Author: The "D" Man

No matter what we may think we are doing there is something happening that is real, measurable and usually contrary to what we think we are actually engaged in.

Body Alignment for instance, is an important topic in any Martial Art, most styles have their own particular approach that is usually played out in different stances and movement patterns, but in this Universe the only thing we ever align ourselves with is Gravity. 

Because we have lived with Gravity for every second of our lives we tend not to notice it, and we need to.

Gravity infuses everything we do, constantly.

Gravity is pulling us down towards the centre of our planet’s mass, the reason we do not end up flat on the floor is that all of our collective body parts are FALLING into our Feet in such a way that they stack up on top of each other to create a balanced structure.  This is the same with buildings, trees and even mountains.

In most Martial Arts the first learning objective is to be able to stand in this Balanced State that prevents us from falling over, there are numerous ways to achieve this, but they all have the same Goal.

Aligning ourselves with Gravity so that all of our weight FALLS into our Feet. 

 If our balance is correct we will not require any tension to hold us still, if there is tension then you are not in balance.  

This is easy to test, just stand still. 

 If you are out of balance you will use tension to stop you from falling, this will fatigue the Muscle providing the tension, when this happens your body will independently move to a new position that will also be out of balance and require tension to prevent falling over, you see this all the time, people shifting from one leg to the other, mostly unaware that it is even happening.

It is easy to think that we use the Muscular Tension to hold us IN balance, but this is incorrect, the tension is holding us out of balance.

When we are in balance there is no need for tension.

Gravity is always pulling on us, if we do anything to work against this we are fighting force.  

Think deeply about that.

 If you are engaged in anything except allowing all of your Body to sink down, to drain into the Earth, you are fighting force and cannot possibly be relaxed no matter what you may think you are doing.

Once we have established balance and stillness it is time to introduce movement.

All movement is a result of our interaction with the Planet, all power comes from our interaction with the Planet, being still is a result of our interaction with the Planet.

The first moves are usually small, minor, often just an Arm, if my movement takes any of my weight out of my feet, if it in any way interferes with the constant sinking into the ground of every part that is me then it is no longer working with Gravity but is in fact fighting it.

Wherever I may choose to move it the weight of my Arm, my Feet must go to, or at the very least the action must not take anything away from my feet.

As difficult as this is to imagine if you think deeply on it you realise that there is no other way if we are to remain in unity with Gravity.

Take 20 minutes every day for a week to think deeply about this, take notes discuss it with friends, use what you discover to examine what you think you know, examine what you think you understand.

It is not about me being right or wrong, this is the way our Universe works, agreeing or disagreeing will not change the reality of our Cosmos.

When you understand ……  things are just the way they are.

When you do not understand ……   things are just the way they are.

When we move we must move with Gravity, so every move begins as a downward move.  

My foot presses the Planet, and the Planet presses back. 

Even when I am standing still the stacking of my body that allows my weight to fall into my foot creates this press.

When still my foot presses the planet, this is the fundamental connection.

The more aware of this you can be, the more you can accomplish with it.

The most important aspect of any stance or any movement is the relationship between our foot and the Planet.

When engaged in Chi Sau, a dynamic drill that encompasses both accepting and issuing force, we lose all idea of gravity, it is now just Chi Sau, for Chi Sau’s sake.

is it even possible to monitor how we are dealing with gravity?

Ultimately if we lose our control of, on, or with gravity, whether we are in a violent situation or a training situation, nothing we attempt will be successful.

My teacher would often come up to me when I was engaging in Chi Sau with a schoolmate and ask “What are your ankles doing”?

A quick aside regarding the video below, especially for any guests that may get confused with this type of training, but also for students who forget that there is a step after this, the step where we develop our own way to turn this IDEA into a practical, physical application for use in a chaotic violent situation.

It should be no surprise to learn that our nervous system is seriously invested in our survival, and as such it will override our brain {and if it deems it is necessary to ignore our training} when it comes to deciding how fast we do things, it will however naturally strive to at least equal the speed of the incoming strike, so it is more important that we are moving with a smooth, even rhythm that can be upsized to suit our needs.

