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The Yang 24 form, one paragraph at a time

The 24 form is the most practised sequence of movements in the world, which is a strange thing to be able to say about a set of exercises assembled by a committee. In 1956 the Chinese national sports authority took the Yang family’s long form — 108 postures, several years of study — and cut it to twenty-four, keeping the shapes that teach the most and dropping the repetitions. It takes about five minutes to perform and about six months to stop being embarrassed by.

This page collects every class here that teaches a standardised short set: the 24 itself, and the 8, 10 and 16 that most teachers now use as the way in. They are not competing products. The 8 is the first third of the 24 with the hard transitions taken out, which is why so many people who bounced off the 24 get through the 8 in a fortnight.

Twenty-four of what, exactly

Twenty-four postures, not twenty-four exercises. The count is of named positions the body passes through — Parting the Wild Horse’s Mane, White Crane Spreads Its Wings, Brush Knee and Push, Cloud Hands — and the form is the unbroken movement between them. That distinction is why counting your progress in postures learned is misleading: the twelfth posture is not twice as far along as the sixth, because what takes the time is the joins.

It is conventionally taught in four sections, sometimes called paragraphs, and that is the unit that matters. A section is five or six postures, runs about seventy seconds, and is short enough to practise on its own until it stops needing attention. Several classes below teach exactly one paragraph. Those are the ones to use once you have decided to actually learn this rather than watch it.

The form is Yang in origin, and nineteen of the classes here are Yang. The others are the same idea applied inside a different family: a Sun 24, a Chen 8, a Wu short form. If you have no allegiance yet, start Yang — not because it is better, but because it is the one every other class on this page assumes you know.

Back view and mirrored, and why they are not a gimmick

A teacher facing you is showing you the form reversed. Their left hand rises on your right, and for the first month your brain will silently translate every movement while you are also trying to remember what comes next. Almost everyone who quits in the first fortnight quits somewhere inside that translation.

There are two fixes, and the library carries both: 6 classes filmed from behind, where the teacher’s back is to the camera and their left is your left, and 19 filmed mirrored, which achieves the same thing optically. Neither is a beginner’s crutch to be outgrown. Most people who have practised for years still learn new material from behind and then switch to the front view to check their own shape against a face.

This is also the argument for a library rather than a course. The same twenty-four movements are here from front, from behind, mirrored, in silence, with verbal cues and paragraph by paragraph, because the version that unsticks you on move seven is rarely the version that got you to move six. That is a deliberate build rule, not an accident of collecting — §6.5 explains why the same canonical set from several teachers is worth more than several different sets.

How long it takes, said honestly

To follow along badly: one session. To get through all twenty-four without a video: two to four months at fifteen minutes a day. To perform it in a way another practitioner would call correct: years, and this app does not pretend to be the thing that gets you there — that is what a teacher in a room is for, and §9 is explicit about where this site stops.

The order that works: learn section one until you can do it without the screen, then add section two, then run one-plus-two before you touch three. Never learn a new section on a day you have not run the old ones. Sequences decay fast in the first three weeks and then barely at all, which is the same curve the app’s daily-repeat logic is built on — §4.6.

One practical warning about runtimes. The full step-by-step courses here run to eighty minutes, and the timer budgets against the real length rather than the title. If you have set a twenty-minute session, the engine will not hand you an eighty-minute class and let you discover the problem at minute nineteen — it prefers a class that fits and penalises one that cannot, as described in §6.3. Learning a form is the one case where you should ignore that and open the long class directly from the list below.

The 22 classes on this page

Every class here teaches a standardised short set — the 24, and the 8, 10 and 16 that lead into it. Shortest first, so the demonstrations come before the courses.

Setting it up

The daily session is not a form course, and choosing form as a focus will not teach you the 24 in order — it gives you a form block, from a rotating cast of teachers, inside a session that also warms you up and puts you back down. That is the better daily habit and the worse way to memorise a sequence.

So do both. Use the app for the practice, and pick one course from the list below to work through in order — a paragraph a week is a realistic pace. If you are starting from nothing, the beginners page is the better first stop, and five minutes a day is the honest amount of time this needs to stick.

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