Author: The "D" Man

Despite their complete misunderstanding, they are correct, Wing Chun is smoke and Mirrors..

Hey Guys.

This is a longish post that should pull a lot of other posts into a single focus, no matter what you think is going on it will pay great dividends if you read it through to the bitter end and retain the information.

The main reason I dislike YouTube videos regarding Wing Chun is that the people who make them clearly do not fully understand what Wing Chun is, or what it aims to achieve.

Sadly, I am not only talking about the haters, this includes the well-intentioned souls that step up to defend Wing Chun’s honour.

In many instances, the “Defenders of the Faith” are doing much more damage to Wing Chun than the detractors ever could.

By putting time and effort into demonstrating that Wing Chun can work in a ‘Real Fight’ they are moving away from what Wing Chun was, is, and could be.

The detractors that make negative comments about Wing Chun are not doing anyone any harm, they are just voicing their opinion, which is everyone’s right.

They have no understanding of Wing Chun and so they call it as they see it.

 Through the lens of ‘Not Knowing,’ they say that Wing Chun is nothing but ‘Smoke and Mirrors’.

Despite their complete misunderstanding, they are correct, Wing Chun is smoke and Mirrors..

Then up stand the loyal disciples, usually young men keen to impress as young men are.

Through effort and enterprise, they try to show that the ‘Smoke and Mirrors’ can work in a ‘Real Fight’.

It can, but it is nonetheless still just ‘Smoke and Mirrors’.

Understanding Wing Chun is more about understanding LIFE than it is about understanding fighting.

A big ask for a young person, and by young I am talking about being under 40 years old.

The reason Great Kung Fu Masters are old is not because of a lifetime spent training, it is because of a lifetime spent living.

People who understand Wing Chun say yes, Wing Chun training is as you call it, ‘Smoke and Mirrors’.

But the ‘Smoke and Mirrors’ are not Wing Chun, they are simply a vehicle, a way for us to see and explore Wing Chun.

Just as a prism can split a beam of white light to show the colours of the spectrum.

Without the use of a Prism, all that is visible is a beam of white light, but those of us who previously saw that light pass through the spectrum know that in truth that beam of white light is in reality, every colour of the rainbow.

Smoke and Mirrors.

This is where ‘Shit Gets Weird”

Wing Chun is a Conceptual Martial Art.

There is nothing physical.

But the only way we can interact with or experience the Concept of Wing Chun is through physical interaction and physical training.

It is doubtful that Dr Leung Jan of Foshan had any IDEA about Quantum Physics, but that is exactly how he created Wing Chun.

Light as a particle and a wave.

Doing and not doing.

If you have stayed with me this far then it should be clear that to understand the nature of Wing Chun we must understand, as well as we can, the nature of Dr Leung Jan’s thinking.

But here is more weird shit, this thinking can only be understood through the physical interaction of what we call training.

Seeing as how he has been dead for more than a century connecting to his thinking may be difficult.

But enough has been handed down through the years for us to at least find the door, and hopefully prise it open.

Hints that have been left like breadcrumbs are often ignored because they have been usurped and used as cliches by the movie industry, or exhausted as advertising spin.

But it is these very cliches and spin statements that hold the key to understanding.

These are the ‘Smoke and Mirrors’ that hide Wing Chun.

And there are hundreds of them.

Here are a few that I found value in exploring.

He attacks first, but I strike first.

He walks the Bow, but I walk the string.

These two nuggets are from the Kuen Kurt, the language is flowery so we need to update it.

The first describes the reality of counter-attacking, in a simple clear way.

As you all know, I think that the majority of Wing Chun students do not understand counter-attack, but this is it in a nutshell.

Q. Does a counterattack need any kind of defensive action?

If your answer is yes, or some variation of simultaneous attack and defence, you are among the people that do not understand.

The second is a clear instruction that we attack with straight lines, we walk the bowstring.

But think about the things we use to try and sell Wing Chun.

We claim that Wing Chun is not a ‘they do that, so we do this’ type of Martial Art.

