Wing Chun Sydney, Australia

HOW DIFFERENT DOES SOMETHING NEED TO BE BEFORE IT BECOMES SOMETHING ELSE?

Whenever there is a shooting in the U.S.A., the gun lobby invariably comes out and tells us that “Guns do not kill people, people with Guns kill people”.  The implication being that the gun is just a tool.

As annoying, self-serving and banal as this statement is, there is a certain correctness to it, and as such, we are forced to consider that Kung Fu does not save the day; it is people using Kung Fu that save the day, just as the Gun is a tool, so is our Kung Fu.

Let’s be honest, nothing we do in training is what anyone would use in genuine trouble. Everything needs to be adjusted to fit the situation, which means we will be doing something similar and based upon our training, but essentially not the same; it will be different.

How different does something need to be before it becomes something else?

Before it becomes something we have not learnt?

How long is a piece of string?

So why does any training work?

Why does it improve our chances of a good outcome? Which it does.

What are we really doing when we think we are doing Kung Fu? What are we trying to Master?

This is going to sound like a bit of a Homer moment, but it is our old friend…

… CONTROL.

But what are we trying to CONTROL?

Let’s have a thought experiment.

Imagine a “BAD GUY” attacking you, picture it, feel it, make it real; it could be something from a lived experience, a movie, or even a fantasy Jason Statham moment.

This IS a thought experiment, so things do not need to make perfect sense.

The “BAD GUY” moves, we flash forward, poke him in the eye and knock him to the floor.  Game over, we win.

O.K. Perhaps you do not buy that one, how about…

The “BAD GUY” moves, we flash forward, initiate a Tekken or Mortal Kombat-style, 7 punch, 5 kick combo.  Game over, we win.

Still not happy? A bit O.T.T? How about…

The “BAD GUY” moves, we flash forward, Pak Sau and punch, latch and strike, hook kick, followed with an Elbow finisher.  Game over, we win.

Most people will take this.

The first option was too simple, the second too complex, but the third was just right – the GodlyLocks choice. A big plus is that we can work on this in training.

But they all have the same chance of failing; they are the same piece of string, just different lengths.

Another piece of string is when we start at Sil Lim Tao, progress to Chi Sau, onto the Dummy, then Sparring and ultimately into a real, “Violent Situation”.

What are we doing here? What are we trying to learn? What are we trying to control?

For the first few weeks of this year, we will be looking at the work from this perspective, pretty much the same practice, just a different connection.

Onwards and upwards, 2026 begins on Thursday.

That is the problem right there, in the “Not Knowing Zone”, there is no thinking going on.

Due to the extreme heat wave that we are currently experiencing here in OZ, we do not start 2026 training until the 14th, so here is a bit more Head Food.

The purpose of all posts is to change how we think about our training, because at the end of the day it is UNDERSTANDING that gives the “GREAT LEAP FORWARD” much more so than practice.

I finished the last post with the message that “all training is task specific”.

This means we only learn what we are doing, essentially,  if we are learning to swim, it does not teach us how to ride a bike, but in saying that, neither are optimal actions if we are falling out of a tree.

If, as I assure you it is, all training is task-specific, what TASK are we trying to complete?

With regards to the whole “training kicking in” scenario, what training do we want to kick in, and what comes next once it has kicked in?

This is where things slip into the “Twilight Zone”, if some aspect of our training “Kicks In” by definition it will not be a conscious choice, we will not have any knowledge of what action was chosen and as such we can have no IDEA about how to follow it up.

We are in the swimming, riding, or falling out of a tree zone, the “Not Knowing Zone”.

I have had this conversation with many students over the years so I know that someone will be thinking, “I will automatically choose an appropriate action”.

That is the problem right there, in the “Not Knowing Zone” there is no thinking going on.

Do we really understand what is happening when we find ourselves in the “Not Knowing Zone” 

The ONLY reason we would need our training to “Kick In” is by being surprised.

