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Ten minutes of tai chi a day

A ten-minute session is not a shorter version of a thirty-minute one. If you take the same six phases and divide the time by three you get six ninety-second fragments, and a ninety-second block is mostly spent finding where the video starts and where you are supposed to be standing.

So the app does something else: below a certain length it drops whole phases rather than compressing them, and tells you which ones went. Ten minutes ends up being three or four things done properly instead of six things done nominally.

How ten minutes actually gets divided

Each phase has a floor — the length below which it stops being worth doing. Arriving needs a minute and a half, the warm-up two minutes, qigong three, a form four, standing balance work two, and the close a minute and a half. A phase that cannot be given its floor is dropped and its time handed to the phases that survive.

Two phases are never dropped: the arrival at the start and the close at the end. They are the ritual that makes the thing a practice rather than a video you watched. Beyond those, at least one of qigong, form or balance has to survive, or it is not a session.

The result is that a ten-minute session is shaped by your focus more visibly than a long one is. Choose balance and you get arriving, balance work and a close. Choose calm and the arriving and closing phases — weighted at more than double on that focus — take up most of the ten minutes, which is exactly right for the purpose. The app names the dropped phases in the session notes rather than quietly omitting them. The floors and the order they give way in are in §5.3.

Why short blocks need short videos

Fitting a class to a block is not symmetrical. A video longer than its block is fine — you practise the first few minutes and the timer moves you on, exactly as a class would. A video shorter than its block leaves you standing in a silent room waiting for a timer, which is a far worse experience and the fastest way to feel foolish.

The selection engine scores it that way on purpose: overrunning is mildly penalised, coming up short is punished hard. That is why the library keeps a stock of genuinely short classes and why the app narrates a few blocks itself, with no video at all, when nothing fits — the guided sequences pace their own cues and can fill any block exactly. The arithmetic is written out in §6.3.

Is ten minutes a day enough?

Enough for what, and compared to what. The WHO’s 2020 activity guidelines for adults over 65 ask for 150 to 300 minutes of moderate-intensity activity a week, muscle strengthening on two or more days, and varied multicomponent activity emphasising functional balance and strength on three or more days. Ten minutes a day is seventy minutes a week. That is short of the aerobic target, and this page is not going to pretend otherwise — §4.3 quotes the guideline in full.

What ten minutes a day does hit is the third clause: something varied with a balance component, on most days of the week. And it is not competing with 150 minutes of anything, it is competing with nothing at all, which is the honest comparison for most people reading this.

The app will not warn you if you choose fewer days than the guideline suggests, and it will not nag you when you skip. Nagging is against the brand. What it does instead is spread whatever you have chosen across non-consecutive days, so three sessions a week are distributed rather than stacked on a Sunday.

The 65 classes on this page

Every class in the library that runs ten minutes or under, shortest first. These are what a short session is built from — plus the app's own guided sequences, which have no video and fit any block exactly.

Setting it up

Choose 10 minutes on the practice screen and leave everything else where it is. The session that comes back will name the phases it dropped and why, so you can see the trade rather than wonder about it.

If ten minutes a day is the plan, it is worth putting the app on your home screen — the friction of finding a browser tab is a surprisingly effective way to not practise.

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