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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.

Which ten minutes you get, focus by focus

Ten minutes with balance: centring, a standing balance block of four or five minutes, a close. Ten minutes with calm: centring and closing take most of it, weighted up more than twofold, with a qigong block between them. Ten minutes with joints: the warm-up survives, qigong takes the middle, and the balance work is what gets dropped.

The form block is the usual casualty at this length, and that is deliberate rather than a shortfall. A four-minute form block is the floor at which a sequence can be practised at all, and below it you are watching a form rather than doing one — so a ten-minute session gives the time to something that fits instead. If learning a sequence is what you actually want, do it beside the daily session rather than inside it: the 24 form page lays out how long that really takes.

The one thing ten minutes never drops is the pair at the ends. You always get a centring block and a close, at whatever length is left, because that is what makes it a practice rather than a video you watched — and it is also what makes it repeatable tomorrow.

The 188 classes on this page

Everything ten minutes or under, shortest first. These are whole classes at their intended pace, not excerpts from longer ones.

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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