All of our training is a method to physically represent the IDEA behind the work, it is not techniques, it is Wing Chun Science if you would, our Fist Logic.

Isaac Newton, the greatest of all Wing Chun elders, taught us that it takes more effort to make a still object move than it does to keep something moving or even speed up that movement, think about pushing a car.

Any IDEA that we can make work against a static object/training partner will work even more effortlessly against a moving object/training partner, and never forget that speed is just a metric.

This video is just a record of a normal training session, we are working on understanding an aspect of “The little IDEA” and as such see how our “Fist Logic” works in any shape, from any position in any situation.

GRAVITY SUCKS.

THE “D” MAN.

Chi Sau is a game that we play by our own rules to get an outcome that we alone wish for, for reasons only we know.

Growing out of the last post and the premise that “if we do not know what we are looking for we will never find it”, here is a re-run from just after the first lockdown, it will help us move back into trying to establish some form of an understanding of what to look for in our training, I will cover this over the next few weeks.

Chi Sau is a game that we play by our own rules to get an outcome that we alone wish for, for reasons only we know.

In this way it is both remarkable and hopeless.

I think it is remarkable.

Many years ago when I was getting Tennis Instruction from an Australian National Coach, I was informed that we can only ever learn what we already know, which explains why I never made it to State Grade, but what does it tell us about our Chi Sau?

If what we do does not affect the bad guy what is the purpose of training/using it?

WORK ON YOUR WEAKNESS’ – PLAY TO YOUR STRENGTH.

“The most difficult aspect of Wing Chun is accepting how simple it is”.

Hey Guys,

I have been using Youtube a great deal lately, and as such the recommendations that the YouTube algorithm throws at me daily have included many Wing Chun offerings.

At its heart, Youtube is just a self-promotion/ advertising platform, and as such what is offered frequently exists on very different levels of honesty from our everyday lived experience.

Especially in the realm of Wing Chun.

But we all watch Youtube and it has a disproportionate effect on our views and opinions.

When watching anything on YouTube we should think “Buyer Beware”.

The following Video is more me having a conversation with anyone that is willing to listen than anything else, however, if you can understand what I am talking about it may help your training exponentially

A couple of the things I remember my Sifu saying to me may help you navigate this video.

“The most difficult aspect of Wing Chun is accepting how simple it is”.

Jim Fung

“There is no reason to pressure ourselves about learning Wing Chun because we already know everything there is”.

Jim Fung

https://vimeo.com/845801270?share=copy

As a Wing Chun practitioner, I get upset when people from other styles bag us out and say we are nothing but con men selling nothing but false hope.

I know first-hand how good Wing Chun’s Fist Logic is, but I also know how much of what is called Wing Chun by the mainstream, is just a diluted and misunderstood version of what we do, designed for no other reason than to protect the rice bowl.

I truly, truly feel for people that spend years upon years looking at their Finger, and missing the Moon.

The really sad thing is that when you point these things out to the finger watchers, they feel that they have too much invested to change.

My Sifu was a very smart man and he was spot on with his observations.

Actively working on combos is, in my opinion, just training us to be impatient.

In the Bruce Lee film ‘Enter the Dragon’ when talking about being defeated the character played by Jim Brown says “WHEN IT COMES I WON’T EVEN NOTICE, I’LL BE TO BUSY LOOKING GOOD”.

Without intention what he is referring to is that if we are looking good we will probably lose, we are just dancing, a winning physical interaction is at best messy, usually downright ugly, but most importantly, it never looks GOOD.

As madcap as it sounds, when watching a movie or video clip if it looks like it would work in a real situation, it will more than likely fail.

But we are all human and get impressed by dance moves pretending to be fighting.

But if shit happens my advice is, ’don’t dance, just fight’.

