Like most YouTube videos this was a set-up with a specific agenda, and unless I am mistaken the agenda was to show how ‘Karate kicks Ass, and Wing Chun sucks’.
The YouTube algorithm recently suggested a post of a well known internet Karateka facing off against an almost equally well known internet Wing Chun player.
I do not mean any disrespect by this description, but I only know these two guys from the internet.
As you all know I do not like commenting on videos for the simple reason that we do not know what the participants are trying to do and it is so easy to get everything wrong.
But this video sat in my head like an extra hot curry sits in your belly and it just had to be set free or else I would have soiled myself.
As someone who understands Wing Chun, I was dismayed to see what the Wing Chun YouTube influencer was putting out there.
Like most YouTube videos this was a set-up with a specific agenda, and unless I am mistaken the agenda was to show how ‘Karate kicks Ass, and Wing Chun sucks’.
This is not an spiteful, and unwarranted roasting, the actors were willing to put it out there to be interacted with, it even had a share button, so here it is.
Before we even address how ‘BAAAAAD’ the presented Wing Chun was we should first address it as a match-up itself.
Which had a lot to teach about “fighting ignorance“.
For starters, the match started in homage to Enter the Dragon with both men touching wrists.
Pure cinematic bullshit.
This only works if the opponent is an actor whose role is not to react.
Or, as in this case, if one man is 30cm taller than the other man.
For the moment let’s look past the fact that Wing Chun does not fight and just deal with what is presented.
If we are up against a taller man the most important thing is to control the distances.
Especially the kicking distance.
We must be either to far away to kick, or if we talk Wing Chun, too close in to kick.
Which against a skilled kicker means pretty much Nose-to-Nose, jamming up their legs.
The correct Wing Chun position is to firstly be out of range, and as the opponent steps in to fire off a kick, step in to the nose-to-nose space, jamming the legs and smacking the dude in the head as a bonus.
In this instance this so-called Wing Chun Man was in the perfect position for a skilled kicker to take his head off.
And of course, the Karateka said thank ‘you very much’ and kicked him in the neck.
Right there, in any kind of realistic situation, this was “Game Over”.
Credit where credit is due this kick was a display of high skill.
The short video is less than a minute in length, and yet the little man still manages to do so many things wrong.
I still cannot decide if his positioning was simply a bad decision, or attempted suicide.
Let’s now look at this from a Wing Chun perspective.
As I say all the time if we are touching someone in any way what so ever, it should be either causing them pain, or disturbing their balance.
Triggering a Somatic Reflex we can then exploit.
So being in a wrist-to-wrist standoff is just madness {or attempted suicide}.
Being an American {or Canadian, they are so often just stoned Americans} he more than likely believes that what is on the movies is reality, he cleary thinks that trying a Pak Sau and punch against an aware and prepared opponent will work.
After all if Bruce Lee did it it must be good.
Moving on.
We can clearly see that everything the little man was trying to do was at Chi Sau range, which is the Neutral Zone, the Middle Zone.
The Middle Zone is the Fool’s Zone, because to have any influence on our opponent we must press forward.
Which is what the little man does and gets fed a diet of fists.
Wing Chun does not attack, it counter-attacks, but the little man kept trying to press forward and just got fed pain.
In training, we may sometimes step into our opponent to get familiar with the compression of space and time, {because our training partner does not wish to commit to a genuine attack and step into us and pay the obvious price}.
It is a training artefact and not a strategy, as counter-attackers our best bet is to almost stand and wait until the opponent steps into us, but the only way we can come close to replicating this time/space compression in training is for us to step forward.
On the occasion where the little man did get inside the defence of the bigger man he had no plan, no intention, did nothing to change the bigger man’s thinking, and as such was simply pushed out into a perfect kicking position.
Just target practice.
So little time, so many mistakes.
Despite this being a pitiful example of the very worst example of Wing Chun, it has a great deal of value.
It is a clear and accurate video on what not to do.
One thing this video clearly shows is that Wing Chun fails miserably, and almost instantly, if not used in the time and place it was designed to operate, as a counter-attacking method against a committed attacker.
Another thing on show here, and a problem that can get into a students’s head, is coming back for more and thinking it is training you how to get the technique working.
It just teaches you how to get flattened.
While the little man acknowledges that he was pinged he just steps back in and does the same thing.
As I said earlier, I do not know if this was simply making bad decisions or attempting suicide.
The really bad thing about this video is that it perpetuates the IDEA that Wing Chun is a fighting style, and a very poor fighting style at that.
Wing Chun was and is intended as a genuine set of answers to genuine problems.
With a genuine problem, if our first answer does not work we do not get a second chance.
If we touch an opponent we must either cause them so much pain that their brain turns off, or we affect their balance to the same end.
It is videos like this that feed the complete misunderstanding of what and why we train.
I will cover this later.
IT IS EASIER TO FOOL PEOPLE
THAN TO CONVINCE THEM THAT THEY HAVE BEEN FOOLED.
MARK TWAIN.
Wing Chun Sydney, Australia 