WINTER PARK, Fla. — You don’t have to take up boxing, basketball or bicycling, Eric Raboy says.

Just take up.

“Do something,” he says.

Raboy teaches a weekly tai chi and qigong seniors class for the City of Winter Park, and on Tuesday mornings he leads up to 10 students through forms and exercises that appear to hit every muscle, right down to their fingers and toes.

He says he combines yoga, mime in dance and stretching exercises with the Chinese martial arts of tai chi, or tai ji, and qigong — both of which carry various spellings, include coordinated graceful movements, and aim for improved strength, health, focus, flexibility, and longevity, among other things.

If after an hour, students “can walk out of the class feeling like they’ve done something, my purpose is achieved,” Raboy says.

At the City of Winter Park Community Center on Tuesday, Raboy led six students through about a half hour of warm-up exercises that included yoga poses and swimming and bow-shooting motions.

He then directed them through tai chi forms that made all appear as though they were flowing with wind and water. That included a “circle walk” from Ba Gua Zhang, another Chinese martial art, and qigong.

Student Lucy Silverman of Winter Park said the class helps her relieve stiffness and problems in her lower back. She also appreciates the calm and relaxation in a world otherwise “moving so fast,” she says.

“These moves tend to bring you back into your own self,” she says.

Celeste Houlihan of Winter Park says the practice helps her focus on “something that’s calming and centering” and allows her to stifle mental chatter.

“It’s an escape,” she says. “It lets you leave behind everything that you’re going through at home. … You’re focusing on this and not everything else.”

Patty Schmidt of Winter Park says she gets relaxation and a sense of control from an emphasis on breathing within the movements.

During the pandemic, she says, the classes remain “a safe place we come to. We can learn. My body knows I did something... and that’s good. Can I stay at home? Yeah. I might do exercises. But come here, and you know you’re going to do exercises.”

Raboy, who turns 71 on Friday, also teaches kung fu and says he has been involved in tai chi for almost 50 years. He calls the martial art and related forms “probably the best panacea we’ve got in terms of therapy and curing problems.”

“Modern life is wonderful,” he says. “I don’t want to give up the technology or any of that. But we don’t get enough exercise -- not enough range of motion, not enough doing stuff.

“It’s just not good for us to just sit still and do very confined movements. The body needs to move.”