Wing Chun Sydney, Australia

Wing Chun is in danger of becoming a dinosaur or worse yet a religion.

This is a reposting of something from 2021, I think it is well worth revisiting.

Who did what, where, when and why?

Back in the mid-1850s, Leung Jan of Foshan {the creator of Wing Chun} was a doctor, herbalist and bonesetter working with the Red Boat Opera Troupe in Guangdong Province.

From his experiences with the Martial Arts actors of the Red Boat Troupe, he formulated a new Martial System that he called Wing Chun.

As a bonesetter, he would have been conscious of anatomically correct movement, and of course, would have avoided any of the injury-causing movements that he would have been treating the Red Boats Martial Artists for.

If we relate his situation/position then to what occurs today he would have been akin to a modern-day Physical Therapist working through a CrossFit Gym.

Perhaps along the lines of T.R.S’s Kelly Starret or Smashwerx’s Trevor Bachmeyer.

He was coming from a position of avoiding injury but more importantly doing things better than before.

Fast forwards to 1950, Hong Kong, Ip Man opens a school that would ultimately bring Wing Chun to the world.

It is doubtful that Ip Mans Wing Chun was remotely similar to Leung Jan’s, his knowledge came from a variety of sources and from the outset his ideas reflected the living experiences he had as an undercover policeman and intelligence officer.

Dark alleys, multiple attackers.

It is well documented that Ip Man deliberately removed many of the traditional Chinese elements from his Wing Chun, such as the Bagua and 5 elements, to appeal to the more modern thinking young people of post-civil-war Hong Kong.

Three times Ip Man changed the presentation and content of his Wing Chun to the point that when his sons joined him in Hong Kong in the early 1960s they did not recognise the art he was teaching compared to the art he taught them in Foshan.

Ip Man was feeling the pulse of the times and quite possibly created a new Martial Art.

Just like Dr Jan of Foshan, he was coming from a position of doing things better than before.

Two of Ip Mans more famous students, Wong Shun Leung and Chu Shong Tin, went on to make severe departures to what Ip Man had taught them, interestingly their changes were in contrary directions to each other.

Their reason for the change was more an update than a reinvention, they were coming from the same position of doing things better than before.

Ip man passed in 1972, Wong Shun Leung passed in 1997, Chu Shong Tin passed in 2014.

If we look around the Wing Chun world, everyone is ideologically stuck in the late 20th century Hong Kong.

Wing Chun is in danger of becoming a dinosaur or worse yet a religion.

Surely it is time for someone to be coming from a position of doing things better than before.

The old torches have long since burnt out.

WHEN YOU UNDERSTAND, THINGS ARE JUST THE WAY THEY ARE.

WHEN YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND, THINGS ARE JUST THE WAY THEY ARE.

Doing any Form is a kind of dancing, without a goal it is pointless, when we know what we are looking for we will instinctively find it in any Form, in every Form.

It was 17 years ago this month that my Sifu shuffled off to the great Kwoon in the sky, a great loss of a great man.

He is missed.

Something he would often ask me as I was standing doing the S.L.T. Form was “What are your Ankles doing at this moment”?

At first this really baffled me but after many conversations it became clear that he was reminding me not to be in any one part of my body at any one time, but to aim to be in all of my body all of the time.

This of course is an aspect of the “IDEA”, and a component of Sil Lim Tao training.

A trap I would fall into when he asked me this was to change my focus to my Ankles and as such be making the same error.

Since his passing, and the creation of my own school, this is something I try to pass on to you guys, and, just like my Sifu with me, I have no easy answers for you, no shortcuts or hints.

Only the FORM.

But do you know how to use the Form to improve capability?

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the poet, the author of The Little Prince, a hero fighter pilot who perished in World War II had this to say to us.

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks or to do work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

Doing any Form is a kind of dancing, without a goal it is pointless, when we know what we are looking for we will instinctively find it in any Form, in every Form.

Do not waste your time and effort building ships, instead, yearn for the open sea, our incredible brain will then set about building ships.

In the video with this post may be difficult to see the point of what we are doing, after all effortless power is easy so it does not clearly show up, with this in mind watch how little everybody is effected when they do stuff.