What does this imply, especially when we think about how we train, someone poses a strike {they do that} and we reply with a counter from the Wing Chun repertoire {so we do this}.

What we do in training is clearly not what we are meant to learn.

Here we go again with the ‘finger pointing at the moon’.

In our Science focused education system, we are accidentally taught to abandon abstract thinking.

But I maintain that only abstract thinking can cut through.

Think abstractly, but deeply, about statements such as ‘fighting without fighting’.

And my favourite ‘it is only when we do not try to use Wing Chun that we use Wing Chun’.

If as per the statement above Wing Chun is not a ‘they do that’ style of Martial Art, surely this is implying that we never know what is going on.

Think deeply about this one.

If we know what is going on, if we know what the opponent is trying to do then we are involved.

This is fighting.

Wing Chun does not fight.

As I have said there are hundreds of IDEAS we can think of, hundreds of breadcrumbs, you do not need to use the ones I use.

The message in the ‘Smoke and Mirrors’ reveals itself bit by bit, in small packages as our understanding grows.

When we have none or little understanding the ‘Smoke and Mirrors’ present themselves as a pile of steaming Horse Shit.

This is what the haters see, just plain white light.

With some understanding, shapes appear in the smoke, and weird, unrecognisable reflections flash across the mirrors, it is pretty much gobbledygook.

This is what the defenders see, still plain white light.

But a time does come when the IDEA presents itself as a Fog Lamp that cuts through the smoke, reflects off the mirrors, and illuminates the prize.

The Prism.

Violence is white light, Wing Chun is a Prism, and the training is a rainbow.

To understand a Concept’ we must use a ‘Concept’, to understand thinking we must use thinking.

After that, we just smack people.

THE MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY

Alfred Korzybski

My opponent did not need to work for the win, it was given to him.

About 15 or 20 years ago I was talking to a workmate when I discovered he trained in Karate, we began talking about training when he shared his opinion that Wing Chun didn’t work in a real fight.

When I asked him why he thought that punching people in the head or kicking them in the nuts did not work in a ‘Real Fight”, because that is part of what Wing Chun teaches, he said I did not understand what he meant so the obvious thing was to touch hands.

In a friendly way.

We were in a quiet part of a very large building so we decided there was no time like the present.

Long story short, he came second.

I may only train in Wing Chun, but I understand Karate.

I would stand out of range until he tried to close on me and then I would swarm him.

After a few minutes of this, pretty much rinse and repeat, we called it quits and I asked him what he now thought about Wing Chun.

At this point, he told me that what I had used was not Wing Chun.

This really puzzled me, how did he come up with that opinion?

Despite the fact that he did not train in Wing Chun, he knew that what I was doing was not it.

It turns out that what I had done was not what he had seen on YouTube. 

I was no longer surprised.

Lately, YouTube has been suggesting many videos to me that offer up a wide variety of opinions on Wing Chun.

Most of these are negative.

Most YouTube visitors are just searching for some kind of shortcut to what their teacher is offering and not really casting an intelligent eye on what is being shown, the majority of these people are still struggling to understand whatever Martial style it is that they are training in.

I am not trying to be mean, but most of them have a very limited idea of what Martial Arts do, especially their own Martial art.

One thing I can assure you of is that once we understand what makes our own style work we know what makes all styles work, and pretty soon we realise that all styles work.

After all, a punch is just a punch.

So it stands that if we do not fully understand why our own style works we will never understand how other styles work.

And of course, YouTube also appeals to people who love the idea of training in Martial arts, but lack the motivation to do the work.

After watching M.A. presentation after M.A. presentation they believe that they have absorbed a great deal of information, but without a personal, practical context, none of this information winds up as useable.

Therefore, in their lack of context, they proclaim that it does not work.

I grew up in post-WW.2. Britain, throughout all of my early life violence was commonplace, I have been, like all of my generation, in so many violent situations it even sounds exaggerated to me.

To be expected I did not win them all, no one does.

But in the situations that I came second in, there were very few times where I was beaten by a more skilled or better-trained fighter.

