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Areas › Your body › Moving your body
Tai chi runs the same series again and again, and there is nothing to decide once you know it. It is a bit like having a programme on that you have watched twenty times: familiar enough to stop demanding anything from you. If novelty usually pulls you off course, a fixed sequence removes the pull altogether. Give it a few weeks before deciding whether it suits you.
Seek help through steadfastness and prayer (Quran 2:153). Both are things repeated rather than felt into being, and the repeating is where the help comes from.
البقرة
يَٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُواْ ٱسۡتَعِينُواْ بِٱلصَّبۡرِ وَٱلصَّلَوٰةِۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ مَعَ ٱلصَّٰبِرِينَ
You who believe, seek help through steadfastness and prayer, for God is with the steadfast
Qur’an 2:153read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
In adults with serious mental illness, structured exercise programmes improved physical fitness and produced modest mental health benefits. Structure was part of what was delivered in those trials, though they were not designed to test repetition against variety. So the evidence supports the general shape of a set programme rather than the specific claim about sameness.
Pearsall R, Smith DJ, Pelosi A, Geddes J. (2014). Exercise therapy in adults with serious mental illness: a systematic review and meta-analysis.. BMC psychiatry doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
When nothing is new, there is nothing to work out, and the body can settle.
Classes and clubs work mostly because somebody notices when you are not there. It is the being expected, more than the workout, that gets you out of the door.
When nobody has checked whether a benefit lasts, that is not the same as finding out it does not. Following people up for a year costs money that most studies never had.
When you reach a goal, stop and let yourself register it before moving on to the next one. Otherwise you collect achievements and never feel any of them.