TRAINING TO BE OURSELVES.

We will all get better, that is the point of the training.

It does not take a great deal of research to verify that the person that lands the first meaningful blow usually wins any violent encounter.

First meaningful blow.

This is not in anyway connected to fighting style or type of training.

We all have a different tipping point, a different line in the sand when it comes to responding to what we feel is an attack, and then choosing to activate our counter-attack.

There is no one size fits all here, so this post is just one way of approaching this problem, food for thought, something to throw at the wall and see what sticks.

Sun Tzu, the sweetheart of all Kung Fu players, says we must understand our enemy as well as we understand ourselves, however, from the perspective of random violence we can only, at best, have a general knowledge of our enemy.

So we need a general knowledge of ourselves?

How can we measure this?

Well we can start by taking the B/S filters off when training.

Training should be about assessing ourselves as we are, right here, right now, at this moment of time that we are doing the training.

And measuring it against the possibility of immediate violence, no matter how you view this you will be better than you were yesterday.

Tomorrow, next week, or next grading is of limited value, violence happens in the NOW.

Violence could happen on the way home from any nights training.

Is our training doing this?

As a young pre-teen Boxer our Club Coach would get us wound up and shaking by telling us…

… ‘The Boxing Ring is where Tall Tales comes to die, in the ring there is nowhere to hide, it is the field of TRUTH’.

It turned out that his intention was not to boost our confidence, in reality it was to thin the ranks of the tire kickers among the new boys, but it made stepping through the ropes an even greater challenge.

But it was also true, as all of us that chose to step through those ropes all too soon found out.

However, while all of us boys had the choice of stepping into the ring or stepping back and going home, this is not a choice we will have with random violence, or any self-defence situation.

This is the reference point that we should be aware of.

In this case the first goal of training needs to be… ACCEPTANCE… It is happening, deal with it.

When we are training there is no need to pretend that we are more, or less, than we are, the truth is that none of us training tonight would choose to put ourselves in that dark place of genuine, unwanted violence.

But if we approach the work we call training with the IDEA that we are training ‘IN CASE’ we get in trouble, we are not training to ACCEPT the situation.

If we are not training to ACCEPT the situation then we are not training to deal with the situation. 

ACCEPTANCE begins with simply not pretending we are anything but ourselves. 

We will all get better, that is the point of the training.

I am as guilty as any of us for painting Wing Chun with the brightest light.

But it is always an honest light, Bullshit filter set close to zero.

Saying this, there is one thing that we absolutely must be honest about?

We can train hard, live well, be the best version of ourselves that we can possible be…

….and still not be good enough.

This is just the way it goes.

This is the simple truth at the heart of the work, once we ACCEPT this everything else is cake.

Being honest does not mean being negatively critical, sometimes an unknown new strength arises out of thin air because we avoided a well known old weakness.

We must learn to ACCEPT our weakness’, the weakness’ of our understanding and the weakness’ in our ability to use it.

Here’s some good news, if we avoid our weakness’ we will, by default, be using our strengths.

We cannot avoid our weakness’ if we refuse to recognise them.

In training we all enjoy playing the things we are good at, it is fun and satisfying, but it encourages us to ignore our weakness’.

As painful and unpleasant as working on things we think we suck at is, this is the only way to turn a weakness to a strength, even if that strength comes from recognising our weakness’ and avoiding using them.

Acceptance is always a personal journey and as such no two journeys will be the same, this is one of the shortfalls of traditional training methods, where we all do the same thing, in the same place, at the same time, hoping to get the same results as our seniors and get better rewards for the ‘more same’, the more like them, we do these things.

This is the relationship between training and gradings in a nutshell.

Our best bet is to be guided by the Principles of Simplicity and Non-use of Brute Force, and of course the fact that everything is based on normal human body movements.

If everything we do respects this, then everything we do, even if it is unrecognisable as Kung Fu,  will be GOOD ENOUGH.