Having spent long enough experimenting during private lessons and in small group sessions, I want our current teaching programme to benefit from the latest scientific findings.
Due consideration must also be given to understanding what can actually be expected of the "partner forms with contact", formerly known as the "Chi-Sao sections", and what cannot.
Solo and partner forms are in part indispensable for the development of six (!) of the "big seven" preconditions: consciousness, flexibility, balance, body unity, to some extent even timing and amazingly enough fighting spirit. This means that they rightly occupy a major proportion of training time. In my view they are irreplaceable with regard to their contribution.

The misunderstanding under which even some masters have laboured worldwide takes its origin from the term "Chi-Sao sections" an expression which I may or may not even have invented myself in the 1970s. Of course, it is apt to the extent that contact ("Chi-Sao") is maintained all the time during these "sequences" which the two partners carry out in a choreographed manner.

At some time the mistaken impression gained currency even in instructor circles that these partner forms, during which contact is maintained in contrast to "Lat-Sao" (= arms free), are a suitable means of acquiring the tactile sensitivity required for close combat. And yet in his classic book "Wing Tsun Kuen" published in 1978, my Si-Fu Leung Ting already warned against training for combat like learning to tango with a partner.
Scales fell from my eyes when I finally realised what a misunderstanding so many had succumbed to. The damage a seemingly harmless word can do is amazing. Most of the Asian styles consist solely of solo and partner forms, but not least owing to our scientific studies, WingTsun has recognised that the tactile/kinaesthetic sense can be systematically developed by specially created, short exercises. I have meanwhile thought out these exercises, tested them with resounding success during my private lessons and continuously improved them, with the result that I am at last entirely satisfied with the programme.
These are pure WT movements derived from the principles, and most of them occur in the partner forms. The sequences are however not fixed, so that unlike in the partner forms it is necessary to take decisions. In fact the great tactile sensitivity developed by these special exercises takes the decisions of its own accord, which means we save precious time (bits).
The principle is to "break up the rings (that hold the partner forms together) into very small units", as Grandmaster Leung Ting once expressed, using forced decision-making processes that the tactile sense masters admirably on our behalf.

Let me remind you all that Grandmaster Leung Ting is visiting the EWTO again this year, in order to hold his popular tutorials on his own account during the Livorno seminar in Italy.

Keith R. Kernspecht