If we are awake and aware of what is going on, we would consciously choose an appropriate response and not be standing there with our thumb in our mouth, hoping our reflexes will save the day.

The “Not Knowing Zone” is a brief window of time, just an instant, we are pretty much not present, vacant, A.F.K. and our attacker is making any move they wish unhindered.

Something I can affirm from personal lived experience is that if our opponent lands a decent strike while we are A.F.K.  There is no coming back from it.

Instinctively, we know this to be true, hence the dream of the “Automatic Pilot”.

Falling out of a tree trying to swim on a bike.

FEAR MANAGEMENT OR DANGER MANAGEMENT

Back in the day, the most respected martial arts influencer and competitor in the U.K. was Geoff Thompson, who once opined that…

Boxers (or any combat Athlete) train to manage danger, while Traditional Martial Artists train to manage fear.

Do not be intimidated by the descriptors, and above all, do not try to pretend that somehow you are different.

When a Boxer trains to deal with a Jab or a Hook, when a Muay Thai player trains to deal with a Head Kick or a Clinch, when Judokas train to deal with throws or when Ju Jitsu players train to deal with Takedowns, this is danger management because not only do they know that these things will definitely be thrown at them they usually know where and when and by whom because fights are arranged weeks if not months in advance.

 The “Bad Guy” is a REAL person, but that person will be restricted to using a limited variety of well-known attacks set out by the rules of the sport.

Being physically and mentally in optimal condition is every bit as important as fighting skill. An average fighter in optimal condition will often beat a great fighter who is out of condition.

Traditional Martial Artists, which is anyone of any style that does not engage in competition, are training to deal with what?

We do not know what will happen, when it will happen, or who will be doing it, let alone what type of attacks we will be facing.  Our BAD GUY only exists in our imagination; they are a phantom that most of us will never meet. But this phantom is not limited in its attack choices; if it can be done, we must prepare for it, every technique of every style and any combinations of new creations.

There is a very good reason to be fearful of this situation.

Can we be honest with ourselves? Can we identify the real danger, and how do we deal with this newly identified problem?  

Solving the problem we identify is the Specific Task we wish to complete, and is what our training needs to be oriented toward, so that if some aspect of the work does “Kick In” it helps us resolve the situation.

Something else I know from my own lived experience is that Competition Fights are way more complex and demanding than most students think, while Street Violence is way more straightforward and easy to handle than most students think.

Finally, when you watch any YouTube video, ask yourself what Specific Task they are trying to accomplish?

If there is no single, Task-Specific action to a genuine act of violence being shown, then they are just playing and not training, because…

…” ALL TRAINING IS TASK SPECIFIC”.

Think on these IDEAS, and we can expand on them once we are all together.

We only need to “Think outside of the box” when the content of the box fails,

Hi guys.

We are back at it again as of this Thursday, so here is something to think about to get the juices flowing.

A continuation of the question , “Are we playing or are we training”?

First up a couple of seed thoughts to stick in a corner of your head and allow to grow.

#1. When we do not remember something, for that moment in time we do not know it”

#2. All training is task-specific.

When we find ourselves forgetting something, it is the same thing as not being able to find a file on our computer; we know it is there somewhere, but no keyword in the search bar brings results.

This is what I was getting at in the last post when I was bringing up “Information Theory”.

How we organise incoming information, “Colation”, and how we store that information, “Memorise”, determines how we recall the information “Remember”.

It is overlooked how important memory is to our training; in fact, it is taken for granted.

Do we understand how memory operates?

When I first researched this topic, it completely changed how I approached all of my training, and instantly improved it out of sight.

Short-term memory is where we hold working information at the time we are doing it. It only holds a very small amount of information, calculated as being as little as 7 items, and then it is shunted away to long-term memory for storage and later retrieval.

How does this impact “playing over training”?

The difference is how we remember the event we were involved in.

