It’s taken sixteen weeks but I’ve gradually built up my standing ’embrace the tree posture’ to sixteen minutes.
And I haven’t had any major problems with my knees reacting against the stance. Apart from some minor soreness, the knees feel fine.
In the past I’ve tried to work through pain and practice lower stances which actually stressed my knees and caused pain. A silly attitude because it wasn’t in line with the Yin Yang philosophy of finding one’s balance. It took me a while to wake up to my self and focus on only doing exercises I could physically handle.
Besides my other daily training sessions I now practice the ’embrace the tree’ posture three times a week, a day a part, and increase it’s duration by one minute per week. So far so good. I aim to get to twenty minutes in four weeks time and and continue with that duration for the rest of the year.
Then I plan to add two more sessions of standing practice (that’ll be five times a week) gradually and see how things go. These two extra days will be paced slowly as I’ll start with one minute and build up to 20 minutes which will take twenty weeks.
Sounds like a long time but because Tai Chi is my calling then twenty weeks is a small amount of time in comparison.
By pacing my Tai Chi training throughout the week, in segments of about thirty minutes, I usually do 8.5 hours. And that includes the stance work.
Not bad for an old codger 🙂
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