Protect your knees – revisiting this important issue!

Knee pain is a major inconvenience to many middle-aged people. Can tai chi or chi kung solve the problem? But isn’t it something called tai chi knees, with some doctors advising their knee-pain patients not to practise tai chi? Should we take a rest as some doctors advise? But there are some doctors who advise that one should strengthen one’s leg muscles with more exercises to lessen knee pain? In severe cases our surgeon may advise us to do an operation to take out those damaged tissue to lessen (or even take away totally) the pain. Do you want an operation? And do you do another operation (if at all possible) when the next knee pain comes?

I don’t have knee pain and I have “cured” the knees pain of some of my students through practising my selected exercises of tai chi chi-kung. However, I cannot guarantee that every knee pain I can “cure”. Two reasons: firstly, my teaching may not be applicable to all cases; and secondly, more importantly, many people do not have the patience to focus on the minute internal experience leading to progress. Doing surgery is the sole responsibility of the surgeon but healing through tai chi chi-kung exercise is a joint effort of the teacher and the student (client).

The theory behind tai chi chi-kung healing is simple. The advice to strengthen one’s leg muscles (in particular thigh muscles) is correct. Resting and avoidance cannot cure knee pain. When you are resting you experience no (or much less) pain, but we cannot rest the whole day, there will be loads of other problems that will arise. And when your muscles become weaker, your pain will intensify. The gist of the solution is to join your leg muscles properly together, and your leg muscles as a whole being joined properly together with the rest of your body. In chi-kung lingo, it is "muscles as one". When you can experientially and physically join your muscles together, you can minutely realign your muscles so that your can avoid the points in your knees that create pain. It will take many sessions of practice, the length of time depends on each individual. When such realignment is strengthened/done, you will be able to walk, and free from knee pain, without your conscious attention to make the realignment. The objective of the exercise is that in your daily life you can forget about you knees - you have no more pain!

Healing is best to be done with the help of an experienced teacher - a cooperative effort. Those who do not have such benefit, should study closely the theory as explained above and try to experiment step by step to achieve the desired results. Good luck.