When we describe a hectic sparring session to a friend, we will describe it along the lines of it as being hectic, we were all bouncing off the wall, fists and feet flying everywhere, it was insane fun.

This is us remembering a feeling.

However, if we explain to a classmate who missed a session what we did, we talk about specific movements, we talk about applications of the technique, and we talk about physical drills that repeat these techniques.

As a basic yardstick, when we play, we remember the feelings we had while playing, and when we are training, we remember the specifics of the lesson.

If we are hoping for something from our long-term memory, “Kicking in” while we are deep in a shit storm, which one of these memories gives us the best chance of survival?

Playing is important and teaches valuable lessons, but the lesson it teaches is not what people think.

Training is order, training is process, training is repetition, training is setting boundaries, “Thinking and working inside of the Box”.

Playing is everything that training is not; it is chaos, playing is making things up on the run, being creative, everything is original and never repeated, total “thinking outside of the Box”.

We only need to “Think outside of the box” when the content of the box fails, and the real value of thinking outside of the box is not the content of the thinking; it is the freedom from being trapped in the box, the ability to re-orient once the box fails.

But first we need the box.

Data Retrieval: If we buy into the whole ‘our training will kick in’, we expect this to just happen.

This is a thought exercise to lead us into the new year. We have been working towards this end for some time, so it should ring a bell or two.

Every Martial Artist hopes that in a time of extreme stress, our nervous system will choose, without any conscious intervention on our part, to use a certain set of movements that we are familiar with over other different sets of movements, some of which we may be even more familiar with.

This is the whole “our training will kick in” ethos.

Empirically, there are some very mixed results; for some people, this is what happens: “our training will kick in”, while for others it does not.

If we hope to be part of the first group, which I am sure we all do, we need to understand why the situation exists in the first place.

Bear with me while I make a slight detour, I promise this is not as nerdy as it may at first sound.

Something that changed my way of looking at life in general was when at school, I  found out about ‘Information Theory’,  described in 1948 by Claude Shannon in a paper entitled A Mathematical Theory of Communication, in which information is thought of as a set of possible messages, and the goal is to send these messages over a noisy channel, and to have the receiver reconstruct the message with low probability of error.

This is not just about maths or computers; it has influenced everyday thinking in all experiences on all levels and can be crystallised in the meme term ‘signal-to-noise ratio’

The stronger the signal, the weaker the noise, the clearer the signal.

Think about this, we research by reading, but not all reading is research. Why not? . The action is the same.

When we are researching, by reading, we consciously try to turn down the outside noise, to somewhat insulate ourselves from distractions; in that way, we make the signal stronger, clearer, easier to hear.

Or as Shannon put it “the goal is to send these messages over a noisy channel, and to have the receiver reconstruct the message with low probability of error”.

The question becomes, is our training research, or are we just reading?

Are we training, or are we playing? The action is the same.

There are movement sets and actions from our working life that we know far more intimately and perform many times more often than our Kung Fu movement sets, yet we expect our subconscious to choose these less familiar sets when we are in trouble. How does that work? Because for some people, it does work, 

Sitting in the shadow of ‘Information Theory’ we can clearly see the progression as …

Data Collection..

Data Collation..

Data Storage..

Data Retrieval..

And as in all shadows, it is far from clearly visible.

Data collection; This is the same if we are training or playing, it is just us doing stuff, any stuff, Kung Fu, Gardening, or Work, essentially Raw Data.

Data Collation: This is the big step. The organising and structuring of the Raw Data from various sources into a coherent, usable dataset. This is where we put files into folders. This is when we separate Kung Fu Data from all other sources and create a dedicated file.

Data Storage:  This is the vital step; this is where we organise our many, many files and folders into Groups. Some files are needed in multiple folders, and some folders are needed in multiple groups. The movement we know as Tarn Sau is the same as paying for a pie, the same movement as putting our hand out to catch a ball, the same movement as showing our hands are empty. All require different folders. In the case of our Wing Chun, where every movement is based on natural human movement, we will find a copy of everything in every file.

