Just do it! The importance of consistency & self-practice for tai chi & qigong

Be Consistent

To acquire a skill or to remember a process or action takes time and practice. 

When we begin to learn a new skill or pastime it is important to invest time if we want to progress and improve our understanding or skill.

Tai Chi and Qigong are no different. 

Consistency in practice takes many forms: being present and attending, understanding and engage with learning, home practice and research.

Turn up regularly. Life tends to get in the way of what you really want to pursue, so turn up to your lesson every week. Repetition is the key to reinforcing a new habit/skill/movement, and you will need to have corrections to keep you on the right track. If you leave long gaps between your practice, you will not remember much, if anything from the previous session, so you will always be relearning the postures at the same level and will not progress.

Treating the session as a workout, just following, and copying, and not engaging with actually learning to do it for yourself, will leave you stuck or awkward when you are asked to self -practice in a session. If you are always just following, and your focus is only on the instructor and not on how your body is moving, you will not see or feel how your body is really moving. This leads to incorrect posture, as your head is always turned to the instructor, and mimicking the body movements rather than feeling how the body settles into the position.


You are there to learn how to do tai chi for yourself. The instructor will hopefully be able to effectively communicate the theory and requirements of what is currently been taught. Be consistent in listening to instruction and asking questions where they are needed; this will help not only you, but other students and the instructor.

Practice at home to reinforce the learning. Regular training outside of normal lesson time will help you to retain the knowledge you should have acquired from the lesson. The more time you spend on learning a new skill, the quicker you should attain it. I have made a lot of ‘discoveries’ through home practice over the years, and know that any self-acquired knowledge is retained longer than any information ‘spoon fed’ by an instructor or master.

Research what you are learning. This could be quite general or very specific. A little understanding of the history can really help clarify the context of a routine you are studying, or a deeper study of acupressure points will yield the reasoning why postures look and feel a certain way. There maybe books on the particular routine you are working on, and these are a valuable reference to refine and progress your study.

Therefore, being consistent in your attendance, learning, practice, and research will enable you to progress and fully appreciate and enjoy Tai Chi and Qigong. Achieving consistency in one thing in life will invariably lead to consistency elsewhere so it is a win win situation.
Train smart, train safe, keep learning.
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