I made mistakes, I made poor decisions, and I lost.

My opponent did not need to work for the win, it was given to him.

Not all of the time for sure, but at least 90% of my losses were my own fault.

And even though I like to think the opposite is not true, 90% of my wins must have been the other guy making mistakes, and making poor decisions. 

This is reality.

We become better fighters by eliminating errors.

We eliminate errors through regular and intelligent training.

We eliminate errors by doing the little things right.

KNOWLEDGE IS GAINED BY ADDING SOMETHING NEW.

WISDOM IS GAINED BY TAKING AWAY SOMETHING OLD.

LAO TZU

Obviously, the sooner we redress the situation the better, but it is NEVER too late.

Learning any skill is a lot more of a puzzle than a task, and one of the most enabling and at the same time disabling aspects is how well we deal with mistakes we make along the way.

As Carl Sagan pointed out in his cautionary tale about the Bamboozle,

 ” If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge.”

But this effect happens at all levels of thought, we all avoid owning up to errors, especially if we worked hard to get to this incorrect position, and think we will need to restart the whole thing to get it right.

What can help with this is understanding what in a 1969 paper Management Trainer Martin Broadwell called the “4 levels of teaching”  which today is better known as the “4 levels of competence”.

The four stages are:

1. Unconscious incompetence. The individual does not understand or know how to do something and does not necessarily recognise the deficit. They may deny the usefulness of the skill. The individual must recognise their own incompetence, and the value of the new skill, before moving on to the next stage. The length of time an individual spends in this stage depends on the strength of the stimulus to learn.^[1]
   
2. Conscious incompetence. Though the individual does not understand or know how to do something, they recognise the deficit, as well as the value of a new skill in addressing the deficit. The making of mistakes can be integral to the learning process at this stage.
   
3. Conscious competence. The individual understands or knows how to do something. It may be broken down into steps, and there is heavy conscious involvement in executing the new skill. However, demonstrating the skill or knowledge requires concentration, and if it is broken, they lapse into incompetence.^[1]
   
4. Unconscious competence. The individual has had so much practice with a skill that it has become “second nature” and can be performed easily. As a result, the skill can be performed while executing another task. The individual may be able to teach it to others, depending on how and when it was learned.
   

Once we see that it is simply human nature to get everything wrong at first it makes it so much easier to retrace our steps and make a fresh start.

The main fear is that if it took us 10 years to get it wrong it will take another 10 years to correct this mistake.

No one is ever 100% wrong, it is usually more like 5 or 10%, and frequently it is not the physical aspects but how we think about or look at the physical aspects.

We were looking in the right direction but at the wrong thing.

The very fact that there is a Buddhist Sutras covering this is an indication of how prevalent it is among us all.

With respect to my  Wing Chun training, this was definitely the case for many years in my past, and through conversations with my teacher/sifu it was also his experience, and he told me that his teacher had told him the very same thing.

We should not fear getting things wrong, it is only by understanding what is incorrect that we can recognise what is correct.

Obviously, the sooner we redress the situation the better, but it is NEVER too late.

I have been actively teaching Wing Chun for over 25 years, and it is my observation, from teaching hundreds of Wing Chun students, that most students do not recognise what Wing Chun is trying to teach them.

They are looking at what they think is Wing Chun, but they are seeing something else.

There is no need to be upset or embarrassed by this, I was in this place, as was my Sifu, Jim Fung, and as was his Sifu, Choy Shun Tin. 

“I am a finger pointing to the moon. Don’t look at me; look at the moon.”

THE BUDDHA.

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.

This post could save your Bacon.

Guys.

Do not get nervous about there being more than two paragraphs to read and no video you can listen to on the toilet.

This post could save your Bacon.

Martial Art knowledge is a skill set, and like all skill sets it will work at different levels in different situations, excelling in some and being unsuited to others.

Think about it this way, being a great swimmer will not particularly help with your Maths homework.

We all get this, but for some reason, we do not think it applies to getting the most from our Martial Arts training.