Data Retrieval: If we buy into the whole ‘our training will kick in’, we expect this to just happen.

And for some, it does.

The key is understanding the difference between playing and training, especially as  ‘The action is the same’.

It is more fun playing at being a “Bad Ass” than it is training to become one, but deep down, we know violence is serious, so why would our nervous system choose to play when we need to get serious?

NEWS FLASH… it won’t!

Our main aim next year is to fix this so that it does.

It should come as no surprise that this requires us to stop playing.

All fighting is a consensual contest where both parties give their opposite number permission to hurt them;

This post is mostly to help William and Saleh understand my position on Sparring, and why I refer to it as “Play fighting”.

But first, let’s be clear about what “Play Fighting” is and is not.

Play fighting is anything organised that follows a set of rules, even if those rules are unwritten.

“Play Fighting” is a contest with a referee, me, on a Thursday, who has the authority to stop the fight if one participant is taking dangerous or simply unnecessary levels of damage. 

Play Fighting is considered complete if one person decides to yield, tap out, or throw in the towel.  

Play fighting is a long way from being safe, but deliberate, malicious injury is not the aim.

In Play fighting, just as in all fighting, defence is minimal at best; the goal is to attack your opponent and win at all costs. 

The goal is not primarily to defend yourself.

All fighting is a consensual contest where both parties give their opposite number permission to hurt them;  there are no surprises, no ambushes. 

Usually, the event is planned, expected, and even looked forward to, such as the usual Sparring session on Thursday evening training.

The “Headspace” of a person about to engage in any type of play fighting, be it
a pro-level championship fight, an amateur-level club championship fight, or even just a sparring session at the local Kung Fu School, is completely under the control of the player.

You can have a strategy, a plan of attack, just as in any game.

Violence has nothing in common with play fighting.

Violence is everything else.

In a violent encounter, only the attacker has control of his Headspace, only the attacker has a plan.

This attacker is not interested in fighting;  their goal is to dominate and inflict harm, and if possible, to finish this before we know what is happening.

Non-Competitive Martial Arts are first and foremost about surviving this onslaught.

Non-Competitive Martial Arts are about becoming a Hedgehog.

This does not mean that there is no place for sparring in Non-Competitive Martial Arts.

But the training is not about finding ways to hit your partner.  The training is about not being hit and then finding ways to turn the tables on the attacker.

To become the attacker, the new man with a plan, who is now the only man with a plan.

The training is about maintaining composure when all appears lost.

And, shock horror, using the things we learn in our everyday training, the way we use them in our everyday training.

When someone attacks us, we do not have the luxury of staying out of range and popping in to strike when we see an opening; that ship sailed the instant the attack began. 

Real Violence is fought out in the space between our Ears.

The difference between Fighting and Self-defence is not a difference of scale of punishment or hurt; Combat Sports can and have cost lives, while street-level violence can be survived with only injured pride.

The difference is the aimed-for outcome.

As I said at the top of this post, All fighting is a consensual contest where both parties give their opposite number permission to hurt them;

If you are not planning to be hurt, why learn how to fight?

First become a Hedgehog, and then become a Dragon.

HOW MANY TIMES DO WE NEED TO ROLL A BALL DOWN HILL TO UNDERSTAND THAT BALLS ROLL DOWN HILLS?

As I get older, as the view gets clearer and the end is coming into sight my drive from an instructional point of view is to help you guys bypass the things that in my personal experience slow us down, things that, as important as they most certainly are, ultimately need to be jettisoned due to redundancy, to be thrown away.

It is not that these things were ever unimportant, it is more that we overestimate their purpose, just like the scaffolding that cannot be ignored during construction of a skyscraper, but is taken down once the exterior skin is completed, self-supporting, so the work of transforming the shell into a working building can ramp up and progress, be it an office, hotel, data centre, or mixed purpose building, the scaffolding is taken down and rarely thought of again.