Effortless power is achieved by transferring as much of our body mass/kinetic force as possible into the target, any kind of recoil effect that results from an action is a sharing of that body mass/kinetic force, no recoil is a sign that all of the body mass/kinetic force was transferred into the target.

Moving at speed increases momentum that in turn increases the force applied, moving slowly is simply the first of many baselines that can be scaled up.

The first baseline, i.e.moving slowly, if performed correctly will transfer the static body weight of the person punching, all of these guys are over 80kg, so these slow punches are the equivalent of being hit with 4 bags of concrete.

“A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment we contemplate it bearing within us the image of a Cathedral”.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The closest we come to controlling any action our body makes is in formulating the intention.

More old man stuff.

Concepts are abstract thoughts, as such they can, and do, mean very different things to different people, everything depends on how well we can navigate abstract thoughts.

The crux of this problem lies with intention.

If, for instance, I ask someone to move a knee, in general terms most people will move their hip to raise their leg so that their knee moves, and they believe that they have a measure of success in the objective.

But I did not ask them to move their hip, I asked them to move their knee.

Biomechanically it is not possible to move our knee without moving the hip so that can confuse people that are not very mentally adroit.

I am pretty sure that if we had a sensitive enough scanner we would find that we do in fact move everything when we try to move just our knee, so how do we understand this.

There exists a fundamental difference between what we think we are doing, about to do or have already done from what our Brain instructed our body to do.

We begin with a thought, in this case raise our knee, this becomes an intention which our brain turns into a chemical signal that instructs a myriad of body systems to do individual, unconnected actions that culminate in the raising off the knee.

The closest we come to controlling any action our body makes is  in formulating the intention.

Everything after that is not us, it is not under our control, it is as if we are governed by an outside operator, which is what our nervous system is.

I have experienced students that get embarrassed ,even angry, at the idea that they are not in control of their own bodies, which in no way helps them to understand the complexity of even the most simple actions.

If we can reach a level of acceptance that we are not in control it becomes clear that the best we can do is to send accurate thoughts to our brain and hope it does what we want.

If I am vague and my intention is to finish with a raised knee my Brain – Nervous System – Body team will do what ever gets the job done, and it may be done in a different way every time.

Raising my knee requires that I also understand what I do not want to do, like rotate my hip, or lift my foot, both of these actions will raise my knee.

This is truly weird stuff at first, but once we get it we see that it is not weird, or difficult or anything except being mentally deliberate and thinking clearly.

We all experience situations that frustrate us in training, we may even get a bit precious, but out of nowhere we do the thing as asked, almost without thinking and then we cannot understand how we did not see it in the first place.

This has happened to me many times and not just in Wing Chun, do not get me started about Golf.

If we stick with moving the knee, it is not enough for me to think about just moving the knee, I must actively be involved in bringing in other actions, my Brain – Nervous System – Body team take care of that even if I do not want them to.

Mentally paint a green dot on your knee and in your intention only move that.

Some things move, and some things get moved, understand which is which.

A final observation that I frequently remind you guys of is that what we do in training is only of any use at all in training, this is another somewhat abstract thought.

We all know that if we get in trouble we will do something inspired or influenced buy our training, because we will never be in the exact same place doing the exact same thing.

What we do out in the wild will be different.

In the same vein as “How long is a piece of string”?

How different does an action need to be before it becomes a different action?

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

The vision in the following video came from 2 separate training instances, There was so much more than what I have shown, so much great stuff but length wise the video would have done Scorcesi proud.

If we work on this stuff it will give us everything we need, and do it in just a couple of years not some decade down the road.

Courage, above all things, is the first quality of a warrior.

HI GUY’S.

This post is mostly for Saleh, Rick, and Kunal, but it is still important for you guys who have been with me for years.

Read it and if there is anything that needs further explanation bring it in with you and we will devote the evening to it.

Stay frosty.

In a live performance, theory counts for shit!

At training last Friday Saleh and Rick initiated a conversation about the dynamics of violence.

It was an intelligent and insightful conversation, and Salah asked if I would do a post on the subject so that he could refer to it when needed.

This conversation is not as simple as we may wish because Violence is a complex and ever-changing environment that unfortunately never has just one answer.

