Does qigong keep you fit as you get older?
Studies show that qigong helps older people with balance, muscle function, physical ability, and probably also thinking and memory. The evidence is moderately strong, but the effects are consistent enough to take seriously.
Doing qigong three times a week substantially improves physical ability in people aged between 62 and 83 compared with usual care. Lower-quality studies showed larger effects than better-designed ones, so the figure at the upper end is probably somewhat inflated. Even so, the overall direction remains clearly positive.
Balance and fall risk are probably the best-supported applications. Several studies show that qigong improves balance and reduces the risk of falling, sometimes just as well as, or even better than, other exercise programmes aimed at fall prevention. For older people, that is in practical terms one of the most relevant benefits.
When it comes to muscle function, studies in older people with substantial age-related muscle loss found improvements in grip strength (+2.4 kg), walking speed, and the ability to rise from a chair. This suggests that qigong is also worthwhile if you already have muscle and mobility problems, not only as prevention.
Thinking and memory can also improve, although the effects are smaller. Memory, language ability, and the ability to plan tasks all increased in older people with an average age of 70. The effect on thinking was independent of the effect on physical function, which suggests it is not simply a result of getting fitter.
For sleep quality there are positive signals, particularly for the Baduanjin style (on average just over 2 points better on the standard sleep scale). However, studies on this point contradict each other more than they do for the other outcomes, and the researchers themselves rate the certainty here as low. For depression and anxiety the results are encouraging but not yet statistically convincing. No serious side effects were reported in any of the studies.
This answer draws on eight large overviews of existing research, most of which also pool the results of individual studies. The researchers themselves rate the certainty of the evidence as low to moderate, partly because of large differences between studies and a risk of bias in some of them. For the sleep outcome, the authors explicitly rate the certainty as low. The evidence is stronger for the physical outcomes, but even there the researchers point to the limited quality of some of the underlying studies.