Some qigong teachers demand that you practice 2 hours every day. I have never been one of those teachers. That’s because I didn’t do it that way, and I always try to practice what I teach.

I also know from my own experience that this kind of advice doesn’t work. The success rate for this method is ridiculously low, probably around 2-3%.

If only a tiny percentage of your students are able to implement your advice, then something is wrong.

The truth is that practicing 2 hours a day is outrageously hard, even if you are desperate for healing.

And yet…and yet…

Sometimes, you really DO need to practice for 2 hours per day. Qigong is medicine. As with all medicine, the dosage matters.

When deep healing is required, a higher dose of qigong is also required.

15 Minutes Per Day

Typically, I encourage my students to practice for ~15 minutes per session. From there, I encourage them to do ~15 minutes twice per day, once in the morning, and then again in the afternoon or evening. So that’s a total of ~30 minutes per day.

Some students stick with 15 minutes once a day and get good results. When you do 15 minutes every day religiously, and when you follow the 5-Phase Routine, you get tremendous bang for your buck.

Nevertheless, I can confidently say that even this — just 15 minutes once per day — is hard. With the right method you can do it, but don’t expect it to be easy.

The method that I use is called the 2-Minute Method. In short, instead of demanding that you immediately start practicing for 15 minutes every day (and shaming you if you don’t), I encourage you to start with 2 minutes per day.

Or if you fall off the horse and stop practicing qigong, then the way to get back up by doing 2 minutes a day. Same method.

If you can do 2 minutes a day, then you can eventually do 15 minutes per day.

And here’s the next part of that equation: If you can do 15 minutes per day, then you can do 2 hours.

Ancient vs. Modern Settings

Let’s back up a bit. Why is it so damn hard to do 15 minutes per day, let alone 2 hours per day? What’s up with that?

Here’s some perspective for you. The modern concept of a qigong school did not exist for most of the history of this art. There were 4 main settings for learning and practicing qigong in the past:

1. A temple environment (like Shaolin or Wudang)
2. The master’s house
3. A military environment
4. An appointment with a Chinese physician

Notice that all 4 of these environments came with built-in discipline:

• If you were in a Buddhist or Taoist temple, then you would have had a rigid schedule as well as community accountability.
• If you were learning at the master’s house, then it would have been a daily affair and you would have been constantly under his or her watchful eye.
• If you were in the military, then you would have learned and practiced qigong under strict military discipline.
• If your Chinese physician prescribed qigong, then you would likely have learned it 1-on-1 and perhaps even seen them daily.

In other words, most qigong practice happened in a totally different setting back then. They certainly weren’t dealing with getting kids ready for school, making coffee before work, running out for groceries, or fixing the damn WiFi router (again!).

The closest comparison we have in the 21st century is a healing retreat. For example, at my qigong retreat in Costa Rica, where we do 4-6 hours of qigong per day, students never struggle with discipline. They easily put in the time.

I’m not making excuses for you or for myself. There ARE ways to become a disciplined practitioner of qigong in the modern era. But beating yourself up because you lack willpower is not one of them.

The Bamboo Stick

In the 4 traditional environments above, teachers would often use a bamboo stick to manually adjust students and even whack them when they made mistakes. I’ve never done this, not just because it’s illegal (can you imagine the lawsuits?) but also because I’m a modern educator and I don’t subscribe to this kind of outdated pedagogy.

I will never hit you with a bamboo stick. So why are you hitting yourself with a figurative stick? Why would you expect something like that to work? There are other ways to get yourself to practice more — ways that actually work.

When 2 Hours is Critical

Recently, I received an email from a longtime student who is facing a serious health crisis. He’s an older gentleman, but not too old. He told me, bluntly, that he’s not ready to die.

In a situation like this, 15 minutes twice per day is a good start, but it’s probably not enough. We need to increase the dosage. A lot.

I encouraged him to work up to 2 hours per day. This includes his tai chi practice, as well as his sitting meditation practice (which he learned elsewhere).

Humans can do incredible things when faced with their own mortality. But not always. Often, students will simply give up hope. Or they will beat themselves up with a figurative bamboo stick.

This particular student does not have time to waste. There’s no time for self-deprecation. There’s no time for despair. And there’s no time to use ineffective methods for increasing his qigong dosage.

Let’s focus on what really works.

How to Increase Your Dosage

I made the decision years ago not to berate my students for not practicing more. I not even chastise them if they struggled to do 15 minutes. Instead, I would use modern teaching methods, positive reinforcement, and most importantly, leading by example.

If you know my story, you know that I struggled to practice even while desperately needing qigong to heal my depression. It was during my struggle that I discovered what I now call the 2-Minute Method.

Today, instead of telling students to practice 2 hours per day, I tell them to start with 2 minutes a day. The 2-minute session acts as a placeholder for a future 15-minute session. Later, once you are doing a solid 15 minutes per day, you can repeat the process by adding a 2-minute session to the opposite end of the day. This then becomes a placeholder for your 2nd session.

In other words, the progression looks something like this:

1. 2 minutes once per day
2. 15 minutes 2-3 times per week, replacing those 2 minute sessions (while maintaining 2 minutes on the other days)
3. 15 minutes once per day
4. 15 minutes once per day + 2 minutes once per day in a new time slot
5. 15 minutes twice per day

This progression follows the ancient Chinese concept of jiànjìn (漸進) , which translates to “gradual progress” or “step-by-step progression”.

But that’s still only 30 minutes a day. So how do we increase to 2 hours?

