… If I benefit You Benefit. With partnership training there should be cooperation and not tit for tat competition. When practicing Chi Sau and provoking a competition just to get a strike in, this becomes the only purpose followed. You will be focusing on exchanging strikes but not how to handle what can follow. Training colleagues may end up distancing themselves from you, as they feel that they cannot practice their skills, or once they have discovered your methodology you don’t interest them anymore; they find no benefit from training with you.

When sparring take the opportunity to discover and improve upon your weaknesses and let your opponent counter a technique to see how you can handle the response; they learn their counter and you will learn your counter. By extension you will begin to experiment to see what works and what doesn’t, correct yourself and your partner, and exchange ideas. You will improve dramatically this way.

Always remember that in partnership training remember you are both there to learn, it becomes a case of:

If You Benefit I Benefit, If I benefit You Benefit