If you have been training for a few years and have hit a plateau, you might ask yourself “how do I improve my chi sao?”. I recently asked myself the same question when 4 young, enthusiastic, athletic, and talented students caught up to me in chi sao despite the fact that I started 2 years before any of them.
Chi sao can be practiced at different speeds, slow, medium, fast, or explosive. At slow speeds you can concentrate on hand positioning and economy of motion. At medium speeds you can pick say 3 techniques and using a non-competitive flowing style build up a large number of repetitions of these techniques with your partner. The reason for this exercise is that the techniques will become so ingrained that you can actually use them under pressure. At fast speed chi sao is practiced at a speed that is equal to real fighting and hence is practical.
You train at explosive speed in order to increase the top speed of your attacks. Alth0ugh a real fight is fast, not all movements in a real fight are at top speed. Surprisingly, research has shown that the fastest techniques of lightweight fighters are often no faster than the fastest techniques of heavyweight fighters. The difference is that the lightweights’ average speed is higher. So explosive chi sao is a very specialized training to push your speed beyond anything you thought was possible.
Another excellent exercise is to do chi sao where 1 partner attacks and the other partner only defends. When you just defend of necessity you stick super close . I was practicing this with a pretty good junior student who had been training about 2 years or so, and he was unable to hit me at all- but if I wanted to I could have hit him practically any time. This is what Wing Chun is all about- you can hit him but he can’t hit you. Being a brawler is incompatible with the Wing Chun concept. If you want to take it one step further defend while blindfolded. Blindfold chi sao helps with stick because without stick you “are blind”.