It is beyond all doubt that the shell is essential, without it there is just empty space, but it is in every sense generic, look around there is a certain sameness to all buildings, it is only what goes on inside of them that gives them purpose, and frequently, all be it years later, the interior gets redesigned to change that purpose without a change to the exterior.

Now look at all the different Kung Fu styles.

On Thursday evening I used the metaphor of building a telescope, to study the cosmos, to do astronomy.

The more accurately we assemble this telescope, the higher the optical quality of the lenses, the better the reliability, performance and compatibility of the data chip that governs the C.P.U. to achieve perfect focus and the overall care with which we align all the working parts of this telescope will all contribute to the end efficiency of this instrument.

But even a cheap telescope will look upwards, anyway, it is not the telescope that does astronomy.

The Telescope, the shell of the Skyscraper,  both essential to the work, but they are not the work.

Obviously to be able to do the work we must firstly build the telescope, erect the shell, there is no short-cut here, but does it need to take so long?

How many times do we need to roll a ball down hill to understand that balls roll down hills?

How many times do we need to play the same FORM?

Even though it took me much longer, I cannot see why we cannot have all of the physical tools, the shell or telescope, in 2 to 3 years, depending on involvement and the type of help received or information researched.

I, like many others, paid too much attention to the wrong things. 

I focused on the Telescope and forgot about the Sky.

We all know that training is not fighting, we all know that what we wish to learn is not the Forms, or Chi Sau, or even the free-play pretend fighting, but we get seduced.

If we are using our training in anger, then we are involved in a violent situation.

No 2 violent situations are the same, but they can be looked at in 2 very wide generalities.

1. A violent situation that we know about, this can be a situation that we have started or a situation that we have agreed to participate in, which is either us attacking somebody with or without just cause or us agreeing to engage physically with somebody else, this last option is your classic “Fight”.
2. A violent situation we have no prior knowledge of, a situation where someone acts out violently against us, and we have no choice except to deal with it. This is a classic “SELF DEFENCE” situation.

In the first situation, there is a high probability that we throw the first punch, and our chances are at worst 50/50.

In the second situation, the “Bad Guy” always throws the first punch, and we are playing catch-up.

The situation that Wing Chun prepares us for is a Self-Defence situation; we will be second cab off the rank, playing catch-up.

Playing catch-up is reactionary and not responsive. What this boils down to is that we will not be thinking about what we are doing, only thinking about what we wish to achieve, such as not being hit, getting out of trouble, or escaping the immediate danger.

How our brain and body react will not be under our direct control; it will be reflexive, and there will be no thinking.

In this or similar situations, our Brain/Body will choose something it knows well and trusts totally; it will not choose an action it does not trust, no matter how effective or powerful that action might be.

This is how our Brain makes decisions, and it is not just about violence.

Would you buy a used car from a shifty-looking bloke that you know nothing about?

You have no evidence at all that the guy cannot be trusted, but do you take the punt?  How did you come to the decision?

This is not just about Wing Chun, it is not really bout Martial Art or violence, it is about any problem that needs us to make a choice.

We will not choose something we do not trust or believe in; we will, in fact, ignore obvious truths if we think otherwise.

So what is the real work?

The real work is TRUST.

An understanding of WHY what we do works, not how it works.

This is the meaning behind our saying that “WING CHUN IS A CONCEPT-DRIVEN MARTIAL ART”.

We do all the physical stuff so that we can explore the concepts that they use.

Once we see it and trust it, we can use those concepts in any way that is available to us.

EVERY TELESCOPE CAN SEE THE SKY.

I have come to the end of words, as Bill Burroughs may say.

It has been a minute since I posted anything, mostly because over the past 20 years of blogging, I have said everything that needs to be said.

