WING CHUN SYDNEY.

 

It is the weapon sets and not the dummy set that allow us to combine all of the aspects of the earlier sets and ultimately discover the “Little Idea”.

 

Saturday morning training is all about deeper understanding, my senior students attend and to be honest I learn as much as I teach most of the time, this week we worked on the Baat Cham Do.

The first thing to understand about the Baat Cham Do, and the Luk Dim Boon Quan for that matter is that they are not real weapons, and the training we do with them is not weapons training.

From the perspective of weapons the movement of both sets is pedestrian and the applications one dimensional.

I know many people that disagree with this statement but they have not trained real weapon styles and I have, firstly I studied Bo Jutsu, Japanese staff training and later Doce´ Peres Philippine sticks and knives training, I assure you that the Wing Chun weapons sets are not comparable.

Why does a clever style like Wing Chun have these components?

My Sifu once joked that the main purpose of the Knives was to practice the Pole, and that the main purpose of the Pole was to practice the Knives, that is worth thinking about.

It is really tempting to say that the weapons are there to hide what we are working on from outsiders or casual students, this fits nicely with the belief that for many years Wing Chun was a secret martial arts style, unfortunately if that was the idea it also hid it from many normal students, this is so noticeable when you watch them moving, they lose their shape, their body unity and their stances.

This is the purpose of the Knives and the Pole, maintaining body unity while changing stances, coordinating hands, feet and body weight, and developing focus and projection of intention.

In Biu Gee we project our intention to the end of our fingers, in the Baat we project it out to the tip of the blade, and of course with the pole we extend that projection out towards infinity.

It is the weapon sets and not the dummy set that allow us to combine all the aspects of the earlier sets and ultimately discover the “Little Idea”.

 

 

As always the greatest strength / weakness of Wing Chun is that there is no standard way of doing things, we all need to find our own way, and this is mine.

 

It may be different from what you or your favourite Guru think but at least it works as a learning tool.

 

 

 

 

A few weeks ago I reinstituted technical sparring, some things never seem to change, and that is a real problem.

 

 

 

 

If you see the Forms in the same way today as you did 5 years ago what have you been doing for the last 5 years?

 

Wing Chun Forms are the blueprint for how we move, they are not Kata, they are not shadow boxing sets. There comes a point in our training where our understanding of the Forms changes so much that we see in many ways they go nowhere and do nothing and are all the better because of that.

They are how we move and not where or why.

I have played many sports and trained in numerous styles of Martial Art, there comes a point where they all become the same thing.

As a young man in the U.K. I played a great deal of Lawn Tennis, English winters are not Tennis friendly so I would head indoors and play Racquet Ball, Table Tennis even Badminton to maintain court awareness, keep my hand-eye coordination up,  keep my reflexes sharp, they share many of the same moves, same shots, same plays.

In many ways they are the same game.

I tried Squash a few times but when Tennis players play Squash watch out, those flowing follow-throughs become lethal head shots in the confines of a Squash court.

Squash needs different movement due to the environment it is played in, once we recognise that the differences in movement, footwork and shot creation are caused by environmental necessity we can see that all the moves are still the same, they just look different.

Approaching the Wing Chun Forms with this perspective opens them up in many surprising and enlightening ways, new thinking proliferates, new questions arise, what is really going on when we move our arm through Bong Sau?

Using an open perspective approach describe what happens when we move our arm in a large complete circle.

In the beginning we think we that move our arm in one large circular motion, from “A” back around to “A”, but with new thinking we see that we also move our arm in many small arcs, “A” through  to “B”, “B” through  to “C” and so on, from here it is a short step to moving many different sized arcs, “A” through to “K”, “L” through to “M”, “N” through  to “D” and so on.

Directions become nothing more than descriptions, forwards, backwards, up, down, the same movement different value.

Arm swings, Leg swings, same movement different value.

Is there any kicking methodology in Biu Gee?

Same movement different value.

If you see the Forms in the same way today as you did 5 years ago what have you been doing for the last 5 years?

Tick, tock.

 

 

As a follow along of sorts dealing with positioning the video below is from 2013, it is difficult to appreciate how good these guys are when everything is done so slowly and without malice.  Watching this I am still really impressed by the guys that trust me to teach them, they are multitudes better than this now { I truly pity anyone that gives them reason to act}, and happily so is my film making, but I really must revisit the slow mo’s and sound effects. Lol.

 

 

The standard training IDEAs of Hey Diddle Diddle, Straight Down The Middle do not stack up against even an average attacker, Wing Chun’s greatest weakness is that we only ever train against other Wing Chun people with our almost trademark poor mobility and complete absence of intelligent strategy.