For Shirley Porbo, an Australian-Indonesian stay-at-home mother-of-one and competitive CrossFitter, Cheng’s treatments have become a biweekly routine, and help to keep her injury-free.
“My goal is to do better than last year [in the CrossFit Open] and to not get injured. Toto is part of that plan,” she said.
Cheng herself has an impressive sports résumé. She played rugby for Hong Kong from 2012 to 2017, and now plays for Société Générale Valley Black Ladies, one of the city’s top teams and the reigning league champions.
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Her accomplishments in another seemingly unrelated sport – coastal rowing – are just as stellar, having represented Hong Kong in international races as a member of the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club. She took up Olympic weightlifting to improve her rugby, but it became a passion in itself. One day, she hopes to represent the city at the masters level, for competitors aged 35 and over. (Full disclosure: I play on the same club team as Cheng and was also a national teammate.)
Now Cheng juggles a gruelling training regime with her clinic’s hours – from 2pm to 9pm daily, except Saturday – usually squeezing in at least two hours of rugby, rowing or gym work per day. She lifts weights five days a week and, depending on the season, will have one or two rowing training sessions a day and up to three rugby training sessions a week.
Her mother is a nurse, so she didn’t have much exposure to TCM while growing up, and had never used it before she became a practitioner. She chose the profession through a process of elimination: she knew she didn’t like the arts or business, and that she wanted to work with people face-to-face.
In the beginning, she didn’t realise TCM would bring her closer to her dream of working in a sports-related field. That changed in her first year of study at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She injured her knee days before a trail running race, prompting her to seek help from a TCM professor. It was the first time she had had acupuncture treatment – and it worked.
“That’s when I realised I could apply Chinese medicine to sports,” she recalls, “and that it was what I wanted to do.”
Purely through word of mouth, her clinic has become popular in the three-and-a-half years since she set up shop. Because it is in the family home, she only takes on clients who have been referred by existing ones.
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She estimates more than 100 national athletes come to see her, as well as national-level coaches and referees. They are involved in sports including rugby, tae kwon do, netball, shooting, rowing, water polo, baseball and swimming.
“I’ve put my body through a lot and seen a lot of physios, but I have never met anyone like Toto,” says a former British Royal Marines captain who served multiple tours in Afghanistan and who requested anonymity. While many professionals had failed to cure his nagging shoulder pain, Cheng fixed it after only one acupuncture session, he claims.
Cheng thinks she understands her clients’ needs in a way that most Chinese medicine practitioners don’t. “You have to know about the sport, so you can tell them what [exercises] they should avoid, and what would help them while carrying this injury and competing at the same time,” she says.
After receiving her bachelor’s degree in Chinese medicine, Cheng earned a master’s degree in sports medicine and exercise health science. Her practice combines what she’s learned from both degrees.
For example, to help clients with back pain, Cheng needs the diagnosis that Western technology such as computed tomography, or CT, scans can provide. In the case of a bulging disc, the scans reveal which nerves to treat through acupuncture.
For Western athletes, acupuncture and cupping recently came into vogue as a way to hone a competitive edge. At the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, American swimmer Michael Phelps – the most decorated Olympian of all time with 28 medals – appeared in global news photos with purple, circular bruises on his shoulders and back, the telltale marks of cupping. The process uses suction through cups to draw blood to an affected area, to reduce soreness and speed the healing of overworked muscles.
Western physiotherapists who use cupping and acupuncture may be borrowing TCM tools, but not the tenets on which it is based, Cheng suggests.
“They’re not the same,” she says. “The way they use it is called modern acupuncture; it’s mainly based on anatomy. TCM is based on a philosophy.”
That philosophy is grounded in balancing opposing forces known as yin and yang to maintain the flow of energy, or qi, the vital force in all living things. When the yin and yang of qi are in harmony, a person feels well. If they are not balanced, a person feels ill.
Most of Cheng’s clients have their first experience of TCM through her. This puts additional pressure on the young practitioner, who already feels a responsibility to help her patients perform to their best.
“Some of them are [sceptical], but most of them come here because they want to try it,” Cheng says. “You have to make sure that it works.”
While Cheng has big athletic and professional aspirations for herself, she has even more ambitious ones for her clients.
“My goal is to help athletes to achieve their dreams and their goals, and [to do] what they love to do,” Cheng says. “One day I want to treat Olympians, or maybe help someone become an Olympian.”
After a moment’s pause, she adds that she may have already treated a future Olympian.
This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: traditional remedies keep top athletes in the game
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