I have come to the end of words as Bill Burroughs may say.

But all the same I understand that you guys may still want something to think about so I intend to reboot a collection of the more fundamental yet meaningful videos.

Videos can never come close to supervised training, in fact, they can take us to places we do not need to go, but hey.

Stay frosty.

SPOILER ALERT!!! IT IS PREVENTING THIS THAT IS THE CORE OF EVERY MARTIAL ART THAT I HAVE STUDIED.

It blows my mind a little bit to think that I have been involved in Martial Art training now for 65 years, numerous styles and many good and talented Sifus, Senseis, Instructors and Coaches, and let me never forget the many talented fellow students, whom I learned just as much from.

To be expected, there are some major differences between these styles and differing teachers’ approaches, but there is also common ground, core elements that relate directly to the aim of all Martial Arts.

I was chatting with Saleh last week and I mentioned to him, as I have mentioned to all of you at some time, from “Day 1”, we can all fight, we have always been able to fight, what we are trying to achieve through training is the ability to fight better, better than we did last week, and to be sure better than anyone who wishes us harm.

“Training” is developing an ability that we may or will use somewhere else at some other time, not today, not here and not against my training partner, who is a friend and Brother.

Why would we wish to hurt our training buddies?

In short, training is not, never was, and never will be the same as the thing we are training for.  Training is about learning the thing we are training, and not about doing the thing that the training teaches us.

We need to rejoice in this, embrace the “PLAY” aspect that is training, and not to treat it so seriously, and above all not to keep score on ourselves.

In every style I have studied, and in fact in every Sport that I have trained in, the main aim is to get out of our own way, to quiet the inner voice, and become a “NIKE” meme.

JUST DO IT!

All styles, all sports, no exceptions.

I can only talk for myself here, but I believe that you may harmonise with this thought.

The times I got things wrong in training, it was because I was trying to prove that I could do it my way just as well as my teacher’s way.

This was not a conscious thing, not overtly deliberate, not me wilfully engaging in “dumb fuckery”,  but it did come from me, and when I messed up, which of course I did frequently, I would blame myself for this failure and get embarrassed.

Which would often result in my talking to myself instead of clearing my mind to start again, and messing up the retry.

 In a way, I was possessed of an evil, mischievous spirit, an inner antagonistic 7-year-old that thinks it knows better and overrules my grown-up thinking.

A results and prestige-driven imp that genuinely and, usually innocently, believes it can already do this thing.

The “E” Word.

Just let me show you.

SPOILER ALERT!!! IT IS PREVENTING THIS THAT IS THE CORE OF EVERY MARTIAL ART THAT I HAVE STUDIED.

Quietening the inner child, doing the work for the sake of the work alone, of course, we want to do it well, but firstly, we need to NIKE it, and not think that we need to prove our individuality.

And guess what?

After 65 years, I am still struggling with this, still failing as much as I am succeeding, but I am cool with it these days, because if nothing else, I understand that this is exactly what training is.

Quietly training. Quietly thinking about hurting some MOFO.

We were told on our very first day, in fact in our first conversations, that Wing Chun is a “Concept Driven” Martial Art, based on normal human body movements.

My sifu was a somewhat traditional teacher, he would show us but was not too big on explanations, he thought we would learn more from our own discoveries than if he simply told us what to look for.

There is some merit in this approach, but not very much if I am honest, a bit of help never hurts.

A case in point is FORMS, he would bang on about how important they were and how if we did not fully understand the FORMS we would never understand Wing Chun, but then he would just leave us to our own devices to fathom what he meant.

He may have ,at least, shared that there are multiple layers of understanding, and that the least important was the physical practice.

He could have told us that the “REAL” approach to the FORMS was not physically copying traditional patterns whose main function is to introduce us to optimal ranges of motion, which is such an easy Rabbit hole to get lost down, but that it is the relationship between the core attributes of each of the FORMs that is the ‘ONLY’ information that we can ever transpose into a random violent situation.