Especially as most situations can be as good as decided before the fists fly, and the most important and defining factors have nothing to do with the style of Martial Art we practice, at least not directly.

But to begin with I wish to address an old chestnut.

“Does Wing Chun, or any Martial Art, work in a Street Fight’?

This is a silly question ‘put out there’ to create mayhem amongst ‘Keyboard Warriors’.

We may as well ask…

“Does the Pentatonic Scale, or Arpeggios, or even Guitar licks work in a RockConcert”?

Forms = Scales.

Arpeggios = Chi Sau.

Killer Riffs = Techniques.

To prevent the Internet from exploding let’s choose to answer this way…

“IT DEPENDS”!!

There is little doubt that someone banging out a tune on a guitar who has deep knowledge of Scales, and arpeggios and knows a hat full of killer riffs will create far more interesting music than someone without this knowledge.

But in a one-off 10-second burst it could be close, and that is the point.

If two guys picked up a guitar at a party, I would put my money on the trained musician to be better, just as if an argument broke out I would put my money on the trained martial artist to do better.

But it is not a sure bet.

In a live performance, theory counts for shit!

Let me try to explain why.

No two ‘Violent Encounters’ are ever the same, I think we all know this, so it calls into question the wisdom of learning any system as an answer.

As I have said many times, I do not regard Wing Chun as a fighting system, but as a method of organisation that once understood just happens to help us perform optimally in violent situations.

But it requires that we have some level of control over our own emotions, thinking and movement.

There is much more to come in this direction, ask me about it.

MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS.

That bloke from FaceBook.

what on earth were we doing last year?

Hey guys.

The first video of 2024, and the question is how do we get what we think we got.

This is a very important topic, and not just for our Wing Chun, if you can do some research of your own.

Every new year our training should involve a new approach, if we need to cover old ground again, in the same way, what on earth were we doing last year?

But the IDEA remains the same, constant, fundamental.

We can only get so far by training in purely physical expressions of Wing Chun, no matter what those physical expressions are, techniques, Chi Sau, and even Forms.

Physical work will allow us to know how to make these movements, but only the thinking that created them can lead us to advanced understanding.

There is only one Wing Chun, one way of accessing the Wing Chun IDEA.

Furthermore, there really is no right way / wrong way to do things.

Let me clarify this a bit, when training if we are involved in a specific exercise, then yes, there is a right/wrong way for that specific training IDEA, but this is not, as may be thought, about correctness, it is about consistency.

If we are doing an exercise differently on each pass-through, even if it is only by the smallest amount, as far as our Brain is concerned we are doing different exercises, and this will have a negative flow-on to how we remember this IDEA, and to be expected a negative flow-on to how we retrieve that memory, in particular when we remember the IDEA intending to use the skill.

So it is only right/wrong in the context of that specific exercise, and at that particular time, and not in the wider IDEA of how we would use our skill set.

As I have mentioned many times, we will never use the things we do in training out in the wild, we will always need to refine/adjust/adapt them to the situation, so the important thing is to lay down a consistent ‘Default Base Idea’.

This ‘Default Base Idea’ is of course where the term ‘Basics” comes from.

Any physical exercise/action in Wing Chun is always just a way for us to explore the fundamental IDEA behind that action.

The chosen method of approaching and exploring the IDEA can vary in the extreme, with every Instructor and every School free to do this in any way that they feel comfortable with.

But the IDEA remains the same, constant, fundamental.

Once we understand this we can learn from any Instructor, even when their physical or external approach looks completely different to our own.

It allows us to participate in another school’s exercises and approaches without clashing with our own approach.

Which has the potential to end the constant bickering around the opinion that  “My school or sifu is better than your school or sifu”

There is only one Wing Chun.

We are all individuals with different levels of understanding and different life experiences, and this difference is multiplied over generations, so some approaches will be easier to access for us than others, but the IDEA is the same.

What is even more remarkable is that not only can we train in different approaches to Wing Chun and still train the same fundamentals, but once our knowledge is deep enough we can train in a totally different martial art and still explore the fundamental aspects of Wing Chun.

This becomes abundantly clear once we focus on the similarities between various methods instead of the differences that they all most certainly have.

