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Shibashi, the eighteen movements

Tai Chi Qigong Shibashi — 太極氣功十八式 — was put together in 1979 by Lin Housheng, a Shanghai researcher, out of Yang-style movements and older breathing exercises. Eighteen movements, each repeated six times, each paired with one breath in and one breath out. It takes about fifteen minutes, there is nothing to memorise beyond the order, and it is probably the single most taught qigong set outside China.

It is also the set most often confused with something else, because “eighteen” is a popular number in this tradition. The section below sorts that out before you press play on the wrong thing.

Two different forms share the number eighteen

Tai Chi Qigong Shibashi is qigong: eighteen repeated movements, no sequence to hold in your head, breath-led, done standing more or less on the spot. 12 of the classes below are this. If you arrived here having seen it in a park or a hospital programme, this is what you saw.

The Chen eighteen is a tai chi form: eighteen postures of Chen-style taijiquan condensed from a much longer sequence, with the family’s characteristic changes of speed and its low stances. 6 of the classes below are this one. It is a genuinely harder thing to learn and a genuinely harder thing to do, and it is not a variation of the qigong set — the two share a number and nothing else.

Both are listed here on purpose, because the ambiguity is the reason people land on the wrong video. If you want the gentle repeating one and a class opens with a low stance and a stamp, you are in the Chen. If you want the form and every movement is being repeated six times to a breath, you are in the qigong.

Set one, set two, and where to start

Set one is the original eighteen and the one to learn. Set two — and there are further sets after it, up to a fourth — was written later in the same shape: eighteen more movements, same breathing, more waist rotation and a little more demand on the legs. There is no reason to touch set two until set one has stopped requiring you to look at the screen.

The movements have names that describe them adequately once you have seen them and not at all before: Commencing Form, Broadening One’s Chest, Painting a Rainbow, Separating the Clouds, Rowing the Boat. Learning them in order is easy, because unlike a tai chi form the transitions are trivial — every movement returns you to standing before the next one begins. That is the entire reason this set travels so well.

Several teachers appear here for the same set, which is the library’s standing bet: the same canonical material from different people is worth more than more different material. Across 188 channels overall, the sets people actually need are carried several times over — §6.5. Pick the teacher whose pace you can follow; you are going to hear a lot of them.

Sitting down, and slowing down

9 of these classes are seated or safe to do holding a chair, including a full run of all eighteen movements from a chair. Shibashi survives that transposition better than almost anything else in this tradition, because most of the eighteen movements are led by the arms and the waist while the legs only bend and straighten. What is lost sitting down is the weight shift, which matters, and the seated page is honest about what the app removes rather than adapts.

Intensity here is set by how deep you stand and how far you reach, not by how fast you go — the same rule as everywhere else in this tradition, laid out in §4.4. Shibashi done with straight legs is genuinely restful. The same eighteen movements with the knees bent two inches lower and the arms fully extended stop being restful around movement eleven.

The set arrives with claims attached — organ health, energy circulation, blood pressure — and the class titles below carry them because their authors wrote them. Those titles are reproduced verbatim as a matter of attribution policy, §8.3, and the app never repeats the claims in its own voice.

The 18 classes on this page

Eighteen-movement sets, shortest first. Read the section above before picking: two different forms share the number, and they are not variations of each other.

Setting it up

There is no “shibashi mode”, and adding one would be dishonest about what the app does: it builds a six-phase session and draws each block from whatever fits, so you will meet these classes in the qigong phase rather than as a course. Choose calm or joints as your focus and that phase becomes most of the session.

To learn the set itself, work through one teacher from the list below in order — fifteen minutes, most days, for about three weeks. Ba Duan Jin is the obvious next set, and the twenty-minute page explains why a full run of this is the natural size of a daily practice.

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