Areas › Your body › Moving your body
Tai chi, qigong, karate, whatever is running near you at a time you can make. Choose on availability, cost and what you actually like, because those decide whether you keep going.
The ingredients are much the same across these: steady movement, a structure somebody else designed, and a session that happens whether or not you feel like it. Comparing them in detail is a way of not starting. Go to the one you can get to on a wet Tuesday in February.
Qur’an and Sunnah
He has made the earth manageable for you (Quran 67:15). What is near and walkable is treated as the provision, not as second best.
هُوَ ٱلَّذِي جَعَلَ لَكُمُ ٱلۡأَرۡضَ ذَلُولࣰ ا فَٱمۡشُواْ فِي مَنَاكِبِهَا وَكُلُواْ مِن رِّزۡقِهِۦۖ وَإِلَيۡهِ ٱلنُّشُورُ
It is He who has made the earth manageable for you––travel its regions; eat His provision- and to Him you will be resurrected
Qur’an 67:15read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Randomised trials of resistance training, which looks nothing like a slow movement class, produced a moderate reduction in depressive symptoms, and it did not depend on strength improving. Quite different forms of movement keep arriving at similar places. That is a reason to choose on practicalities rather than on which one sounds most impressive.
Gordon BR, McDowell CP, Hallgren M, Meyer JD, Lyons M, Herring MP. (2018). Association of Efficacy of Resistance Exercise Training With Depressive Symptoms: Meta-analysis and Meta-regression Analysis of Randomized Clinical Trials.. JAMA psychiatry doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
The practice you can reach and enjoy is the one you will still be doing in three months, and that is what decides the outcome.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
You do not need greenery for outside to help. Snow, grey sky, bare trees, a car park at dusk. Getting out still does something.
Almost nobody needs convincing that exercise helps. The gap is between knowing it and doing it, so spend your effort there.
Clumsy is not a description you can work with. Balance, core strength, shifting your weight, big movements, small ones, catching a ball, keeping a beat: those you can look at one at a time.