WING CHUN SYDNEY.

 when I heard Master Chu Shong Tin say that in reality Chi Sau is used before contact, I was instantly intrigued

Many years ago I was at a seminar on Chi Sau at my Sifu’s school hosted by our Sigung ,Chu Shong Tin, during the evening he {C.S.T} said that in reality Chi Sau is used before contact, I had always been confused by Chi Sau, as an ex boxer and ex judoka I found it really hard to see how it could be used to defend ourself and really easy to see how it set people up for a beating, so when I heard Master Chu Shong Tin say that in reality Chi Sau is used before contact, I was instantly intrigued, with my sifu translating I asked CST what he meant, he told me that it was how we connected to incoming force and make it point somewhere else {turn it away} as he spoke did this action like a pivoting Kwan Sau, I thought for a brief second and then asked “so is it a little bit like Chum Kiu”? This amused CST mightily and as he was laughing at me said “It is not like Chum Kiu, it is Chum Kiu”, it was not long before this statement brought about a paradigm shift that made me look at both Chi Sau and Chum Kiu in a more cohesive way.

I am not trying to imply that I know a secret, there are no secrets, sometimes we just don’t listen.

However when I started bringing in Chum Kiu concepts to my own Chi Sau, shifting, changing stances, pivoting, my fellow Instructors that I rolled with would ask me to stop it and roll properly, they complained that I was making it difficult for them to practice Chi Sau, this of course just convinced me that I was on the right track, why would I wish to learn and practice something that someone could deal with? When I told them that it was C.S.T. that told me they just said that I had misunderstood him and carried on as before, grind, grind, chug, chug. The problem was snowballing, taking on a life of its own, Adherence to thinking of the Y.C.K.Y.M as a stance and working only with the movements of the  Sil Lim Tao had completely closed their minds.  All they were all learning was a new dance and the skills they practiced had little real world application.

If we have the wrong thinking towards the Y.C.K.Y.M. it affects everything we do, or at least the outcome of everything we do, it leads on to the misunderstanding of what a guard is, it leads to standing still in front of a moving opponent, it leads to hey diddle diddle push the spear down the middle, it leads us away from safe positions and into troublesome ones.  The way most Chi Sau is played we place ourselves in a position that is the weakest fighting position we would ever wish to find ourselves in { and instead of working out how to change this we stay there chatting}, we do not notice this because our partner is also in a weak position doing the same thing so no one has the advantage, we will not have this luxury in a real situation,  in the rarefied totally fake environment that is the training hall what is often referred to as good Chi Sau tends to resemble a front loading washing machine having an epileptic fit, and looks nothing like fighting.  It becomes its own game, and like most games it cannot be played properly unless all participants know how to play it, everything rapidly falls apart when someone does not know the rules.

My Sifu always stated that “Chi Sau was a means to an end, and not an end in itself” that it had no real purpose it was just a way for us to work things out, but whenever I asked someone I was rolling with what they were working on they would just say Chi Sau, for them at least it had become and end in itself.  If we look at videos even from the schools of famous masters, even C.S.T. we see students grinding their arms together and pushing each other about in ways that do not in any way resemble fighting.

Grind, grind, chug, chug.

At its core Wing Chun is working with a series of IDEAs, but IDEAs are not foolproof, delusions start of asIDEAs, for a delusion to survive other more rational IDEAs must be destroyed, only then can the delusion grow.

Y.C.K.Y.M. is one such delusion..

the biggest mistake most students make is to relax their legs, we need to learn how to add healthy tension into the structure to make it alive

These recent failure of the two Wing Chun Masters against M.M.A. fighters has been making many of my guys reassess their take on Wing Chun, firstly for all of us it is important to accept that they where genuine Wing Chun Masters, the organisers of the event obviously wished to discredit Wing Chun so how could they hope to do that if these guys were not recognised Masters, someone somewhere would of pointed out to the world that this was a set up and called Bullsh*t, but that has not happened.

The reason Wing Chun fighters do so badly against competitive fighters is that they genuinely try to do Wing Chun instead of just fighting.  Wing Chun is not really suited to Mano a Mano situations, our main weapon is surprise, followed by a quick finish and off home for a cup of tea, as a result of this if the Wing Chun fighter does not get the quick finish they can struggle quite badly, there is no “Plan B” in Wing Chun. 

Wing Chun is a clever martial art but it is not very technical, it is nowhere near as technical as western boxing for instance, a great deal of what is passed on as Wing Chun, even by the very top masters, is naive in respect of fight craft and strategy, the Wing Chun stance and guard is completely ineffective but I do not think that it was ever meant to be used for real, it is just a simple frame of reference to begin training from but unfortunately it has taken on a life of its own and now students try to use it with predictably bad results.

