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Qigong you can practise every morning

Qigong is the easiest part of this to start and the hardest part to describe without sounding like a brochure. Mechanically it is a short set of repeating movements paired with a slow breath: eight or ten gestures, each done several times, the same ones tomorrow. There is no sequence to memorise, which is why it survives being done at seven in the morning by someone who is not fully awake.

It is also the most portable thing here. 101 of the qigong classes below can be done sitting or with a chair to hold, and the sets are short enough to fit into a ten-minute session without being cut in half.

What we will not say about it

Qigong comes wrapped in claims. Some of the classes in the list below have titles about immunity, organ health, energy or healing. Those titles are reproduced here exactly as their authors wrote them, because altering someone’s title while embedding their work would be worse than quoting it — but reproducing a title is attribution, not agreement, and the app never repeats those claims in its own voice.

What is left when you take them away is not nothing. It is ten minutes of gentle, continuous, weight-shifting movement with a long breath, done daily. That is a reasonable thing to do with ten minutes, and it does not need any of the rest of it.

The site’s position is written down rather than implied: nothing here supports claims about immunity, “energy”, organ function or disease reversal, as stated in §4.7, and the rule about reproducing titles verbatim is part of the attribution policy.

Gentle does not mean nothing is happening

Intensity in this tradition is not speed. It is set by stance height first and foremost, then by how far you extend, how long you spend with your weight on one leg, and how continuously you keep moving. A qigong set done with straight legs and small circles is genuinely restful; the same set with the knees bent two inches lower stops being restful within four minutes.

That is why the app’s intensity control says stance height and single-leg time rather than showing you a number. There is a conventional figure for tai chi — around three METs, light-to-moderate — but it is a design heuristic taken from a compendium rather than something measured here, so it is used to shape the ladder and never displayed as a fact about your session. The reasoning is in §4.4.

Practically: if a session feels too easy, lower your stance before you look for a harder class. If it feels too hard, raise your stance before you shorten it. That single adjustment covers most of the range these classes can offer.

Where qigong sits in a session

Qigong is one of the six phases, and it is the one that expands when other things are removed. Practise seated and the standing balance phase is deleted — there is no honest seated equivalent of single-leg work — and its time is added to qigong, weighted up by about a third, because weight shift and trunk control are trainable in a chair.

Choosing calm or joints as your focus also weights qigong up, for different reasons: on calm because a repeating set is easier to sink into than choreography, on joints because the shoulder, hip and spine opening in a qigong set is mobility work that happens to be pleasant.

Some blocks have no video at all. The app narrates its own short sequences, paced at about five and a half breaths a minute, and uses them when nothing in the library fits the block properly. They load nothing and depend on nobody.

The sets that have names, and where they are

Qigong is not one thing. Most of what is below belongs to one of four named sets, and knowing which one you are looking at is the difference between practising something and doing arm circles. Ba Duan Jin, the eight brocades, is a thousand years old and the one to learn first. Shibashi, the eighteen movements, was written in 1979 out of Yang-style shapes and is the most taught set outside China.

The same page as the brocades carries the other two classical sets — Wu Qin Xi, the five animal frolics, and Yi Jin Jing, the muscle-tendon change classic — because they are learned as alternatives to one another rather than as a syllabus. And zhan zhuang is qigong with the movement taken out: standing still, which is harder.

Everything else here is a teacher’s own sequence, which is entirely legitimate and worth knowing about, because an unnamed set is one you can only practise with that teacher. If you want something you can carry into a park, a hotel room or a hospital ward without a screen, learn one of the named four.

The 131 classes on this page

Qigong sets, shortest first. Repeated movements rather than a sequence to memorise, which is why these are the easiest classes here to come back to daily.

Setting it up

There is no qigong-only mode, and adding one would be the wrong shape: choose calm or joints as your focus, or tell the app you practise seated, and qigong becomes most of the session by weighting rather than by a switch.

Or start from the material — the full library lists every class with its real runtime and where it fits in a session.

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