Qigong (or ch'i kung) refers to a wide variety of traditional cultivation practices that involve methods of accumulating, circulating, and working with qi or energy within the body. Qigong is sometimes mistakenly said to always involve movement and/or regulated breathing; in fact, use of special methods of focusing on particular energy centers in and around the body are common in the higher level or evolved forms of Qigong. Qigong is practised for health maintenance purposes, as a therapeutic intervention, as a medical profession, a spiritual path and/or component of Chinese martial arts.

The qi in qigong means air in Chinese, and, by extension, life force, dynamic energy or even cosmic breath. Gong means work applied to a discipline or the resultant level of skill, so qigong is thus breath work or energy work. The term was coined in the twentieth-century and its currency, David Ownby suggests, speaks of a cultural desire to separate cultivation from superstition, to secularize and preserve valuable aspects of traditional Chinese practices.