The Yee Chi Kim Yeung Ma is a conditioning exercise for the legs to prepare them for the work to come in Chum Kiu, to condition any muscle it must be activated the biggest mistake most students make is to relax their legs, we need to learn how to add healthy tension into the structure to make it alive. The  idea that the Y.C.K.Y.M. is a fighting stance has permeated mainstream Wing Chun and the flow on effect is that everything is being done in the wrong place at the wrong time from the wrong direction, look around, most Wing Chun schools teach only one angle of attack namely front to back and hey diddle diddle straight down the middle, it is great when it works, and it will work against an average street mug, but it will rarely work against an experienced fighter as our two unfortunate Wing Chun masters found out.

The real training in Wing Chun begins with Chum Kiu, everything before that was just isometric exercises, if we can look at the Y.C.K.Y.M as two separate legs, the rear legs of the stances introduced in Chum Kiu we realise that it shows us how to move, not stand still, there is some very clever stuff going on in the Y.C.K.Y.M once you abandon the idea that it is a stance, but only when you know where to look.

Deconstructing the Forms and reassembling them in different patterns is the key to mastery. Breaking apart the practiced sequence even the direction of travel is enlightening.

When we are training in Wing Chun something that should be held front and centre in our mind is that Wing Chun is based on normal human body movement, if for some reason we are struggling with any particular action or any section of any form it is because we are not moving like a normal human.  Once we get past the dance, at their core all Forms are just dances, Forms function as an observation deck into how much we understand about our own body, they are not really teaching us anything, we already know how to move ourselves, placing special emphasis on any particular set of movements is a trap that binds and blinds, it prevents us from understanding the totality of the Wing Chun system, the end game of which is to be able to create power on the fly, from any position, any shape with any part of our body.

There are ideas introduced in Chum Kiu that are not repeated in Biu Gee that we are meant to take along with us just as we are meant to bring the ideas from the First Form with us into Chum Kiu. In particular in Chum Kiu we have a Bong Sau / Dai Sau movement that is performed in the first section with a pivot and in the second section with a shift. This is a clear indication that all arm structures can be performed either pivoting or shifting.

All arm structures.

Biu Gee is predominately performed with pivots, but if we follow what was introduced in Chum Kiu the moves can also be done shifting, and of course we see that in the Dummy with the Kwan Sau and Garn Sau movements being performed with shifting in the first section and pivoting in the second and third section of the Dummy Form.

By the time we complete our study of Biu Gee we have been introduced to the complete repertoire of movement in Wing Chun, but it is still to a large extent a jig saw that needs putting together, looking ahead we see that there is backwards shifting and stepping in the Knives and the Pole, the straight back shift to the cat stance from the Pole is introduced in Chum Kiu albeit in two separate parts, the lateral curved backwards shift in the Knives was introduced in Biu Gee.

Deconstructing the forms and reassembling them in different patterns is the key to mastery, bringing forward the idea from the S.L.T. to use only one hand breathes new life into the Chum Kiu and Biu Gee, performing the opening sequence from the S.L.T. with the movement and aggression of Biu Gee is exactly what we do with the Dummy and of course in application.  Breaking apart the practiced sequence even the direction of travel is enlightening.

For reasons I really do not understand the majority of the people that I began this journey with over 25 years ago base the majority of their training on the First Form, do not mistake me I know that the First Form is important, the first step of any journey is important, we cannot build without foundations but unless our training is imbued with the knowledge of the Chum Kiu and Biu Gee it is of no functional value, the First Form is an imaginary Form in the very realest of senses, everything that we can come to understand through the First Form can be learned by studying Chum Kiu and Biu Gee but there are numerous aspects of the later Forms that can not even be approached through the First Form, focusing on the First Form is not enough if you expect to be dealing with nasty, violent and more than likely larger people.

People train for many different reasons, but at the end of the day Wing Chun has a specific objective to achieve, and that objective is to defend ourselves, which Form, if any, is the best training to prepare us for this? In Wing Chun how we approach the work is of as much consequence as the work itself, if we perform Biu Gee the same way as we perform S.L.T. then we are in point of fact still doing S.L.T.  If we do Biu Gee the same way as we do Chum Kiu then we are in point of fact still doing Chum Kiu, this is not necessarily a negative, it also means we can perform S.L.T. with the aggression and intent of Biu Gee and still be doing Biu Gee!

Standing still moving slowly will most certainly help us understand how our joints work and how to use them correctly but it does not energise a kinetic chain, it does not increase velocity, it does not create greater momentum and as such is not representative of dynamic contact especially the type we are expecting if we ever get into a violent situation.

We should ask ourselves what is normal human body movement in respect of a Martial Art. 

Wing Chun is a system, although we have six Forms all the relevant information is in the first three, the Dummy combines the three into one and brings into being a workable whole, Knives and Pole Forms add complexity and difficulty due to the tools themselves this allows us to approximate challenges in controlling our body mass and balance that we may face when confronting the force of an opponent.

How we train is how we will fight, how could it be any other way?