Pilates and Qigong Cross Training

My pilates instructor Mabel, recently started collaborating with a Qigong teacher at her studio. This was on the initiative of a student who had found that those who practiced pilates usually picked up qigong much faster due to the fact that they had better sensitivity and alignment of their bodies. Thus were able to make micro adjustments to tune the alignment of their bodies to maximize the flow of Qi. So this Qigong teacher started teaching weekend workshops at her studio. She did not practice much Qigong herself previously, but started to take the classes and we discussed what she felt after one week. The discussion mainly revolved around zhan zhuang. 

She herself found that it was quite easy for her to settle her legs in the right position and sink her weight into her feet due to her understanding of the alignment of the hips and the knees. While many of the other students were gripping with their quads and forcing the position, she was able to settle quite nicely and get a strong Qi feeling in her lower body (like floating on a balloon as she described it) very quickly. This dovetailed nicely with my previous thoughts regarding not gripping the pelvis and the coccyx. 

The other important thing that came out of our discussion was the fact that zhan zhuang, like pilates, is always looking for a comfortable median position between tension and contraction, and contrary to popular belief, a lot of yoga practitioners are not usually so good at achieving this as much of yoga practice involves pushing to the limits of range of movement. She has noticed that many yoga practitioners actually compress their lower spine by too much inner rotation of their legs and activating their glutes, even in a standing position. This had been also one my previous complaints about yoga, that sometimes instruction (such as inner rotation) was given and not fully explained and was thus sometimes taken to extreme. Also different teachers would give contradictory instruction for the same poses in terms of rotation and alignment. 

She also saw many of the similarities in the spiral movements of qigong with the Gyrotonic method (which I had also remarked on earlier) and she said that it actually helped her understanding of how the shoulders worked when doing the Gyrotonics. There were also similarities between the location of the key accupuncture points such as the Bai Hui and Ming men and some of the anatomical explanations she encountered in some of the other disciplines that she studied.

After practicing for a few days she was able to generate a good deal of Qi, however, she felt quite a bit of discomfort due to certain blocks in her body where the Qi did not flow properly, as the Qi also magnified her sensitivity. So she was able to understand why certain people quit Qigong after a few sessions due to an inability to sleep or discomfort. While it is possible for the Qi to open the areas of blockages by itself, this can take a period of time, and in the cases where there are physical mis-alignments (such as the spine) this may not be able to be achieved just by qigong alone and needs to be paired with more rigorous movement exercises or bodywork.

The talk was very interesting as it was good to get some third party confirmation of some of the thoughts that I had previously.