Chi Sau training, when it is valuable and practical, from the outside will always look messy and weak if it looks good it is because we are succeeding in doing something our partner cannot counter.

But that is a fighting mentality, that is us trying to do something to our opponent, great fun and a big part of the Chi Sau game, but it is also the trigger for the trap.

The thing we really want to learn is how to prevent our opponent from doing something, anything, to us.

If we can negate our partner’s attack and open them up we can do anything we want at any time, this is the core of Chi Sau training, this is understanding how to transition from being attacked.

In training exercises, we are working on implementing one specific IDEA, but if we hope to prevail against an attacker out in the wild it will need multiple IDEAS.

Skill, ability, and effectiveness are governed more by transitions than combinations.

Perform one skill correctly then rapidly transition to another skill and do that correctly, rinse and repeat.

We can only transition between skills if we see them as individual skills, and as such we must train them as individual skills.

Actively working on combos is, in my opinion, just training us to be impatient.

Looking at this video it is tempting to say that what is going on with these guys is weak, not very good W.C. and would fail if we were in trouble.

But the truth is that this is very powerful training, the guys are staying in control of their shape, and their balance, not losing their composure and not trying to win when the win is not there.

This is what wins a violent conflict, not techniques or even power.

Control ourselves, stick to the plan, and trust the work and what we know.

“Your mind is a battlefield, be its commander, not its soldier.”

the overriding intention is ‘do the work, do not hang around, go home’.

It appears to be that time of year again, the time when Kung Fu Masters choose to step into an arena to battle fighters from other disciplines.

The clip I have here was recently posted to our WhatsApp group by Sam, it is a Kung Fu Master vs a youngish Female Boxer.

The difference in age, build, and weight is quite significant.

The only info I have of the two fighters is what is given in the video, but I have no reason to doubt the commentator.

The usual approach is to bag-out the Kung Fu guy for not being the second coming of Bruce Lee and generally covering him in scorn.

But why?

Even though it has been well over 40 years since I took someone on competitively, I remember the nerves stepping through the ropes, or onto that mat.

This ‘caper’ is not for the faint at heart, and we should at least give them some respect for this.

When Kung Fu practitioners talk about these events there is the suggestion that none of us cares about these fools and the games they play.

If that is the case why are the comments so brutal?

We do feel it, deep inside, we do get embarrassed, and feel ‘Tarred with the same brush’, and with a certain percentage of students, this creates a sense of doubt.

But I ask you, doubt about what?

Doubt about our ability to hold our nerves when we step into an area with someone that wants to hurt us?

Doubt about our conditioning to chase that someone around a ring for 15 minutes?

Doubt about our capacity to ignore punishment and carry on when the other fighter hits us?

This is not what we train for, so where does this doubt come from?

We should simply not go there.

What Kung Fu, and any other self-defence-minded Martial Art trains for, the environment we will find ourselves in so to speak, is a very short, very intense, unprepared-for attack.

The thing that makes this environment so difficult is that we will, to a certain degree, be caught out, be surprised, be shocked, the thing could be over before we know it has begun.

However, if we can reverse the flow, and surprise or shock our attacker, then the path ahead becomes much easier to navigate.

This is the concept of counter-attack, this is what we train.

It is not about swapping punches, is about turning tables.

If we look at the video we should ask ourselves….

Q. #1. Where are the Kung Fu skills?

All we see is an apparently untrained brawler trying to face off against a moderately trained boxer, which begs the obvious question…

Q. #2. Why is this trained Kung Fu Master choosing to brawl instead of using Kung Fu?

All Kung Fu styles, but particularly Wing Chun, operate from a position of responding to someone attacking us, that is the whole IDEA of self-defence.

It is hard to access self-defence IDEAs if we are the ones doing the attack.

If we look at this fight through the lens of our own ‘FIST LOGIC’ it is the young boxer, if anyone, that is employing Kung Fu philosophy.

This gets down to something I have been banging on about for years.

Kung Fu, and especially Wing Chun Kung Fu, does not fight.