Many basic Western Boxing Footwork drills, if slowed down enough and looked at as a collection of single moves, as we do with our FORMS, are almost identical to how we play the Baat Cham Dao Form, and many Muay Thai techniques again slowed down, reflect Biu Gee to an uncanny extent.

There is, and always was, going all the way back to Dr Leung Jan, only one IDEA of Wing Chun.

And no matter how differently we all do it…

…we all do it.

THE “D” MAN.

In fact, it is because what we are training will never be used that we need to be even better at it.

Some students embrace it while other students try to not even think about it, but we cannot escape the fact that what we do in training will never be used out in the wild.

All types of training, in every style, will always need to be creatively adapted to suit the situation we find ourselves in when the ‘Brown And Sticky Gets Airborne’, this really should be a great big “DUH”, or ‘Facepalm’ moment.

Accepting that nothing we do will ever be used can be remarkably liberating.

I have always found this a positive way of thinking, it allows me, in fact almost forces me, to think deeply about what the training is showing, it encourages me to work on the shapes and movement in different sizes, different directions, in particular doing things in reverse, yes, do the whole move, or even Form backward.

And I do not get distracted by thoughts of ‘Will this shit fly”?

I know from the very beginning that it will not fly, unless of course I can find a way to make it fly, and the more I know about any movement, shape, or even IDEA the higher the chance I can make it operational.

But this does not mean that we can be in any way ‘half-assed’ about our training, especially solo training, where there is no one to correct or motivate us.

In fact, it is because what we are training will never be used that we need to be even better at it.

If we are looking at adapting something we know the more accurate, more internalised, and most importantly the closer to perfect the movement or IDEA is then the better will be the adaptation. 

This situation is like what we find with a computer, G.I.G.O. which as we know stands for “Garbage in, garbage out”.

If we can reach a position where we fully accept that training is just training, we begin to, almost surreptitiously, accelerate the work of suppressing the ego, which is a far more valuable asset than any technique could ever be.

If the work we are doing is never going to be used for real, then why are we doing it and what is the value?

Very often the learning objective is not obvious, the real gold needs to be dug up.

We can use an aspect of the stance to illustrate this really well.

Wether we are using the YEE GEE KIM YEUNG MA, the basic Wing Chun Stance, or we are using the BO MA, which is the Horse Stance from the Pole and the Knives, both of them share the action of rotating the leg, albeit in opposite directions.

The Y.C.K.Y.Ma uses adduction, it turns the leg inwards toward the centre, while the Bo Ma uses abduction, it turns the leg outwards away from the centre.

Both actions create TORSION, and torsion improves stability of the joints, which inhibits loss of power transmission.

The ‘IDEA’ of  TORSION can be used in any shape and is naturally present in many of our fundamental movements, such as Taan Sau, and Bong Sau, both of which create a small amount of torsion in the forearm and upper arm bringing healthy stability to shoulder and elbow joint, both extremely important aspects of structure and power transmission.

Once we see this, and make the connection, we instinctively become more confident about this action. Confidence reduces stress, reduced stress helps us relax, and increased relaxation just makes stuff work better.

This is a cycle of improvement that happens if we are aware of it or not.

Frequently what we think we are training is not the “nugget” that we will get the best value from, just like the role of rotation, which we tend to think is just an aspect of the methodology.

I think we all understand that any adaptations we make to our training, at the moment of using it, when it is go time, will pretty much be a background task carried out by our ‘Mind-Intention Matrix’ and not a deliberate, conscious decision.

The wider the selection of accurate, correct movements that are available the more chance the ‘Man inside” has of creating something amazing.

What our ‘Mind-Intention Matrix’ chooses to adapt and use will always be beyond our control, so filling our ‘Long Term Memory’ with anything other than optimal information could seriously backfire when it picks something that is just no good because we did not train it properly.

If we think of all the potential benefits that we can get from accepting that training is just training and has F.A. to do with violence, even if just for a minute, then we must factor in all of the opposite, negative things that can come from thinking that what we train is what we will use.

I have personal experience of hitting someone with what I thought was my best shot and seeing him just blink.

I think that hurt me more than the smack in the head that he delivered.

I wouldn’t tell you if it wasn’t true..