As always, hindsight is a MOFO. 

We were told on our very first day, in fact in our first conversations, that Wing Chun is a “Concept Driven” Martial Art, based on normal human body movements.

Like all of my contemporaries, I did not understand what that statement meant.

As a result, it was many, many years before I began seriously trying to understand what I was doing in the FORMS.

By now, we all know that what we do in training will never be used or repeated in a genuine violent encounter. If we sit down and think about this, it means that the physical, fun bits were not the learning objective; they were the lesson that allowed us to progress our study.

But the study of what?

When I would ask this, my Sifu would say, “Just do the FORMS and you will eventually understand”.

He was, of course, correct.

 Because I do now understand, but I would have understood 20 years ago if he had simply told me told me that the “Learning Objective” is not just learn how to top the FORM, it is not even to understand the Core Attributes of each Form, but is in fact to resolve these attributes into a single IDEA.

A “Little IDEA”.

Again, hindsight is a MOFO.

When a student of any level struggles with an exercise, it soon becomes clear that they are not relating what is being done back to the relevant FORM, but when a senior struggles with an exercise it is usually due to the fact they actively relate the exercise to a FORM, and not back to an IDEA.

Something other things we see in hindsight is that it was made clear to us that Wing Chun does not use two hands for the same function; this goes in one ear and out of the other, even once we begin Chi Sau and Chum Kiu, which fly in the face of this.

Another is that each and every movement in Wing Chun comes from the FORM, and not from the individual FORMS, which deserves thinking on.

Lastly, that every single movement of every FORM is a FORM unto itself. This places the formalised patterns as a convenience to aid memory; there is no pattern, and if there is no pattern, then it stands as a given that there is no set direction of travel or order of play.

We are all different, we all think differently and come to personal conclusions, but an Epiphany for me was once I started to play my FORM PATTERNS in reverse.

This caused me such a head spin and helped me to see what I did not understand.

To a very large extent, playing the FORMS is an exercise in futility and is of no practical value, but it would not be Wing Chun if there were not a contradiction. If we do not play the FORMS, we are not even getting the message.

“Plans are of little importance, but planning is essential.”

WINSTON CHURCHILL.

Hey, absent guys, guess what you missed?

We had a great evening training on Thursday, just the 4 of us, myself, Sam, Costas and George, as usual, we began with what could be referred to as Wing Chun fishing, we just did some random stuff, using a Boken, of all things, and drifted into Biu Gee and the Pole, as you would naturally do from this start.

Sadly, I did not turn the camera on, as I usually do, and as Murphy’s Law dictates, we had a blinder of a session.

Even to someone like myself who has understood the essence of effortless power for many years, watching what the guys were doing was a little confusing, watching as Sam holding an 11-foot p[ole with just a thumb and forefinger pushing Costas around the room, and then me being the guy on the wrong end of the pole, was a reality test.

With any handheld weapon what we are doing is absorbing the weapon into the body, in this case, the Boken and then the Pole, as such the weapon becomes part of the body and loses its separate identity, so we are only moving what we move in a Form, when this is achieved it does not matter how the weapon is gripped, or held with thumb and forefinger as in this instance, because this is not a physical act.

To reinforce this IDEA we later did the same thing but this time having the pole wedged into the shoulder or under the arm, or in the crook of the elbow, it makes little difference because it is not physical.

As insane as this may sound, this is the endgame of Wing Chun training: creating usable, practical power without overt effort by understanding natural connectedness and alignment so that every action is powered by our body mass, which of course can be magnified by any simple movement.

This is what Forms are for, this is why we train stances, not to use them as we train them but to teach us how to develop, move and maintain a correct and efficient structure.

As for not having a video, to be honest, it would not have looked like anything special, just some weird shit, so the point of this post is to get you to come into training and ask me to repeat it.

Stay frosty.

Derek.