Let’s spend a minute and clear this up a bit.

What is a fight?

A fight is an event where 2 people openly attack each other, that is it in a nutshell, attack, attack, attack, usually the closest anyone gets to defending themselves is through evasion.

‘Fighting‘ is not what Kung Fu prepares for.

What type of event does Kung Fu prepare for, and again, specifically Wing Chun Kung Fu?

It trains for an unwanted, unexpected, violent situation, and the goal is to get out of there as soon as possible, with a minimum amount of damage.

Obviously, to escape we may first need to incapacitate the attacker, but the overriding intention is ‘do the work, do not hang around, go home’.

Choosing to engage with another person in a fight, or trying to get ourselves out of an unwanted situation are two completely different environments with very different needs, and very different outcomes.

For every environment, there is an optimum way to interact with that environment.

Trying to use self-defence IDEAS for fighting is just choosing an inappropriate means of interaction with that environment.

A bit like Ballroom dancing in a wet suit and flippers.

I am sure someone could make it work, but why even try?

The skills we need are much less specialised physical skills, and more the ability to pick the right tool for the job.

This comes down to understanding what that job is, for example, are we choosing to fight someone as if duelling to defend our honour?

It comes down to detailing the outcomes we wish for, for example, are we looking to prove a point and set someone straight or just get out of there in one piece?

But most importantly, it is deeply understanding the capacity of what we are training to get us the results we want to get.

The video below is quite long, you will get what I am going on about in the first few minutes, but it is worth watching it all.

As always if this creates any kind of confusion we can do a training session to focus on this aspect.

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

Winston Churchill.

To a large extent, we don’t need to, because Dr Leung Jan found himself at this very juncture and made that call for us.

As someone that completed an apprenticeship, I have first-hand knowledge that the things I was expected to learn to get my Trade Papers, were things that were of limited value out in the field.

I would imagine this holds true for every trade, every profession, and every discipline.

Apart from anything else the outside world moves on.

After years of use, not overnight, inherent deficiencies in the old method come to light and because of this, the training IDEA gets seriously modified, if not abandoned.

Training is, by its very nature, years behind what is wanted at the ‘Coal Face’.

Fortunately, when we do enter the workforce, we are surrounded by journeymen that are up to speed with the job at hand and a new phase of training begins.

When we sit down and think about it, training in any discipline or subject is never enough, it is just a bridge to get us from where we are to where we need to be.

And if we are still actively training, we are not there yet.

Two things become clear…

 1. Because the outside world moves on, it is required of us that we are constantly trying to keep pace with it.

2. As situations change our job changes, and as our job changes our training must change or we get left behind.

In the workplace whole Industries vanish, factories retool, and workers undergo re-training in a new field, this is what we all know to be true and has been a constant since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

Do we really miss Steam Trains?

When we think of this and then turn our thoughts to the suitability of our ‘Old Training’, things like, where it came from, what its was intended for, and measure it against what is needed in todays world can we be objective enough to be honest?

To a large extent, we don’t need to, because Dr Leung Jan found himself at this very juncture and made that call for us.

When it comes to problem-solving and decision-making, the clunky, heavy bits, like machinations, applications, and fabrications all change, but something ethereal remains.

The one thing that puts Homo Sapiens at the top of the tree remains.

The ability to engage in reasonable, analytical, logical thought remains.

Our ability to take old, perhaps outdated information and change it into a new IDEA.

A new way.

A new answer.

But here is the “GOOD NEWS”.

When all we need to change is our thinking there is no need for a wholesale retool, no need to abandon all of our previous hard-won skills.

At its heart Wing Chun is a set of IDEAS that sit inside the boundaries of…

Directness, 

Simplicity, 

The Economy of Movement, 

Non-Use of Brute Force 

Practicality.

If we can engage these concepts along the lines of De Bono’s 6 Thinking Hats they become timeless, malleable and always fit for purpose.

Any method that abides by these principles, irrelevant of source or intention, as if by magic, becomes Wing Chun, so in practice, there is no set M.O.

