I think what you are saying is quite right. The effectiveness of "hand pushing" is much depend on the level of proficiency in bais form exercises.
The 83式 your referred to is normally called "Old Structure One", it's impressive indeed your father had been practising that for so long, good for him.
I quite agree with you on the "少林3年打死人,太极十年不出门。"
There is another saying specially for Chen style - " Three years a small gain, Nine years a big step". Practitioners of Chen style Taichi indeed are required with tremendous amount of patience and dedication. However, I need to point out that the number of years of practice does not necessarily linearly correlate to the level of proficiency. I remember Grand Master Chen Zheng Lai once told me that three times of casual practice of the "Old form" can't campare with even one time dedicated practice.
The "Pushing hand" is a way of gaining combat experience from friendly engage. It's designed to be used in parallel with basic form practices, strength excercises, and weaponery trainings. Because it could be used as a "Checking" mechanism to reflect correctiveness of form exercises. Thus, all exercises are mutually enhansive.
I guess what I want to say is that you have to be good at basic form and strength exercises to perform well in Pushing Hand, but you don't have to exercise Pushing Hand only after perfected other exercise. But, it's true that one have to reach certain level of proficiency in form exercise before start doing "Pushing hand".
For that matter, I have been a Chen style practioner for merely insignificant 4 years, which is only the very first step toward the unlimited possibility. I am simply asking for people who are interested or even enjoy some Taichi to get togather, talk to each other about their experiences, and exercise togather. Ideally, I want to find someone that I can start my exercise in "Pushing Hand". I have NO INTENSION to be ignorant or cocky, just trying to find friends with same interests.
Sorry for the typing, my PC was infected with some Spy software which made my PC unable to operate properly, so I have to use PCs in the Lab. [em13]
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