To be able to fully utilise any skill set we need to have two things.

#1. As deep an understanding as possible of the ‘capacity’ of our skill -set.

#2. As deep an understanding as possible of the problem we hope to solve with our skill set.

Hopefully, now my swimmer doing maths homework does not sound so frivolous.

There is no easy or binary answer to this, it is always subjective, ‘Can I use the things I am learning to deal with the problem I anticipate’?

The first priority is of course identifying the problem.

What do we anticipate happening that we will need this skill set for?

This is why it is so subjective, my fears may not be your fears, my goals, may not be your goals.

I am choosing to generalise so that most of us can get the most out of reading this.

For us as Martial Artists, the potential problem is violence.

There are two sides to this coin.

#1. Violence that we chose to engage in.

#2. Violence we did not choose to engage in.

Let’s present this as option #1, a fight, and option #2, a mugging [being attacked].

Do we fully understand the difference between these options?

We must, many students fail or fear to recognise that they do not understand this.

If I am training to fight I will most likely fail in a ‘Mugging’.

Equally, if I am training to escape/survive a ‘Mugging’ I will most likely fail in a fight.

You can try to train for both but the requirements of time and effort are beyond the best of us.

Even professional fighters get mugged, never forget Anthony Mundine getting mugged at Brighton Beach [N.S.W.] at pretty much the peak of his ability.

Once we have made the decision the next question is….

What type of situation was our training devised for?

In our case, the training of Wing Chun, it is the training of a counter-attacking Martial Art.

It should be clear to all that we only counter-attack once we have been attacked [otherwise we are the attacker], so the primary objective of Wing Chun is to escape/survive a ‘Mugging’.

If we need to beat the ‘Brown Stuff’ out of the attacker to achieve this, so be it, but our primary intention is escape.

If you do not tick this box your future could be perilous.

In my imagined scenario, my justification for why I train in Wing Chun, I find myself in a situation where I have been attacked, I did not choose to be in this situation, but luckily, the skill set I possess is a great fit, I can engage this situation from a position of confidence.

It is of critical importance that we understand this not only before the violent situation materialises, but before we begin training in the first place.

I am pretty sure that we will all be in a different head-space over this, so here is some more information to hopefully help establish a more representative stance.

There is a tendency amongst Martial Artists to believe that whatever Martial Art they train, it is this training that will save the day.

This is very rarely the case.

No matter what style we use it is simply a tool to help us implement our current intentions, strategies, ideas, or whatever word fits the bill.

Basically, it helps us make good decisions.

Of greater importance is how we see the situation, as this will colour our understanding, influence any intentions, strategies, or ideas we may have, and it will heavily influence our decision-making.

Violent situations are won or lost by how well we understand what is happening and how well we implement any decisions we choose to balance this situation.

It is impossible to make suitable decisions if we do not know what is going on.

Are we identifying the situation correctly?

Are we fighting someone?

Are we attacking someone?

Are we being attacked by someone?

Fighting, attacking, and defending are not as is often mistakenly thought, different aspects of the same thing.

Fighting, attacking, and defending exist in different environments, and different worlds, they create different problems on physical, emotional, and mental levels that demand an almost specialist approach.

There is rarely a one-size-fits-all answer.

The old cliche of “Never take a knife to a gunfight” is a clear picture of how what may work well in one situation will just flat-out fail in another situation.

Are we fighting, are we attacking someone, or are we being attacked?

Is there a difference in mindset between these 3 situations? Only you can decide this.

Is there a difference in physical preparedness between these 3 situations? Only you can decide this.

Is there a difference in our mental/emotional reaction between these 3 situations? Only you can decide this.

Let’s unpack this a little and paint a simple picture to help us come to a better decision.

FIGHTING.

Fighting is a contest of two or more people trying to better their opponent and giving no quarter along the way, for whatever reason.

The goal is to win at all costs, to give everything until it has all gone.

There will be pain, there will be injury, it will be brutal.

FIGHTERS expect and accept this.

If someone is not physically, mentally, and emotionally trained to deal with being hit, being hurt, or being injured, their chances of success in a fight are diminished.

