Originally Posted by
cjurakpt
chi sao, like push hands, is predicated on a certain degree of agreement between the participants, the most obvious being that they will begin in a certain range (and stay there) with a certain type of contact (and maintain it); like any "short range" exercise, it is valuable because it teaches you to keep your cool when someone is up in your face, and it increases reliance on proprioceptive awareness / decreases reliance on visual feedback, meaning that you don't "waste" time getting two different organ systems to agree on something (e.g. - how to manage an attack), cutting down neural processing and response time
having trained this, one then, naturally, has to back off and start from different ranges / at different levels of "contact" (e.g. - distant eye contact to wedged together in a crowded subway) and then try to apply that skill set in "live" situations;
BTW, this sort of skill can certainly be achieved in ways other than chi sao...