Why should you study Tai Chi online? Wouldn’t a DVD be better?

And what do you do if you don’t have room in front of your computer to practice?

Many people don’t realize that learning Tai Chi online offers a number of benefits over learning from a DVD. And that you don’t need space in your computer room to practice from an online course!

The primary problem with most Tai Chi DVDs is that they tend to put people into “follow-along” learning mode. In most Tai Chi and Qigong programs, you watch the instructor, either in class or on video, and then follow along with the video or instructor in what we call “monkey-see, monkey-do” fashion.

Many online programs, by contrast, are not follow-along programs. Most instructors, even offline in their in-person classes, have found the “monkey-see, monkey-do” approach to be ineffective and time-consuming. As a result, we DON’T want you practicing Tai Chi in front of a TV or a computer monitor. That approach is counter-productive to Chi Development.

So even if though most online programs includes video, you don’t play the video and try to follow along with the teacher like you do on a DVD. Instead, you use the video to get an overall idea of how the movements look, but you use the text and photos to get the details for the movements and customize the movements for yourself – according to your own strengths and weaknesses.

What students with limited space in their computer rooms or without a computer in their practice room do is this.

They watch the video portions of the online program on their PCs just to get an idea of the movements, then print out the text and photos that are part of the course. They take the print-outs to their practice space to work on the details and on learning the movements for themselves. If they forget how a move goes or if the printed photo is not clear, they may go back to their PC to watch the movement and examine the high-quality photos, but then they go back to their practice space to work.

This is quite a bit different from what you might expect in a Tai Chi program – but unlike most Tai Chi instructors, online teacher are not intending to produce “monkeys” who can follow along with them or copy them. They are intending to have you get the most benefits by learning customizing the movements for your body … right from your first lesson.

You know, there are thousands of registered students for these computer-based online Tai Chi courses, and many had misgivings about learning in this format.

While not everyone can make the transition to “not following along”, it’s actually much more like studying with the high-level Tai Chi masters. In in-person training with these masters, you spend almost no time following along. They may demonstrate a movement a few times while you watch, but rarely did they do the movements in front of you with you following. Instead, you spent a majority of the time working on our own in learning the skills involved.

In this way, online courses are very much like studying the advanced training taught by high-level masters.