Being fit, being fast, and being strong is of little use if that person cannot handle being hurt.

The key to being a good FIGHTER is not any chosen style, every style can be effective, the key is training to work through the pain.

ATTACKING.

It is easy to think that attacking a defending are two sides of the same coin, but this is a serious mistake, they are two sides of related yet very different coins and require completely different thinking and approach.

To the attacker, the focus is on surprise, stealth, and even cheating.

There is no wish to engage the person they are attacking on any kind of level playing field.

Speed and surprise are the currency of an attacker, the sooner it is done and dusted the better.

In a perfect attack, the victim does not get the chance to defend themselves.

Think about that.

Attackers tend to lead with their most powerful or most successful weapon or tactic to the extent that they may flee the field if they do not get early success.

Very few attackers [bullies, muggers] are courageous.

DEFENDING.

As a victim of an attack, the most important thing is time.

Time for the defender to orient to this chaotic situation.

Time to allow the attacker to fail.

This may be a simple picture but it is valid.

Where all this gets confused and conflated is that there is a real chance we could find ourselves in a situation where we begin as a defender, somehow we find the time to turn the tables and become the attacker, but then find that we cannot close it out, so we just end up fighting.

This is a negative situation for everyone.

To give ourselves the highest hope of a positive outcome the first thing we need to establish is, what group do we identify with?

Are we Fighters?

Are we Attackers?

Are we Defenders?

Only once we decide who we are can we have any hope of enabling our training.

At this point, it is very important to get on board with the IDEA that all Martial Arts styles can do the job.

No one style is any better than any other style, it is always how well the practitioner can implement the training.

If we re-read the simple painting of the situation there are already some effective answers.

Only a FIGHTER trains to ignore pain, if we see ourselves as fighters are we training for this?

I know that I am not, I am training to hurt an attacker who more than likely cannot handle pain.

This more than anything else informs my training and as such it will hopefully inform my decision-making when the “Brown gets Airborne”.

MANY PEOPLE CAN IGNORE A HIT.

NO-ONE CAN IGNORE AN INJURY

TIM LARKIN. T.F.T.

Rule #1, move as well as a normal person can move when they are just being normal.

Hey Guys, picture this.

We are watching a sporting event, pick your favourite flavour on this, and one player catches our eye, they are not doing anything outrageously special, but everything they do is effortless, smooth, focused and uncluttered.

Our thought is that this person is an elite sportsperson.

Why?

Because they move so well.

This thought exercise holds true for any sport, so it is obviously not the movements themselves, after all, different sports use different actions.

Rule #1, move as well as a normal person can move when they are just being normal.

As I mentioned, different sports use different moves because they have different goals and agendas.

So do different martial arts.

But in their hearts, they are all just the same human movements.

The takeaway from this thought experiment is that nothing we do will be of any benefit to us if we do not move well as a person.

Despite the hype around Wing Chun Forms, they are just our IDEA of a normal movement that meets our specific needs.

like most of the posts on FaceBook this sounds good, but, it is actually Bullshit.

Hey Guys,

Just a quick post to keep in touch.

Sam, Costas and I were working on stuff on Saturday that I thought was quite important to share, we lost the sound early into the piece so there is no commentary on the practice, all the same I am posting a few frames of what we did, with a bit of Timo Mass playing, to seed the water so to speak.

We will revisit this on Thursday evening so if you can, be here, and get all the information instead of just about 5% which is all we really put in these videos.

The heart of this matter is a better understanding of the whole idea of being fast.

Mark Zuckerberg once stated that his motto for Facebook was “Move fast and break things”, like most of the posts on FaceBook this sounds good, but, it is actually Bullshit.

Wing Chun does not attack, Wing Chun counterattacks.

I have mentioned before how intercepting an incoming strike is essentially a ‘Hard Block’, something that we do not do with Wing Chun, and a major misunderstanding about contact.

This is not just a stylistic interpretation, it is a fundamental aspect of what Wing Chun is.

