What does tai chi do for healthy ageing?
Tai chi demonstrably helps older adults reduce falls and improve balance and walking ability. In mild cognitive decline, a variant that combines movement with mental challenges also shows improvement in mental sharpness.
Falling is one of the greatest risks in frail ageing, and tai chi does something about that. In older adults with muscle loss or frailty, regular tai chi leads on average to nearly half a fall fewer per person, less fear of falling, and clearly better scores on practical function tests: getting up from a chair goes an average of 2.4 repetitions better, and an agility walking test improves by an average of 0.7 seconds. Muscle mass and grip strength, however, do not improve in any measurable way. Anyone hoping for noticeably stronger muscles through tai chi should count on a different approach.
In independently living adults aged 60 and over, tai chi practised in the community improves more than just movement. Independence in daily activities, mood and mental sharpness all improve in a measurable way. The same applies to balance and walking ability compared with regular exercise programmes: tai chi scores particularly better than single-focus training such as strength training alone, but not necessarily better than well-designed combination programmes.
For people with mild cognitive decline there is a particularly promising finding: tai chi in which you carry out mental and physical challenges at the same time scores clearly better for mental sharpness than regular tai chi or stretching exercises. The difference remained measurable six months after the training had ended. This is one of the most robustly supported findings in this field.
Over the longer term, comparative research shows that people who had practised tai chi for an average of 25 years were, at age 63, physically functioning like 29-year-olds. That is impressive, but these are a selected group of long-term practitioners who may have been healthier than average to begin with. What we know from shorter-term research is that six months of tai chi in healthy older adults produces no measurable difference compared with doing nothing extra. It appears that tai chi needs time to show an effect in healthy people.
For effects such as better mood or lower blood pressure: tai chi is better than doing nothing at all, but it has not been proven that tai chi is unique in this respect. Other forms of exercise achieve the same thing. The core point is that tai chi is an accessible, safe form of exercise that delivers several health benefits at once in older adults, and that the evidence for fall prevention and cognitive effects is the strongest.
This answer rests on several combined analyses of dozens of studies and on individual studies, together involving thousands of participants. The evidence for fall prevention and physical function in frail older adults, and for cognitively enriched tai chi, is the strongest. The effects in walking difficulties caused by conditions such as Parkinson's disease have so far been shown in smaller studies, largely in women. Long-term effects in healthy older adults have not yet been confirmed in studies with random assignment and come primarily from research that tracked and compared groups of people over time without assigning them to a specific treatment.