20/09/2026
A few enquiries this past week (3 in fact) about teacher training for becoming a Tai Chi / Qigong teacher - and how I would recommend becoming a teacher - this can be a tricky question to answer, as for me and many other Tai Chi teachers, the process of becoming a teacher was not straightforward or quick, or even intentional.
When I started in the late 90's, there were probably few if any teacher training courses in Tai Chi / Qigong - unlike the Yoga world, where these have existed for a long time and now are prevalent (it seems most yoga teachers offer teacher training now).
When I started Tai Chi, students would join a school (usually just one school) and the expectation was to train for a very long time with your teacher, or perhaps try a few different teachers and settle on one for at least a few years or a few decades. The idea that you enter this type of study to become a teacher would have seemed utterly ridiculous - similar to a white belt in Karate asking how to become a teacher.
Perhaps because of the culture of the fitness industry, yoga, pilates etc - or our general approach to education - there is an expectation now that you can train to teach Tai Chi & Qigong, without having ever been a student. Or that Tai Chi / Qigong is seen as a 'add on' gentle exercise for yoga teachers, fitness classes, the elderly etc.
Many of my best teachers had no formal 'teacher training' or certificates. For all it's faults, the Tai Chi world seems to retain (or it used to) some integrity around putting in at least a few years (or decades) as a student before even considering teaching.
I'd say 10 years is a reasonable minimum before becoming an independent teacher - personally, I trained for 18 years before I ran my own classes, and for the first 15 years had zero intention or interest in becoming a teacher. If the intention behind the study is to become teacher before being a student, the learning process is bound to be distorted, as well as having to be over simplified and constrained within a course structure.
In the 'old days' (I'm not even that old) there was also the expectation of having 'permission' to teach from your teacher - this could be problematic and caused a lot of issues - but the principle of being recognised for your effort by a teacher within a lineage, held more weight than a teacher training certificate - it was said that one master (TT Liang) would in fact give out certificates to students he wanted rid of. I also once heard the term 'headless chickens' in reference to teachers who had gone off to teach without permission. I am somewhat ambivalent about this tradition, as it can end up being cliquey, elistist, hierarchical, patriarchal etc - certainly in my first decade or so training, I was not in with any cliques and wasn't encouraged to teach (I did eventually get permission to teach from 5 of my teachers).
If the teacher training process is 'transactional', commerical, customer focussed and profit driven - pay the money, get the certificate - the element of genuine community and mutual support is potentially absent - and the integrity and depth of the art is diluted for easy modular distribution via a branded, franchised pyramid scheme.
As one of my teachers noted, from his experience in asia, the teaching is offered freely and the money is offered to support the teacher. The long term senior students or disciples of a master would become the next generation of teachers, in some cases this may have been forced upon them, being asked to move half way around the world.
The traditional approach is not without it problems - and of course, you can now become a Tai Chi Qigong teacher via an online course. And maybe that's all ok. It's just a different thing, and unlikely to offer the same depth.
