Hong Kong
Unique form of Hong Kong exercise
An unusual form of morning exercise in a 7-second video filmed on the way up to the Peak in Hong Kong. This may be a trend, according to this Hong Kong TV news report.
An article on the subject:
People in Shanghai Take Great Strides In Wrong Direction
— They Eagerly Walk Backward To Health and Happiness; Hello, I Must Be Going
By Craig S. Smith
The Wall Street Journal
4 February 1998
China’s economy may be taking great strides, but many Chinese are in reverse, running or walking backward to stave off back pain, improve digestion and heaven knows what else.
The contrariness is just one manifestation of a craze for oddball exercises that makes a walk through many Chinese parks seem like a visit to Monty Python’s famous Ministry of Funny Walks. In Shanghai’s Xiangyang Park one morning, a young woman repeatedly bangs her upper body into a tree; an elderly man flaps his hands while staring toward the sky; and a dozen women stand in a circle shouting the number 3396815.
“Thank you, nature! Thank you, 3396815!” they cry.
One group of exercisers, moving their hands like a ground crew directing jumbo jets, say they are practicing “fragrant gong,” a regimen that is supposed to make practitioners emit a sweet smell. When a passerby sniffs the air, detecting nothing but the aroma of fried dough, an elderly woman says apologetically, “You can’t smell it all the time.”
The surge in strange exercises is a bit hard to explain. People, particularly those who have lost jobs to economic reform, have more time on their hands. There is a greater willingness to try anything in a society where everything is in flux. But the craze is also rooted in quasimystical traditions that lay dormant through decades of Communist rule. How backward walking, specifically, got its start, no one seems to know. Most retrograde trampers picked it up on the streets or from exercise books and newspaper columns that say it is good for you.
Mad as these exercises seem, they may well work, up to a point: The oldest of the exercisers are well into their 80s, and from all appearances, they are fit, despite a past of poor diets, pollution and political upheaval. They congregate at daybreak, braving the cold in layers of knit clothing, and launch unabashed into their routines.
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3 comments for “Unique form of Hong Kong exercise”
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This kind of exercising is very popular in mainland China. In Shanghai I see people doing this everyday in the differents parks.
This is not unique at all. Anyone who has spent more than a few days in China, will have seen this in parks. Old people often walk backwards, to improve their muscles.
It’s Old Peak Rd. The guy is just being sensible. It’s so steep that if you walk forwards down it you will wish you hadn’t - your muscles will be so stiff you’ll hobble for 3 days.