were given a simplified, 10-form version of tai chi’s more than 100 movements, others got biofeedback-based training in balance on a movable platform, while the rest got education about falls but no physical training.
The tai chi and biofeedback groups were given 15 weeks of training, and researchers kept track of the times that all the participants reported falling over four months.
The tai chi group went on average 47.5% longer than the others before a first fall, said researcher Steven L. Wolf. “It’s clear that the tai chi group delayed when they would fall relative to the other groups,” he said.
This makes tai chi a valuable tool to help seniors prevent falls and their potentially crippling fractures, Wolf said. Tai chi’s slow, graceful, balance-related movement seems to teach older people how to move and how to be aware of how they are moving, he said.
It seems to revolve around the “chi,” the life force that tai chi postulates to be in the center of the body, according to Grenier. “You somehow, and I cannot say how, seem to have better access to your body,” he said.
The Wolf study was one of two funded by the National Institute on Aging and published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. The other was done at the University of Connecticut at Farmington on an older group of about 110 people, with an average age of 80.
The Connecticut seniors were divided into groups that received biofeedback balance training (of a type different from the Georgians), weight training to build muscles in the legs, a combination of both or neither. After three months of this, all got six months of tai chi.
Those who took part in the balance, strength or both programs gained in those areas, said Dr. Leslie Wolfson, lead researcher. And the three groups lost some of their gains over the next six months, he said. However, they retained enough to show improvement over where they were when they started, the study found.
Because everyone took tai chi, it cannot be told how much loss the training prevented. However, “If they had not had the tai chi, I’m sure they would have lost just about everything,” Wolfson said.
The group that got neither balance nor strength training but did get tai chi did not gain anything, colleague Robert Whipple said. But this might have been because this group had been given nothing for the tai chi to build upon, he said. In the other groups, “once they had that undergirding, they seemed to fly,” he said.
