This is not the body that did the WORK, this is not the mind that studied the IDEA.
I was forwarded a FB page from a contact of sorts, it was of a Wing Chun Group showing a workshop with a Hong Kong Sifu.
It was the standard format showing how to do S.L.T. movement to inflict a powerful strike.
In the comments someone trolled the Sifu saying some rubbish about how it would not work and how he should be pressure testing his stuff.
I was not surprised by the trolling it really was the type of video presentation that encourages trolling and is so easy for an uneducated person to look at and think that Wing Chun is a ‘FAKE’ Martial Art.
Not because of the Sifu, but because the students looked and acted like they would as Geoff Thompson says ‘struggle to fight off sleep’ and the Sifu was trying his best not to wake them up.
In partial defence of the troll, all of the ideas shown were extremely lame and unrealistic, even for that particular group of sleepy students.
I have done my share of workshops and you have no choice but to work with what you have been given.
Absolute fact: Everything will work if we are in the right place at the right time and we decide to use it.
Even Table Tennis shots.
Especially Table Tennis shots.
Like all trolls, the guy was a total dick-head with little to no idea about genuine street like situational violence.
It is never the Martial Arts style that gets pressure tested, it is the person.
It is about how the person reacts when his/her body and mind panic.
This is why demonstrations that show students chilling and having fun are prone to trolling, where is the stress factor?
Dealing with genuine violence is all about understanding and compensating for our hormonal response and not about physically fighting.
Hormone induced panic is not controllable, it happens because we experience a sudden shock.
Hormones do not trickle in, they flood the system before that initial shock has fully registered.
WE DO NOT SEE THEM HORMONES COMING.
Thinking that we can somehow control our hormones once they are running amok in our bloodstream is madness.
Advising students to breathe easy, relax, centre, put their minds in their spine is great and all that, but about as achievable as levitating out of the way once the hormone dump has happened.
That is why so many Wing Chun demonstration videos look so lame, even when the information is excellent.
These videos all end up looking like a David Attenborough presentation of a bunch of Pandas with some Sifu or another making up stuff you can do with the S.L.T.
100% Troll bait.
But I pity the Sifu, he is on ‘a hiding for nothing’ from people that understand neither violence nor Wing Chun.
Wing Chun, like all Socially Oriented Martial Arts, is a method to explore violent contact not deal with violent contact.
Once the shock happens and the hormones drop we are out of our standard operation settings.
Right here, right now, in this shit storm. This is not the body that did the WORK, this is not the mind that studied the IDEA.
We have not trained in this completely new physical/mental/emotional condition or for this chaotic unknown/unexpected/random situation so it becomes a flip of the coin type of thing.
This sounds much worse than it is because it is the same for all styles, all people, even the Bad Guy.
What we can do in training is to explore why such shocks occur and work on limiting the chance of that occurrence.
Awareness and avoidance are key ideas to factor in.
Shock is a result of something happening that we did not expect or something that we may have expected acting in a different way.
Such as a small man with a massively heavy punch.
Or a big, heavy man that moves like a ballet dancer.
When we engage another person our aim may appear to be self-defence, at least initially, but in reality, we should be attempting to take the shock out of our opponents attack and ramping up the shock level of our response.
Diminish the incoming load while increasing the outgoing load.
The initial panic problem is due to our poor timing, essentially, if the strike gets to us quicker than we expected we slip into Hormone Shock.
Hormone Shock is a response to things happening too quickly for us to evaluate and respond to.
It is all in the ‘timing’.
The easiest way to control ‘timing’ is to control the space in which it is happening.
The longer something takes to happen the less the chance of shock.
At this present juncture, where we should be, social distancing, 1.5 metres from each other, we are still too close to our partner to adequately respond to a surprise attack.
At this position, Chi Sau range, we are deliberately placing ourselves in the ‘Shock-Zone’.
Playing with this aspect, especially as we really should be anyway, can help us get a new perspective on what we think we do.
Distance {Space} = Time.
If we have sufficient Space and Time we will be able to think in a much more concise manner, better and clearer thinking minimise shock.
A quick but important sidestep, we do not get more time by stepping into an attacker, just sayin’, this is physics, not Wing Chun.
It is only thinking that can help us.
It is our MIND that gets shocked but our BODY pays the price.
The question becomes how do we get more time?
This subject is a whole series of posts in itself, but to generalise we stretch the time we have been offered.
When we stretch something it gets weaker, longer and slower, even if we still get hit the shock of that hit is much less.
Something we can explore during this enforced period of Solo Training is ‘how can we use our training to apply this idea of stretching the timing of an incoming attack’?
Our ability to control this first second of the engagement will depend far more on quick thinking and creativity than 30 years of training.
We will all come up with our own solutions, and this is as it should be.
Below is a video from the vault, back in early 2018 when I was still working for the railways as a Controller, that can give us a starting point towards stretching time.
If some of the content of the above video appears a trifle disconnected to the content of the article here is a link to the original post that may, or may not help clear things up. CLICK HERE.
Violence happens by Surprise, Closer, Harder and Faster than in most Martial Arts Training.
Wing Chun Sydney, Australia 