How To Structure Your Practice Time

/

There is no one way to practice qigong and tai chi. There are many different time-tested methods and principles of practice. Additionally, each individual must figure out what works for them.

That said, figuring out how to practice the material you are being taught in qigong or tai chi lessons can be a challenge. Of course, the simplest thing would be to go home and just do the qigong set or tai chi form that you are learning. And that would be fantastic. If you simply do this, you will likely benefit greatly from it.

However, you will get even more benefit if you use your practice time a little more efficiently. I’d like to offer some ideas about how to structure your practice sessions. These are practice strategies that have proven useful for me, or for others I have discussed this with.

First, let’s look at some big principles to apply in figuring out how to practice.

Separate and then combine - pick one thing to work on at a time.

One of the biggest pitfalls people run into is trying to practice everything they’ve learned all at once. They do their tai chi form and the whole time their mind is jumping from one thing to the next. It’s hard to learn to do anything well this way.

An antidote to this problem is the Taoist learning principle of “separate and then combine.” This simply means to focus on one thing at time. Once you have learned to do two things reasonably well - separately - only then would you try to combine them. Then doing those two things simultaneously becomes the focus of your practice - how to combine the two is now your “one thing” to focus on.

For instance, you could choose to just focus on sinking your shoulders through the whole tai chi form - this one time, or each time you practice this week, or this month. When you do the form with this focus, you try not to get distracted with your hand positions or sitting and rising patterns. Who cares about that stuff? You’re working on sinking the shoulders right now.

‘Doing’ and ‘Training’

Another important practice principle is to make a distinction between ‘training’ and ‘doing.’ When you are training, you are working on some element of your form with the aim of improving your skill. Training is essential if you are interested in developing facility in the internal arts.

However, it is also important to spend some of your time simply doing tai chi or qigong. You can do your whole form/set with a particular focus (remember, pick just one thing) or you can just “let qigong or tai chi do you.” This is when you just allow yourself to get into the flow and let whatever happens happen.

Sometimes, when you are simply doing your form, the things that you have been diligently working on in your practice will coalesce, and you will be pleasantly surprised to find that you have integrated them well enough to manifest them without effort.

Of course, those are the really good days. Other days you may find that when you stop trying and just do the form, a lot of the details you have been practicing fall by the wayside. And that’s ok. It’s valuable, actually, to be able to let them go. Because letting go is also an essential element of tai chi and qigong.

Break it down

Continuing in this vein, when you are training it is often helpful to break the movements down into pieces. Training by doing your whole form/set with a particular focus can be a useful exercise, but often it’s better to choose a particular sequence, movement, or even part of a movement to work on repeatedly.

For instance if you are working on curling and uncurling your fingers in Dragon & Tiger qigong, you could pick one of the movements to practice that in today - or even just do the arm motions of one of the movements. As you are doing this you may notice that there is one transition in the arm motions that is particularly difficult for you, and you could decide to spend a few minutes just working on that one little part.

Vary your practice

Consistency is really valuable, and developing a practice routine is extremely helpful, but it is also important to have some variety in your routine. It can be really useful to work on the same thing every day for a week or a few months, but at some point, if you’re human, you will get bored, or burnt out, or your learning will plateau.

You don’t have to change everything - even if you are going to work on the same thing for the next three months, there are innumerable small aspects of your practice that you can tweak: the proportion of training time to doing time, which part of your body is in the foreground of your awareness, the speed of your movements, how you warm up, which principles you choose to focus on, who you practice with, etc.

Tailor your practice to what is going on for you at the moment

A natural way to bring variety to your practice is to consider what is going on for you at the moment - what would help you right now? Do you need to pick your energy up, or calm down? Do you need movement or stillness? Are you in the mood/state to work on subtleties and details, or would you prefer to flow? Do you have a lot of energy to spend on practice, or are you running on empty and you’re doing your practice to recharge? Where do you feel stuck or imbalanced - what parts of you need some attention?

Practice playfully

You don’t have to have fun practicing tai chi and qigong, but please don’t make it a dreadful chore. This is the most important piece of advice in this post. If you approach practice playfully, not only will you enjoy it more, you will relax into it and you will likely learn more.

If you have fond memories of playing as a kid, they may be helpful here. Or you can think of animals you have seen enjoying playfully moving their bodies. You can make play games with yourself - how slow can you go; try to move like a tiger or a dragon or a snake or a crane; get curious - how many different ways can you do a single movement; devise experiments; etc. Use your creativity to find ways of making practice more enjoyable and engaging for you.

