Aging and Taijiquan

At any age, the objectives are the same:

Feeling vital and energetic

Playing with gusto and enthusiasm
Becoming delighted by creative play
Reducing stress
Sharing activities and helping others
Learning something interesting and valuable
Trying to do your best
Learning about Chinese internal martial arts
Having some fun and pleasure
Presenting a cheerful and upbeat demeanor
Adjusting performance to limitations and setbacks
Having a positive, open minded, and grateful manner
Mastering an art or practice
Respecting the achievements of older Taijiquan players
Becoming strong, flexible, and conditioned
Developing positive and uplifting habits
Remaining in good health
Preventing accidents and disease
Facing death and dying with courage, poise, dignity, and compassion

Both qigong and taijiquan books frequently show persons over 70 practicing these movement arts. Some books feature masters who lived to be 100 years of age. The enhanced vitality and athletic exuberance of these seniors is an encouragement to everyone; and if longevity is an additional benefit, then so be it.

Martial Arts and the Art of Aging
Rogue Scholarship on Aging
http://uofugeron.wordpress.com/2009/01/18/martial-arts-and-the-art-of-aging/

Fitness and Aging Well
Recommend Reading List by Mike Garofalo

"So far as motivational status is concerned, healthy people have sufficiently gratified their basic needs for safety, belongingness, love, respect and self-esteem so that they are motivated primarily by trends to self-actualization (defined as ongoing actualization of potentials, capacities and talents, as fulfillment of mission (or call, fate, destiny, or vocation), as a fuller knowledge of, and acceptance of, the person's own intrinsic nature, as an unceasing trend toward unity, integration or synergy within the person. ... These healthy people are there defined by describing their clinically observed characteristics. These are:
1. Superior perception of reality.
2. Increased acceptance of self, of others and of nature.
3. Increased spontaneity.
4. Increase in problem-centering.
5. Increased detachment and desire for privacy.
6. Increased autonomy, and resistance to enculturation.
7. Greater freshness of appreciation, and richness of emotional reaction.
8. Higher frequency of peak experiences.
9. Increased identification with the human species.
10. Changed and improved interpersonal relations.
11. More democratic character structure.
12. Greatly increased creativeness.
13. Certain changes in the value system."

Toward a Psychology of Being. Abraham Maslow. New Jersey, Van Nostrand, 1962. 3rd Edition, Wiley, 1998. 320 pages. ISBN: 0471293091. pp.23-24

Liang Tung-Tsai (T. T. Liang) (1900-2002)