Introduction Asian natural health practices are increasingly present in the physical and sporting habits of the Western population. In particular, the Tai Chi Chuan (TCC) and Qigong (QG) have become an everyday activity that can be performed both in parks and sports facilities in Western cities. The impact of these activities on a global level is very difficult to measure, however, given the lack of statistics on the number of practitioners, associations and existing schools. The degree of acceptance that these disciplines have achieved can be measured by the number of informative publications about them. According to the study by Perez and Gutierrez (2008), 215 (62.3 %) of the 345 papers published between 1960 and 2006 on Chinese martial arts were on QG, and 115 (33.3 %) papers were on TCC, implying that both practices represented 95.6 percent of these publications. More importantly, during the 1990-1999 and 2000-2006 time periods, TCC came to occupy the top of monographs published, ahead of the rest of all forms of Chinese, Japanese and Korean martial arts; during the last time period, QG represented the third most published. According to the authors, the rise of this activity can be attributed to motivation changes for sports. Health, personal development, education, and socialization, as opposed to competition, have become increasingly important goals, which both TCC and QG fit perfectly.

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