The History of RE and Qigong

The ancient Chinese, self-healing practice of Qigong may be 4,000 years old. Through the millennia, Qigong—then known as Dao Yin— evolved into an intricate exercise based on moving energy—Qi—through a complex network of pathways covering the body. However, the exercise was kept from the vast majority of Chinese for centuries, taught and practiced by secret martial and religious societies and reserved for the highest tiers of the aristocracy and military. In the late 1940s, a respected Chinese scientist coined the term “Qigong” and predicted the exercise would shape the future of human development. Unfortunately, Mao Zedong’s regime rose to power in 1949 and banned Qigong’s practice. The Chinese who fled to Taiwan carried the Qigong culture with them and was responsible for almost all the West’s experience with the exercise. Mainland Chinese practiced various forms of Qigong covertly.

Under the more liberal government of Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s, Qigong began to trickle out into the mainstream. By the mid-1990s, it flourished in China’s major cities. Many forms of Qigong competed for followers. Masters began to experiment, trying to get optimum results in a minimum of time. However, the Chinese government began regulating Qigong. Many Qigong masters made unrealistic health claims, leading to cult formations and charlatan-led suicides. In an effort to separate fact from fiction, the government authorized the Ministry of Sports—a Cabinet post that oversees Olympic and martial arts athletes—to regulate the practice of Qigong. To achieve official state recognition, a Qigong system had to verify its healing powers in the context of a science and classical Chinese philosophy. By 1999, the Ministry of Sports recognized 13 Qigong systems as legitimate. In January 1999, the Beijing Health Promotion Society, a consortium of China’s leading medical and health professionals and the Minister of Sports invited John Alton to Beijing to discuss his ideas on how to westernize Qigong. The officials were impressed with Alton’s book Living Qigong: The Chinese Way to Good Health and Long Life, focusing on his experiences in China learning healing methods from a Qigong master while teaching English at Beijing University (John’s Qigong master was also the coach of the university’s martial arts team). By the time Alton left Beijing, the Minister of Sport recognized him as the first non-Chinese Western Qigong master, and the Beijing Health Promotion Society formed with him Health Masters International (HMI), LLC, an international corporation for combining Chinese and Western medicine. In spite of these gains on the Chinese side, Alton remained convinced that purely traditional Chinese approaches to fitness were incompatible with a hurried, skeptical American mainstream. So in 2002 he published Unified Fitness: A 35-Day Exercise Program for Sustainable Health, combining Eastern and Western approaches to health. Alton developed a much more simplified version of Qigong—Reflective Exercise (RE)—for Westerners to learn quickly and incorporate into their Unified Fitness program. In 2002-2003, the University of Virginia varsity swim team adopted RE as part of its training and had its best year in school history. In 2003-2004, the Center for the Study of Complementary and Alternative Therapies found among UVa varsity swimmers a significant correlation between RE practice and a reduction in reported respiratory infection. Subsequently, Alton presented these findings to the U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs and the U.S. Army War College in Pennsylvania. Currently,the UVa School of Medicine’s Cancer Center is conducting a study on the effects of RE on cancer patients receiving radiation therapy. Please don't hesitate to contact us at questions@unifiedfitness.com.

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