About Tactile Training in Goju-Karate

I recently received an enquiry about "Chi-Sao in Karate". Perhaps my answer may be of some interest to you too.

1st question:
"Is Chi-Sao not a WingTsun invention after all? I always thought it was only practiced in WT. And yet the Goju Karate style also has pushing hands known as "Kakie".
2nd question:
"When you are doing Chi-Sao demonstrations in the EWTO, why do you always makes everything so confusing that nobody understands it? At WC demonstrations you at least see a few techniques as well."

My answers:
Question 1:
"Chi-Sao" (sticking arms) is the name given to "sensitivity" or "contact flow" training in Chinese WingTsun Kung-Fu (Ving Tsun, Wing Chun).Most of the other "internal" Chinese styles (e.g. Tai-Chi, Hsing-I, Pakua etc.) have some kind of "tactile training" under another name and in a different form. In my personal view, some form of tactile/kinaesthetic training is no less than indispensable for internal styles (as I understand them), as it is only in this way that complexity can be reduced and timing defined and practiced as a function of the inter-relationship between the limbs in space and time.While Japanese Goju-Ryu Karate is not necessarily an internal style, I think it has obvious "internal aspects" and is the Karate style that comes closest to its Chinese roots. I studied Kempo and Karate myself for over 15 years from 1959 to 1974 (Shotokan, Wado and also Goju) and hold it in high regard, particularly because of its great body work! I became acquainted with the tactile training "Kakie" in England under the name "Rubbing Arms", and this description is very apt if one e.g. watches the very nice video of Higaonna Sensei and his son. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=armFVxujWjc&feature=related)
Some of my best students – one now has his 6th Master Level in WingTsun – came to me as holders of high Goju Dan grades, with the express permission of their generous-minded Japanese master, in order to learn more about this aspect. Even though it has – unfortunately – only now become public knowledge that the Goju style at least has some rudimentary form of tactile/kinaesthetic training (= Rubbing Arms), this by no means implies that it has been in possession of this method for longer than the much, much older Kung-Fu. As is well-known, Karate came via Okinawa and takes it origins from Chinese Kung-Fu.

Question 2:
Learning Chi-Sao from videos on a DIY basis is unfortunately quite impossible. Accordingly I have always refrained from pretending this is not the case in the past, even though it might well be lucrative from a commercial point of view. Hundreds or, in my case, thousands of hours under the guidance of a skilled teacher are necessary to learn to "feel" to the extent that the tactile sense makes all our decisions for us, without involving the distractive effects of the conscious mind.Anybody looking for visible "techniques" is still prone to erroneous wishful thinking: he wants to find safety and order in prearranged ("dead") arm and leg movements in the "chaos of a fight". He expects "clean" individual attacks that have a beginning and an end, attacks that suit the responses he has learned and assimilated by heart. As if an attacker whaling into him with a flurry of hardly recognisable punches will suit his attack to the defences his would-be victim has learned…In WT – as in the other "internal" styles - we therefore do not practice memorised, prefabricated techniques, but rather the psycho-physical principles of anteperception, adaptation, manipulation, separation and elimination.If you wish to learn more about this at some time in the future, I would be pleased to help.

Yours sincerely,
Keith R. Kernspecht
10th Master Level Leung Ting WT
3rd Dan Karate

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