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Tai chi you can do sitting down

Most tai chi written for people who cannot stand safely is standing tai chi with an apology attached — the same class, the same cues, and a line at the top saying you may sit if you need to. That leaves you copying movements designed around weight shifting from one foot to the other while sitting on both.

Seated practice here is a different session rather than a softened one. 41 classes are taught sitting throughout, 32 work either way, and 138 more are standing classes that are safe to do holding the back of a chair. Tell Tai Chi you practise seated and it stops offering you anything else.

Who this is not for: if you can stand unsupported for a few minutes without holding anything, you will get more out of standing practice, because the single-leg time is where most of the balance training actually happens. Sitting down is the right choice when standing is not safe — not a gentler option to pick on a tired day.

What changes in the session itself

Mobility is the first question the app asks, before age and before what you are training for, and it is the only answer that nothing else can override. Answer seated and four things happen, every session, whatever else you have chosen.

The intensity is capped at gentle. You can ask for moderate; you will not get it. The mobility ceiling is a hard gate and no combination of age, experience or preference lifts it — an established practitioner who is steady on their feet can have their age ceiling raised by one step, but the mobility ceiling never moves. The app tells you which constraint bound the session, so a capped intensity never looks like a bug.

The balance phase is removed entirely rather than replaced with a seated imitation of it. There is no honest sitting equivalent of standing on one leg, and pretending otherwise would be the kind of thing this app exists not to do. The time is given to qigong instead, weighted up by about a third, because trunk control and weight shift from hip to hip are trainable in a chair and are worth training.

Chair-friendly becomes a hard content filter, not a preference the engine trades away when it is short of options. If it cannot fill a phase from chair-safe material it drops the phase.

The cautions above the player change. Firm chair, no wheels, feet flat on the floor. They appear every session rather than once during setup, because the session you get wrong is the one on the morning you were not paying attention. The full list is in the safety scope, and the ceiling table is in §5.4.

If you can stand while holding something

There is a middle setting, and it is the one most people who arrive here should choose. Supported means you can stand, but you want a chair back or a counter within reach.

Supported keeps the balance phase — that is the whole point of it — while capping intensity at gentle and applying the same chair-safe content filter as seated practice. You get the standing work, at a stance height that does not ask for it back, with something solid to hold. Someone recovering their confidence after a fall usually belongs here rather than in a chair.

You are not committing to anything by choosing it. The setting lives in your browser on this device, you can change it in the middle of a week, and nothing about your practice history is lost when you do.

What we will not claim for it

The falls-prevention trials this site draws on studied standing programmes with community-dwelling older adults. It would be easy, and wrong, to quote their numbers on a page about chair practice. Seated work trains what it trains — range of motion, trunk control, weight shift, the habit of moving daily — and the evidence for it as falls prevention is not the evidence summarised in §4.1.

This is also not medical advice, and Tai Chi is not a clinical tool. It does not screen for contraindications, does not know your diagnosis, and cannot see whether what you are doing is safe. If you are practising seated because of a condition, a recent operation or a fall, ask the clinician who knows your case before you start, and stop for sharp pain, chest pain, dizziness or breathlessness that does not settle.

What the app is honest about, it is honest about everywhere: what the evidence does not support is a section of the methodology rather than a footnote, and it is worth reading before any of the rest of it.

Three different practices are called chair tai chi

The first is seated throughout: you never stand up, the legs work by pressing into the floor and lifting the heels, and the form is carried by the arms, the waist and the breath. Most of the classes on this page are this. It is the version to use if standing is unreliable on a bad day, and the one to use on a bad day even if it is not.

The second is standing behind a chair, one hand on the back of it. This is not a lesser version of standing practice — it is how balance work is safely progressed, and the hand comes off for a few seconds at a time long before it comes off for good. The library carries far more of these than of true seated classes, which is why the page lists both: a class tagged chair-friendly is a standing class you can hold onto, not a seated one.

The third is wheelchair tai chi, which is its own adapted discipline rather than seated tai chi done in a wheelchair — the arm forms are re-choreographed around the chair’s frame and wheels. Three classes here are explicitly that. What none of the three is, is a warm-up for the real thing; the reasoning behind removing rather than diluting the standing work is in §5.4.

The 211 classes on this page

Every class here can be done from a chair, or holding one. Shortest first — the seven-minute ones are a real session, not a taster.

Setting it up

Open the practice screen, choose Seated or Supported under mobility, and pick how long you have. Ten minutes is a real option, not a consolation one. Everything else — the intensity cap, the phase structure, the cautions — follows from that one answer.

If you would rather see the raw material first, the library filtered to seated classes shows what the engine is choosing from.

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