BALANCE AND STABILITY.

Stability is the quality of being unchanging.

This time of year is traditionally a time of reflection; we compare where we are at in this moment compared to a previous time, such as last year.

How we measure this comparison sets up the training goals going forward.

In my own experience, this is reflected in Wing Chun becoming smaller and simpler; it has been at least twenty years since I learnt anything that could be regarded as “NEW”, but the understanding and appreciation of these things I have known for years continuous to grow deeper and more profound.

But just like everyone else I still need a plan going forward or all of my gains will cease to exist.

Use it or lose it.

If, like most of us lot, you have been training for more than 10 years, in which time even if you are unaware of it you have been shown everything that there is to know about Wing Chun, the emphasis should be on refining what you think you know, reducing the content, trying to identify a common denominator, and then polishing it until it shines like the Sun.

So where do we look and how do we make it interesting and not just more of the same?

Something that fascinates me is the progress in Human-like robots, and there is a shit-tonne of info on the web, especially VIDEO, that we can access.

After all, isn’t that what we are doing with Kung Fu, trying to make a perfect human?

When I watch videos of the latest robots, the thing that impresses me most is their ability to keep Balance and Stability, even when being hit with a stick. It is pretty scary how good they are becoming.

We could do much worse than starting there.

First of all, let us be sure that we are talking about the same things, at least in the context of this post.

Balance is the ability to remain uptight working against no outside force other than gravity. 

Our weight is evenly distributed, and our spine is vertical.

Our body is aligned or “stacked’ in such a way that it is self-supporting and not held in place by using added physical strength to maintain it.

Stability is the quality of being unchanging.

From our Wing Chun perspective, this is especially the physical condition or feeling of self, what we refer to as “Body Being”, and to a certain extent the shapes we adopt when moving. 

Moving requires muscular effort, therefore, if we are moving, we are not in balance, counter-intuitively, this means that we are only in balance if we are still.

In the context of Wing Chun, where we constantly aim to minimise muscular tension, the implication is that the stiller we are, the closer to optimal we are, this is reflected in the principles of “Economy of Movement”, and “Minimal use of Brute Force”.

It should be quite obvious that being still is not the optimum position to defend ourselves from, but the theory is correct.

What we need is to establish a “Sliding Scale” with uninhibited free movement at one end and stillness at the other.

In a situation like this our training becomes more about this sliding scale used on our current knowledge than learning some IDEAL Wing Chun.

Training becomes about working with what we have and finding our personal “Goldilocks Zone”.

The way this Robot moves is the optimum way for a bipedal creature to move, and it looks like Chum Kiu.

It is clear that if we cannot stand up we cannot defend ourselves.

We cannot hope to achieve optimum Wing Chun without optimum Balance and stability.