Train in martial arts and live longer.

This Chinese martial arts master was 250 years old at the time this picture was taken.

How can it be? Read on to find his secrets.

Exercise is good for us? Right?

But martial arts training is reputed to supercharge our longevity. This has been told to us time and time again.

Obviously, some would say that certain types of physical exercise and sports are inclined to have negative effects on our health, wellbeing and chances of living a long life. Recent studies into accumulated brain injuries in football (heading the ball), boxing (by taking repeated blows to the head) and rugby (concussions and other injuries) don’t make for happy reading.

Although I haven’t seen any studies on it, I keep coming across examples of karate people needing hip or knee replacement surgery. But I wonder if that is genetic propensity or just normal wear and tear that over time, whatever type of lifestyle the individual was leading, would have reached a natural crisis point?

I recently came across a YouTube piece called, ‘Jiu Jitsu Saved my Life but Destroyed my Body’. One man’s story about all the positive things he experienced in his martial arts odyssey, but also the price he had to pay. It’s 20 minutes that’s worth watching, even if BJJ is not your thing.

The ‘Soft’ martial arts.

By ‘soft’ I mean the Chinese ‘Internal’ martial arts, the big three being, Hsing-I Chuan, Bagua and Tai Chi, in which movements are inclined to be practiced in soft or flowing ways. We have all seen examples of elderly people in Chinese parks in the early morning moving gracefully through controlled forms. To tai chi practitioners it is a feather in their caps that these people are ‘elderly’, this is their USP (Unique Selling Point) and you have to say, the combination of fresh air, controlled breathing, non-percussive action, working through the fullest ranges of motion possible is a perfect recipe. I cannot imagine any doctor objecting to that – in fact there are significantly more complaints about people injuring themselves through yoga than tai chi; which I don’t think is the fault of yoga as an activity, more just the way it’s taught and the culture around it.¹

But what about the longevity claims in these Internal Chinese systems?

Honestly, these claims about longevity gains in tai chi have been around forever. Maybe a hundred years or more. The origin must surely be in tales of Chinese Taoist mountain hermits, who live on herbs and practice obscure forms of Internal martial arts and are supposed to be over a hundred years old.

The best of such stories relates to this man, Li Ching Yuen (1677 – 1933), yes, look at those dates again! That means he was 256 years old when he died!

Here is a description of him by general Yang Sen who interviewed him in 1927 to find out his secrets, “He has good eyesight and a brisk stride; Li stands seven feet tall, has very long fingernails, and a ruddy complexion."

Here he is in 1927, notice the hideous super-long spiralled fingernails. He certainly doesn’t carry the proportion of a man who is seven feet tall; by my calculation he would be lucky to reach five foot nine.

Li Ching Yuen ticks all the boxes; he is a martial arts master, a herbalist, a nomadic hermit, who still managed to outlive twenty-four wives and produce over two hundred children. When he was asked what his secret of his advanced age was, he gave this reply, “Keep a quiet heart, sit like a tortoise, walk sprightly like a pigeon and sleep like a dog”’.

There have been some forms of studies on tai chi and longevity, but they come out as unconvincing. One said that out of a study of 36 more modern tai chi masters, the average lifespan was 60 years old, (that’s not great) but then added that those who died younger weren’t really paying attention to their health while practising tai chi. The study also suggested that for those who didn’t make a decent age, it might have been down to other health conditions that prompted their initial urge to train in tai chi.²

My own research.

I did my own survey of available dates for deceased masters of tai chi and bagua, a total of 47 individuals going back into the 18^th century.

After crunching the numbers, the average lifespan came out as 76 years old, with just one person hitting the 100 years mark and only four making it past 89. The bagua people seemed to live much longer than the tai chi masters.

76 is okay, but it’s not world breaking. Certainly, as far as I can see, all that antioxidant green tea and ginseng, plus the magic herbs, did not really make a jot of difference.

Another study which happened after Covid said that those who kept their body and soul together during lockdown through tai chi exercise increased their lifespan. My thought on that; if you had enough motivation to get yourself out of a chair and actually do something then there must be a quite potent force of positivity about you – but it doesn’t have to be tai chi, it could be anything moderately active. Those types of people do far better than others who might be inclined to slump into negativity, it’s common sense really.

After looking into this and trying to establish some kind of truth, it started to look ridiculously complicated and unlikely to find any definitive truth. The main problems seem to be:

·       How can we trust the claims of people who say they have lived beyond a feasible lifespan? Evidence for the advanced age of Li Ching Yuen is really unconvincing, because in his time, records were chaotic or just non-existent. Claims of extended lifespans in Japan seem to come out of flawed statistics (some people even illegally claiming pensions for dead relatives, which has skewed the data) and besides any health gains that Japanese people used to be able to claim have been ruined by the introduction of the western style diet. Recent studies have suggested that in Japan prostate cancer has risen from almost zero to western style highs because of the heavy involvement of dairy products that hardly ever featured in the Japanese diet.

·       How do we know that long life isn’t just a result of lucky genes?

·       How do you account for just bad luck, catastrophic disease, wars, famine etc?

From the martial arts perspective; just reading around the subject I come across all kinds of medical pseudo-science, involving claims of ‘massaging of the organs’, boosting the endocrine system, ‘nurturing internal strength’ etc. etc.

Human health is much more complicated than this hocus pocus would like us to believe. But, I suppose we have to just keep trying.

As you read this post I am practising my pigeon-walk at this very moment – but, I have to be honest, it’s making my neck ache.

1. A depressing account of one person’s negative experiences with yoga culture, worth a read, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/05/after-20-years-of-yoga-im-hanging-up-my-mat-for-good

2. Source: https://arthurtaichi.com/articles/310-2/