What Tai Chi teaches us about walking

Watch a street full of people walking to work and you can often pick out who is running late. Their head arrives first. The shoulders tip forward, the arms stop swinging and the feet scurry to catch up with a body that seems to have already left. Further along, someone with time to spare moves quite differently: upright, unhurried, arms swinging loosely, each step landing underneath them rather than somewhere out in front.

Neither of them is thinking about how they walk. Most of us stopped doing that at about the age of two. Walking becomes something that happens beneath our attention, shaped by habits, footwear, desks, bags and moods we barely register. That saves a lot of thought, but it also means the way we walk is rarely something we have chosen.

Tai Chi offers a way of choosing a little more. Not by replacing the way you walk with something new, but by giving you a handful of ideas to notice while you are already out. You do not need to join a class, learn a sequence or wear anything special. You only need to be walking, and curious.

A practice built around stepping

Much of Tai Chi consists of moving slowly and deliberately from one position to the next. Watch it being done and a great deal of what you see is, in effect, stepping: weight shifting from one leg to the other, a foot lifting, placing, and gradually accepting the load of the body. The arms tend to catch the eye of anyone watching, but the legs are doing the steady work underneath.

That is why it has so much to offer walkers. Everyday walking and Tai Chi use the same raw materials: a body with a centre of gravity, two legs that take turns carrying it, and ground that is not always flat. The difference is speed and attention. In Tai Chi the movement is slowed down enough that you can feel what normally happens in a blur.

How the weight passes from foot to foot deserves a closer look of its own. Here it is worth stepping back to the wider habits of attention that Tai Chi encourages, which apply to every part of a walk.

Attention comes before effort

The first lesson is simply to notice. That sounds modest, but it changes a surprising amount. When people start paying attention to their walking, they often find tension they did not know they were carrying: a clenched jaw on a climb, shoulders creeping up towards the ears in a cold wind, fingers gripping a map or a walking pole harder than the job requires.

Tai Chi treats this kind of observation as the starting point rather than a warm-up. Before changing anything, you find out what is actually going on. There is no score and no correct answer. You are gathering information about how your body is organising itself right now.

A few things you might notice on your next walk, if you like:

• Where your eyes go. Are you looking at the ground a metre ahead, or out along the path into the distance? Both have their place, but staring down tends to draw the head forward.
• What your arms are doing. Do they swing freely, stay still, or move differently from each other?
• How your feet sound. A heavy, slapping footfall and a quiet one tell you different things about how each step is being received.
• Whether your breathing changes on a slope. Not to correct it, just to see.

None of these needs fixing on the spot. Some will turn out to be habits worth keeping.

The point is that once you have noticed something, you have more choice about it than you did before.

The whole body walks, not just the legs

One of the ideas running through Tai Chi is that movement is connected. A gesture of the hand is not made by the arm alone. It begins lower down, through the legs and the waist, and travels outwards. The body is encouraged to move as a single, coordinated unit rather than as a collection of separate parts each doing its own thing.

Walking works in a similar way, even if we do not think of it like that. As one leg swings forward, the pelvis turns slightly with it, and the opposite arm swings forward to balance the turn. When all of that is happening freely, walking tends to feel easy and rhythmic. When part of it is held still, something else has to work harder to make up for it.

You can feel this for yourself on a quiet, level stretch of path. Walk twenty paces holding the straps of a bag still in front of you, or with your hands resting on your hips. Then let the arms go and walk another twenty. Many people find the second version feels smoother, as though the legs have been given back a partner. It is simply a way of feeling that the arms are part of walking rather than luggage that comes along for the ride.

The same idea applies to turning. When you look over your shoulder to check behind you, or change direction at a stile, notice whether the movement comes only from the neck, or whether the chest, waist and feet join in. Tai Chi would invite all of them to take part.

Tall without being stiff

Alignment is another idea that comes up often in Tai Chi, and it is easy to misunderstand. It does not mean standing to attention, chest out and chin up. That posture looks upright but usually involves a good deal of holding, and holding is tiring to walk with.

The Tai Chi version is closer to stacking. The head rests balanced on top of the spine, the spine rises out of the pelvis, and the pelvis sits over the legs. When those parts are roughly lined up, the skeleton carries more of the load and the muscles have less bracing to do. A familiar image is of the crown of the head being gently lifted, as if suspended by a thread, while everything below is allowed to settle downwards.

On a walk, you might try it like this. Pause somewhere safe and stand still for a moment. Let your weight settle through both feet. Imagine a slight lift at the very top of your head, without pushing your chin up or tucking it down. Let the shoulders drop a little. Then walk on and see whether that sense of height comes with you for a few steps before habit takes over again. Coming back to it now and then is the practice.

Letting go of effort you do not need is a subject in its own right. For now, one thing is worth noticing. Feeling tall and feeling tense are two different things, and it is possible to have one without the other.

Slowing down to see more clearly

Tai Chi is known for its slowness, and walkers sometimes wonder what use that could be to someone hoping to cover ten miles before dark. The answer is that slowness is a way of learning rather than a speed to adopt. When you move slowly, you can feel details that pass unnoticed at normal pace. Then you can take what you have found back into ordinary walking.

You could try a few slow steps at the start of a walk, perhaps while waiting for companions in the car park or where a path begins. Take a step at half your usual speed, then slower again. Notice the moment your heel meets the ground, how your weight rolls forward, and when the back foot starts to feel light. If you like, pause mid-step with most of your weight on the front foot and ask where exactly you are balanced. If anything feels unsteady, stay near a wall, fence or gatepost you can rest a hand on, and keep the steps small.

After a minute or two, walk on normally. There is no need to hold on to the slow version. Often, though, a trace of it remains: steps that land a little more quietly, a body that feels a little more gathered over its feet.

If walking brings on pain, dizziness or discomfort you cannot account for, it is worth speaking to a qualified professional before experimenting with how you move. For most walkers, these are simply ways of paying closer attention to something they already do well.

None of this asks you to walk like a Tai Chi practitioner. The ideas are small enough to carry in a pocket: notice first, let the whole body take part, stand tall without holding, and slow down now and then to see what you have been missing. Try one of them on your next walk and see what it shows you.