More Quantity, Same Quality

I always encourage students to use high-quality sessions, and that advice hasn’t changed. For beginners, it’s much, much easier to keep the quality high during a 15-minute session than during a 1-hour session. It’s easier to concentrate and focus for 15 minutes, whether it’s qigong or some other kind of work.

Keeping the quality high like this ensures that we are actually doing qigong and not just waving our arms gently in the air. In my school, this means entering into a meditative state, using qigong exercises as moving meditation, generating an energy flow, letting the qi flow freely, consolidating the qi at dantian, etc. We call all of this the 5-Phase Routine.

Once the quality is high, once you have a feel for it — then you can start to increase the quantity too. The trick is to progress gradually.

If you gradually increase the time of your practice sessions, you will be able to keep the quality high. It’s no different than gradually increasing the amount of weight that you are lifting. In this case, it’s your concentration that will get stronger rather than your muscles.

How to Gradually Increase

So here’s how it would look if you were to gradually increase your quantity. Let’s start with the original formula:

• Stage 1: 2 minutes once per day
• Stage 2: 15 minutes once per day (in the same time slot)
• Stage 3: 15 minutes once per day + 2 minutes once per day (in a new time slot)
• Stage 4: 15 minutes twice per day

Let’s assume that you’ve made it to stage 4 and you already have a morning and evening session. Now let’s just continue:

• Stage 5: 20 minutes in the morning + 15 minutes in the evening
• Stage 6: 20 minutes twice per day
• Stage 7: 30 minutes in the morning + 20 minutes in the evening
• Stage 8: 30 minutes twice per day

I encourage you to lengthen only 1 session at a time. This way, you can be sure that you’re keeping the quality high because you still have a shorter session to compare it to.

If you are in a rush because of a healing crisis like the student I mentioned above, then you can move more quickly through the stages. But I don’t recommend that you skip ahead.

40-Minutes 2x Per Day

Once you work up to about 40-minutes 2x per day (i.e. 1 hour and 20 minutes total), you will have some decisions to make. But first, congrats!The truth is that 40 minutes twice per day is incredibly powerful medicine if you stay consistent. Great work!

But some people might still need more. I have been one of those people myself. So if you want to get up to 2 hours per day, then you can do one of the following:

1. Add a 3rd session, using the gradual progress method from above.
2. Add a similar art, like yoga or tai chi
3. Add sitting meditation
4. Use walking meditation

Adding a 3rd, high-quality session can be hard for many people. If you can do it, more power to you. But if you can’t because of work or kids or both, then try one of the other options.

If all else fails, do 30 minutes of walking meditation each day. Walking is medicine on its own and it’s a perfect complement to qigong. You can make it even more healing by walking in nature, and by adding One Finger Zen.

If you have an existing yoga or tai chi practice, or if you want to dust one of these off, then great. Use that as your 3rd session. It can go immediately before or after one of your existing qigong sessions.

If you have an existing or rusty sitting meditation practice, then add that somewhere. This will greatly magnify the power of your 2 qigong sessions.

Of course, you can also gradually increase the duration of each qigong session until they are 1 hour each. But many students find it hard to keep the quality high for 1-hour sessions.

Example Routines

If you’re a student of mine, then you’re probably wondering — but how do we do a longer session? Below are some examples, with the rough number of minutes listed.

If you’re not a student of mine…then what are you waiting for? You can go learn the 5-Phase Routine for free here.

Example 1 (40 minutes)

• Entering Zen (2.5)
• 2 favorite qigong exercises (5)
• FBSW (5)
• 2 more favorites (5)
• FBSW (5)
• 2 more favorites (5)
• FBSW (5)
• Stillness (5)
• Closing (2.5)

Example 2 (40 Minutes)

• Entering Zen (2.5)
• Favorite dynamic qigong exercise #1 (3.3)
• Favorite dynamic qigong exercise #2 (3.3)
• Favorite dynamic qigong exercise #3 (3.3)
• FBSW (5)
• Hugging the Tree (10)
• FBSW (5)
• Stillness (5)
• Closing (2.5)

Example 3 (40 minutes)

• Entering Zen (2.5)
• Favorite dynamic qigong exercise #1 (2.5)
• Favorite dynamic qigong exercise #2 (2.5)
• FBSW (5)
• Favorite dynamic qigong exercise #3 (2.5)
• Favorite dynamic qigong exercise #4 (2.5)
• FBSW (5)
• 1% Forgiveness (5)
• FBSW or Five Animal Play (5)
• Stillness (5)
• Closing (2.5)

Example 4 (40 Minutes)

• Entering Zen (2.5)
• Favorite dynamic qigong exercise #1 (2)
• Favorite dynamic qigong exercise #2 (2)
• Favorite dynamic qigong exercise #3 (2)
• FBSW (3)
• Wuji Stance (2)
• Single-Leg Stance (2 minutes total, 1 minute each side)
• Bow-Arrow Stance (2 minutes total, 1 minute each side)
• Hugging the Tree (10)
• FBSW (5)
• Stillness (5)
• Closing (2.5)

These are just examples. And the times are just rough estimates. You don’t need to be timing this stuff down to the minute.

For my active students, if you’d like some longer guided meditations like this, let me know in the comments below. I’m busy with my book at the moment, but I can try to record some longer meditations if you think that they will be useful.

Summing Up

Qigong is enjoyable, makes us feel better immediately, and brings numerous benefits over time. And yet…it’s still hard to practice.

If you want to practice every day, whether that means 15 minutes per day or 2 hours per day, use the 2-Minute Method and gradual progress.

From the heart,
Sifu Anthony