Structuring a practice session

Here are some rough practice plans based on some of the ideas above. I have used our Wu Style Tai Chi Short Form and Dragon & Tiger Qigong as examples, but you could easily adapt these to work with other forms. The time frames are approximate, and obviously you would adjust them if you are practicing a different form, or if you want to practice these forms more slowly.

20 Minute Practice Session

Wu Style Tai Chi

  • Warm up - folds, squats, qigong exercises (~ 5 minutes)

  • Stand (1 - 2 minutes)

  • Do the short form with a particular focus, such as feeling your feet, breathing, or bending and extending your elbows (3 to 5 minutes)

  • Train a single movement or sequence (~ 5 minutes)

  • Let the short form do you (3 to 5 minutes)

Dragon & Tiger Qigong

  • Train a movement or skill - i.e. pathways of number 2, or pushing and pulling (~ 5 to 8 minutes)

  • Set of 20 - with a particular focus (~ 12 to 15 Minutes)

OR

  • Set of 8 to warm up - with a particular focus (~ 5 to 7 Minutes)

  • Train a movement or skill - i.e. pathways of number 2, or pushing and pulling (~ 5 to 9 minutes)

  • Set of 10 - let Dragon & Tiger do you (~ 6 to 8 Minutes)

Ten Minute Practice Session

Tai Chi

  • Stand, squats, or cloud hands/circle hands for 1 minute

  • Train 1 move or sequence (4 to 5 minutes)

  • Do the short form (3 to 5 minutes)

Dragon & Tiger Qigong

  • Do a set of 8 (with a particular focus, or just letting D&T do you)

OR

  • Train 1 move for about 5 Minutes

  • Set of 6 (~ 5 Minutes)

5 Minute Practice Session

If you only have five minutes to practice, you will probably be doing, rather than training. You can still choose a particular focus for that set - or just let the form do you.

For instance, you might warm up for a minute, or simply stand for a minute, and then do a tai chi short form or a short set of Dragon & Tiger Qigong, or whatever qigong you practice.

5 minute practice sessions are great. If you practice for 5 minutes, or 3 minutes or 1 minute, please congratulate yourself. You practiced!

One Hour Practice Session

Tai Chi Short or Medium Form

Warm up for 10 minutes

Stand for 2 to 5 minutes

Do the form with a particular focus (3 to 7 Minutes)

Train a movement or sequence (if you are doing short or medium forms, you have a lot of training time so you may want to work on several different moves, sequences, and/or principles. Remember to take breaks.) (~35 minutes)

Do the form again - just let the form do you (3 to 7 Minutes)

Dragon & Tiger Qigong

Set of 20 - choose a principle or body part to focus on in this set (12 to 15 minutes)

Train some movements, principles, and/or skills (remember to take breaks) (~30 to 40 minutes)

Set of 10 to 20 - Let Dragon & Tiger do you (7 to 15 minutes)

Storing

Regardless of the length of your practice session, it’s important to finish by storing (the simplest version of this is to just rest your awareness in your lower tantien). 10 to 15 seconds is a minimum for this, but if you’re doing a longer practice session, or you feel very stirred up after you practice, it would be a good idea to take some more time with it. You can do it for as long as it feels useful.

Remember, these are just suggestions and examples. My hope is that if you are looking for practice ideas, you will take these as a starting point and creatively adapt them to your liking. You can adjust the time frames, the order of events, and the principles used to suit you as an individual.

Keep in mind however, that it is always a good idea to finish your practice session by doing a whole form or set (or letting it do you). This is because the forms and sets are designed to leave you in a balanced state - while training one part of a form may not have that effect.

If you practice multiple types of qigong in one session, you can still apply this basic framework of warm-up, training, and doing time. For instance, you can pick one set to use as a warm-up, one or two others to focus your training time on, and another (or two) to simply do. For instance, if you’re doing Energy Gates and tai chi, you might stand for 20 minutes, take ten minutes to do the rest of the set, then do a tai chi form, train a move for 20 minutes, and then do the form again.

Remember, everyone who has ever endeavored to learn an art form has struggled with the issue of practice - except for robots, and they are not very good at tai chi yet.

I’m sure many of you have figured out your own ways to practice, including many strategies that I haven’t mentioned here. We would love to hear about how you practice, and your questions about practice, in the comments below.