To intercept an incoming strike we must firstly be aware of the event as it unfolds, and secondly, be moving towards the contact.

Moving in towards contact is off course an act of attacking.

Wing Chun does not attack, Wing Chun counter attacks.

Many students struggle to appreciate the true nature of a counter-attack and fail to grasp some very basic even bedrock IDEAS that result from operating from a counter-attacking perspective.

Everyone pays lip service to the notion that we cannot counter-attack unless an attack has happened.

But few join the dots and arrive at the conclusion that an attack has not happened until a strike lands.

Nor do they understand the implications.

If we are in a violent situation we are not bound to only use Wing Chun.

If I choose I can intercept or block an incoming strike or even initiate a preemptive strike of my own, options that may be the better choice in situ.

If I am using Wing Chun Fist Logic the situation has been taken out of my hands, I am already the victim of an attack.

I can only counter-attack after an attack.

After a strike has landed or is at the very least microseconds away from landing.

If the choice is mine {which it will not be anyway} my best option is to let the strike land and not try to prevent it from landing.

Before everyone loses their shit over this comment this is not advice on what to do, it is simply pointing out the conditions needed for counter-attack and as such the conditions needed for Wing Chun.

Letting the incoming strike make contact does not mean that I just stand there and take it, it is more that I control the time, place, and manner of contact.

This is a strategic approach that once understood aids us in being in the best place, at the best time and doing the best thing. 

Although this is most definitely a strategic approach it is not about pre-planning or trying to force the attacker into moving how we wish them to move.

It is strategy from the perspective of knowing our options.

Like so much of Wing Chun this IDEA is counter-intuitive but once explored becomes the go to choice.

Sticks and Stones were the first weapons man ever used.

RANGES AND STICKS.

I always get bemused when people who claim to know things about violent physical interactions with other people start to talk about fighting ranges.

Anyone who does know about violence knows that there is only one range.

Contact.

When we consider the range that Wing Chun operates at as a self-defence-oriented martial art, what we are talking about is the other end of an attack.

Even if the initial strike is from what is sometimes called long-range, the follow-up is right down our throats so we should settle down and settle in.

Into being up close and personal.

Our very own Dai Sigung Isaac Newton and Sibak Albert Einstein made it very clear that time and space are two sides of the same coin.

When we are short of one we are short of both, so whatever we do it needs to be very quick, and very close.

There is a great deal of well-intentioned but misguided information kicking around the self-defence community, most of it can be blown away by basic high-school-level physics, and the rest by common sense.

We get out of bad situations by putting the bad guy down, it is not the best thought, but it is the truth.

Sticks and Stones were the first weapons man ever used.

And more than anything else, the only wrong move is not to move.

SPEAK SOFTLY AND CARRY A BIG STICK.

Theodore Roosevelt.

Concepts are IDEAS, seed IDEAS, that provide a departure point for exploration.

As a ‘Concept Driven’ Martial Art, we can and do, use training methods that are as much about understanding thought processes as they are about fighting.

Especially if we are digging deep into the theory of our FIST LOGIC.

Some of the more nuanced aspects such as INTENTION, which due to the peculiarities of the English language is always tricky to explain, and understanding what it means to release a strike and not push it are areas where a different approach can pay dividends.

Using IMAGINATION is one such tool.

It is important to come at this training with an open mind, but it is equally important to understand that this is just a TRAINING TOOL, a method to help us make a breakthrough that we can then work on with more familiar approaches.

As baby humans, “Play Acting” is how we learn all of our earliest lessons, it is something we all know how to do, and if we can allow ourselves to access this very old skill it can help us see things we would never see by other methods.

But as I say, this is just a training method, I am not suggesting that should be something we do in a dire situation.

All this kind of stuff is working on the conceptual aspect of Wing Chun, and as such we should not make the mistake of thinking that a “CONCEPT” is in any way real or what we are after.

Concepts are IDEAS, seed IDEAS, that provide a departure point for exploration.

REALITY: WHAT A CONCEPT.

ROBIN WILLIAMS.