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Tai chi practice, built around your week
Tell Cloud Hands how steady you are on your feet, how long you have and what you are training for, and it builds you a different session every day from 116 classes taught by 71 teachers. Seated and chair-supported practice is a first-class path, not an afterthought — if you cannot stand safely, it removes the standing balance work and gives the time to seated weight-shift instead. Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for.
How a session is built
Every session follows the same arc, which mirrors the structure used in clinical tai chi programmes: arrive, mobilise, work, wind down. Only the durations and the content change. Your focus reweights the phases — training for balance roughly doubles the balance phase — and on a short session the phases that cannot be given enough time to be worth doing are dropped rather than compressed.
- Center無極
- Arrive. Settle the breath and find vertical alignment before moving.
- Warm up熱身
- Mobilise ankles, hips, spine and shoulders through their full pain-free range.
- Qigong氣功
- Repeatable breath-linked movement. Builds the coordination the form assumes.
- Form套路
- Continuous choreography. The cognitive and postural core of the practice.
- Balance平衡
- Deliberate weight transfer, controlled stepping and narrowed stance.
- Close收功
- Down-regulate. Slow the breath and return attention to the room.
What it does, and what it refuses to do
It does
- Ask how steady you are on your feet before anything else, and enforce an intensity ceiling that nothing else can override.
- Decide tomorrow's session in advance and show it to you, rest days included, so the next one is already visible.
- Rotate deliberately, so that this week does not feel like last week — that is the engine's main job.
- Show its whole hand: every class it can reach is listed, with its real runtime, its teacher, and a link back to them.
- Surface the safety cautions above the player every session, not once during onboarding.
It refuses to
- Teach. It cannot see you, so it will never claim a movement is correct.
- Act as a medical device. It does not diagnose, treat, or personalise around a condition, and it does not screen for contraindications.
- Ask you to make an account. No login, no email, no server-side profile, no cross-device sync.
- Claim what the evidence does not support — nothing here is about immunity, “energy” or disease reversal, even where a video title says otherwise.
- Nag you. Miss a week and it will not guilt you about it.
The reasoning behind all of it, with sources, is written up in full. Read the methodology and the evidence base, including the section on what the evidence does not support.
Common questions
Do I need to be able to stand?
No. 11 of the classes are taught seated, and 73 of the 116 are safe to do holding the back of a chair. If you tell Cloud Hands you practise seated, it caps the intensity at gentle, removes the standing balance phase entirely, and gives that time to seated weight-shift and trunk work instead. The cautions above the player change too: firm chair, no wheels, feet flat.
Do I need an account?
No, and there isn't one to make. There is no login, no email, no password and no server-side profile. Your settings, your streak and your practice history live in your browser's local storage on that one device. The costs are real and worth stating plainly: nothing syncs between your phone and your laptop, and clearing your browser data clears your streak.
How long is a session?
You choose 10, 20, 30 or 45 minutes, and the session is built to fit the time you actually have rather than being trimmed at the end. On a short session some phases are dropped rather than compressed into something too brief to do any good, and the app tells you which ones and why.
Who made these classes?
71 teachers, publishing on YouTube. None of it is hosted here and none of it is ours: it is other people's teaching, embedded with attribution and linked back. Every class is listed in full on the library page, and every runtime was machine-checked against YouTube rather than taken from the title, because titles lie constantly about length.
Is this a substitute for a teacher or for medical advice?
No to both. Cloud Hands cannot see you, so it will never tell you a movement is correct and it will never correct your posture. It is a scheduler and a timer wrapped around other people's teaching. It does not screen for contraindications, does not personalise around a diagnosis, and does not claim a therapeutic outcome for anyone. If you have a condition that affects how you move, ask a clinician before you start.
Explore the library
Written for what you came for
- Tai chi you can do sitting down — 73 classes.
- Tai chi for balance and steadier walking — 37 classes.
- Tai chi for arthritis and stiff joints — 72 classes.
- Tai chi and qigong for winding down — 42 classes.
- Tai chi for complete beginners — 76 classes.
- Ten minutes of tai chi a day — 42 classes.
- Qigong you can practise every morning — 57 classes.
- Add Cloud Hands to your phone's home screen — no app store, about fifteen seconds, works on any phone.