The Beginners Guide to the Tai Chi Form (Tai Chi Learners Kit: Book & Online Course)

Great Course With One Big Caveat

I am a complete beginner to Tai Chi, so this course is my first exposure to any substantial teaching material on the subject. Everything about this Beginners Guide has been thoughtfully constructed and beautifully presented, from the structure of the course material itself to the very high production values involved in the design and printing of the book, the accompanying extra materials and the web portion of the course. My one Big Caveat is this: the videos have been edited in such a way as to maximise visual impact in an artsy pop-video kind of way, which sometimes acts to the detriment of the pedagogical intent. There's no problem when the content is purely informational - in fact these parts are superb - but for the ten videos that deal with teaching the ten Tai Chi postures/moves at the core of the course, the style gets right in the way of the actual teaching. In these videos sometimes there are two or three (?) Pauls at a time, all doing what looks (to a beginner) like different moves - not necessarily the one you are trying to learn - all shot from different angles, in different places, in some cases different L/R orientations and with the camera swooshing around excitingly, but disorientingly. It all looks great, but as a complete beginner I cannot easily make head nor tail of these even after repeated viewings. In some cases (looking at you, move 5) I have had to search for alternative demonstrations of a given posture from random You Tube Tai Chi teachers in order to even be able to being trying it myself. Arguably this is all intentional - like any course in anything, you need to put work in to get something out, but given the overall high quality of the course, it seems a shame that the demonstration videos at the core of the thing don't clearly demonstrate the postures. A simple fix would be to change nothing (these videos make great pop-video intros to each move) but add ten new videos, one per move, with no funny swooshing camera angles or funky editing, just Paul in front of a fixed camera demonstrating just that one move in the expected orientation. In sum, I would definitely recommend this course to any would be Tai Chi beginner, but with the awareness that as things stand, seeking out some extra external clarification on how to do some things might be necessary.

I like the Tai chi exercises within the app they are explained well and easy to follow, I paid for and downloaded the app for the Tai Chi component. I am not particularly interested in the menus and what I should poke down my throat part and won’t avail myself of the suggested recipes. So many of the apps contain this part of recipes which we should all apparently be consuming. I stress again the only part I require is the Tai Chi exercises

Nice books,