“Hey Fella, you wanna buy some crap? I am just your guy, full contact all reality pressure tested crap, right here, just sign up”.
As a follow on from my comment that new students struggle to grasp Wing Chun because it does not reflect the thing they fear.
We must, above all else, realise that what we fear will never happen and just settle the ‘fk’ down.
Easier said than done.
This ‘false belief’ prospective students hold heavily impacts what is being offered up in the Martial Arts Marketplace as training.
Never doubt that it is a marketplace, even with my small operation there are costs that must be met, and I meet them by selling my IDEA.
For the most part, and for most salesmen, selling is selling, and the customer calls the shots.
“Hey Fella, you wanna buy some crap? I am just your guy, full contact all reality pressure tested crap, right here, just sign up”.
In the early 1900s, George Bernard Shaw opined that “Those who can do, those who can’t teach”.
And on the wall of Liverpool University {U.K.} A centre for prospective teachers, a wag wrote, “and those who can’t teach, teach teachers”.
This is oh so true of the Martial Arts.
So many teachers have little to no lived experience of random violence, if they had they would spend more time and effort teaching the NIKE DEFENCE and less on chaining impossible combos and machine gun punching.
Why am I any different?
One thing I know, that many others simply do not, is what it is like to be on the wrong end of a beating.
Let’s just be honest for a moment, this is the place we do not want to go to, this is what we are trying to avoid, and this is what we need to learn and understand.
It is a place I hope to never revisit, especially as I have been there more than once.
A few things I know about being hit, especially by big men, is first, that it hurts.
A LOT.
Forget the IDEA that adrenalin will make it so that you do not feel anything, for that to happen you need to know what is going on and have not only already had an adrenalin dump but been able to MANAGE it.
In sport, this happens back in the sheds before the run-on and not just before or upon contact.
Secondly, being hit turns your brain off, the world becomes a blizzard that you do not understand, and dealing with an angry Bad Guy is difficult when your mind is elsewhere.
And thirdly, being hit moves you through space.
In the movies people get hit with all manner of stuff and not only stand there but also just keep going, doing whatever it was they were about to do, they bounce off of walls and into a perfect stance without so much as a stain in their tighty whities.
And then they fight back… good luck with that.
Fantasies of chaining multiple shots together while Big Ben is ringing in your ears are just that, fantasies.
If films are where students choose to get their IDEAS from, then they should all watch and rewatch the original ‘Karate Kid’.
Mr Miyagi tells his student “Best defence, not be there”.
As great as this advice is if we are in trouble we did not take it, so our aim should be to escape this Shit Storm, and not just try to become Jason Statham.
As every Shit Storm is different this cannot take the form of any kind of techniques, defences or attacks, and it is not something we can make up on the fly.
This is about having a strategy to escape before that strategy is needed, and then simply having the courage to put that plan in place.
Keep it SIMPLE, keep it DIRECT and above all else, make sure it is PRACTICAL.
Once we understand this, we understand Wing Chun.
But it is not all doom and gloom.
For some ‘unexplainable’ reason’, Martial Arts students think that this nasty reality will only happen to themselves and not to the Bad Guy.
What I refer to as the “Bruce Lee’s cousin syndrome”.
This is not the case.
All the negative things that happen to us when we get hit will also happen to the Bad Guy when we hit them.
It is Sifu Isaac’s second Law.
Once we understand this, we understand Wing Chun.
DO UNTO OTHERS… BUT DO IT FIRST.
HENRY FLAGLER
Wing Chun Sydney, Australia 