Wing Chun Starting Chi Sau

Starting Chi Sau
Once a student starts understanding the Wing Chun’s basics, he can commence working his practice of Chi Sau. Dan Chi, or  the single sticky hands exercise will develop the proper sense of sticking and reacting on an incoming force. Dan Chi is greatly underistimated and people tend to find it boring usually opting to jumping ahead and moving onto poon sao or double arm chi sao excercises. WRONG! This exercise is fundamental and the focus should be on the proper positioning of the few hand techniques. Again as I say in many articles, without proper positioning and structure, you get nowhere fast.

Moving on the fun begins with the “double hands” Chi Sau. Once this basic rolling motion and it’s implications are well understood, practitioners are free to attack at will the instant they feel a hole or weakness in the training partner’s defensive structure. Timing and a sense of opportunity will gradually emerge from good practice but be aware of some common mistakes. Remember that one of the main objectives is to create and improve sensibility, reaction time, and improved combat reflexes.

Many people use too much force in Chi Sau. They try to force the attack without having first defeated the training partner’s defense. Chi Sao is not about domination.  All attacks should be the result of a clear line to the target. Although Chi Sao can be fun it must work to improve overall reflexes specifically used for effective combat. One other important detail is distance. The proper distance should always allow you to punch trough your opponent. What does this mean? A good punch can be delivered in where you have to step in and attack therefore making the chisao reactions more complicated to penetrate, which is a good thing for your training. Or, you could practice at a very close range in whereby just extending the arm can create contact immediately without stepping. There are many opinions about which is better but personally I like to practice both.  


As time goes by and you have mastered the basics of Poon Sao, Wing Chun offers applications and attack sequences which marries to the philosophy and structure of Wing Chun. Once they are learnt then they must be trained to second nature giving it no thought as thoughts can be a major brake in our progress.