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Twenty minutes, with all six phases intact

Twenty minutes is the first length at which this stops involving sacrifices. At ten, the app deletes whole phases and tells you which ones; at twenty, all six survive — centring, warm-up, qigong, a form block, standing balance work and a close — and each of them clears the floor below which it would not be worth doing. Nothing on the list is a token.

It is also, not coincidentally, the length of a full run of most traditional sets: shibashi, a long Ba Duan Jin, a 24 form with repetitions. These 85 classes, from 61 teachers, are the ones that sit in that band — ten to twenty-five minutes, long enough to be the body of a session on their own.

Twenty is where nothing has to be dropped

Every phase has a floor — a length below which it is not worth starting. Centring needs about ninety seconds, warm-up two minutes, qigong three, a form block four, standing balance two, and the close ninety seconds again. Add those up and you are at fourteen minutes of absolute minimum, which is why ten-minute sessions have to drop something and twenty-minute ones do not.

The extra six minutes do not go anywhere clever. They are spread across the phases your focus weights up, so a twenty-minute session aimed at balance is not the same twenty minutes as one aimed at calm: the first spends the surplus on single-leg work, the second on breathing and the close. The floors, and the order phases give way in, are in §5.3.

Twenty minutes a day is also the first dose that engages seriously with the physical activity guidelines rather than gesturing at them. Seven days at twenty minutes is 140 minutes a week, which is within reach of the 150-to-300 minutes of moderate activity the WHO recommends for adults over 65 — a target ten minutes a day does not come close to. The guideline is quoted in full, including the parts tai chi does not satisfy, in §4.3.

What the twenty minutes are actually spent on

Roughly: two minutes standing and breathing, two and a half warming the joints, four or five of qigong, five of form, three of balance work, two closing. Those are not fixed — the point of the engine is that they move with your focus, your experience and your mobility — but that is the shape, and it is the shape a hospital tai chi programme would recognise.

One thing it deliberately is not: twenty minutes of one video. A single twenty-minute class is a fine thing to do and several are listed below, but a session assembled from four teachers gives you a warm-up from somebody who is good at warm-ups and a close from somebody who is good at closes. It also means tomorrow is different without you choosing anything, which is most of what keeps a daily practice alive.

55 of these classes are suitable for a first-week practitioner, which is more than most people expect at this length. Twenty minutes of gentle qigong is genuinely easier than ten minutes of stepping drills, and the app knows that difference: length and intensity are separate controls, and the safety ceiling never relaxes to fill time — §5.3.

Twenty minutes most days beats forty on Sunday

The app spreads whatever you choose across non-consecutive days when it can, because three practices in a week are worth more scattered than stacked. It also varies what it asks for across the week rather than repeating the same session — a harder day is followed by a gentler one, on purpose. That is periodisation in the plainest sense and it is described in §7.

If twenty minutes is your realistic ceiling on a weekday, set twenty and leave it. Setting thirty and doing it twice a week produces less practice than setting twenty and doing it five times, and it also produces the feeling of being behind, which is the actual reason people stop.

Nothing here nags. There is no streak to defend at midnight and no notification, and a missed day changes nothing about tomorrow’s session. The progress screen counts what you did, not what you owe.

The 85 classes on this page

Classes between ten and twenty-five minutes, shortest first. Long enough to be the body of a session on their own, short enough to fit one before work.

Setting it up

Choose 20 minutes on the practice screen. That is the whole setup — the six phases fit, so there is no dropped-phase note to read and nothing to compensate for.

If twenty is sometimes too much, the app is built for that: ten minutes drops phases honestly rather than compressing them, and five is still a practice. Changing the setting takes two taps and costs nothing.

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