With no set or default method, the catalogue of commonly used, practical techniques, is, to be expected, somewhat fluid.

Wing Chun is constantly improving, always starting anew.

Continued growth along a set path or set direction is evolutionary.

The ability to change in any direction, along any path, which I.M.O. is ground zero for Wing Chun, is revolutionary.

Wing Chun translates into English as “Everlasting Springtime”.

Spring is the season of rebirth.

Wing Chun could just as easily be translated into ‘Never Ending Rebirth”.

Continuous improvement and continuous growth are fuelled by change and pragmatism.

In true Mandalorian spirit…

This is why there are so many different styles and training methodologies in Wing Chun, and yet they are all Wing Chun.

To less experienced students that are looking for, hoping for, guidance, secret knowledge, or perhaps a splash of special sauce, this could be a concern.

However, for more experienced students who know in their hearts that a punch is just a punch, this becomes a 2Ltr bottle of Special Sauce.

As I mentioned in the last post, there must have been a first-ever violent confrontation between two men, so whatever they did, even though it had never been done before, became normal human behaviour because it was being done without outside interference or coaching.

 By normal human beings.

As simple as this sounds it is not not all plain sailing.

Even with our eyes wide open ‘Training’ can become a trap.

An invisible, imperceptible trap, that we build with nothing but good intentions.

It can become the antithesis of what we think it is.

None of us are safe from this, we are all prone to fall for this trap, even Instructors and Masters.

Come to think of it especially Instructors and Masters, at this level most practitioners have forgotten why they took up the training in the first place.

Avoidance is impossible so we need a key, a file in a Cake, or a get-out-of-jail-free card.

For Dr Leung Jan, who was only interested in finding a way out of his own trap, Wing Chun was that get-out-of-jail-free card.

But what do we use?

If learning and understanding Wing Chun has become the reason we train, Wing Chun has become the trap.

Perhaps we should stop reading the Kuen Kuit and start reading Hegel.

History teaches that people have never learned anything from history.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

We do not help our training partners by not putting them at risk

HEY GUYS,

Watching Sam and Saleh rough-housing the other day reminded me that training with someone of a much lower level should be embraced by the more senior student for what we can learn about ourselves, and not just considerd to be a teaching or mentoring situation.

Apart from being fun for all involved, it allows the senior to get an IDEA of how easily things could work against an ordinary, potentially lesser-skilled person {which would describe the average Bad Guy that is likely to attack a complete stranger} to get almost real-world results without all of the shit that comes with violence.

For the Junior training partner, as long as they do not have a loss of confidence it can allow them to see where continued training can take them, that progress stems from a better understanding of objectives that leads to better outcomes and not just trying harder, and that power comes from the correctness of application.

Seniors students do the same things but the results are poles apart.

However, progress is easier to attain if we are on a level playing field that offers no easy excuses.

As difficult as it is to imagine it, there must have been a time and place when the first violent exchange between humans took place.

So the first question that arises is, ‘what style did these two guys use’?

And then the thought of who taught them?

Obviously, no one taught them, after all this is the first-ever fight.

Whatever they did was instinctive, and innate.

The rules of natural selection would lead us to think that the Victor of this first-ever fight was whichever person was bigger, faster, stronger because when all else is equal these are the advantages that make a difference.

As is usually the case payback was hoped for but the loser, let’s call him Man #1 now had to find a way to overcome the advantages that his opponent had, let’s call him Man #2.

For instance, as a means to negate the superior reach of his opponent Man #1 chose to use his leg to reach in under the incoming punch.

Or perhaps Man #1 chooses to use better movement choices before engagement so as to be behind Man #2 and be able to attack from a safer position.

In short, the first fighting style was formulated, 

Martial Arts had begun and the goal was to negate the advantages that Man #2 had over Man #1.

This is of course the goal of every organised fighting system.

To overcome any of our opponent’s advantages.

Somehow this gets lost, and it becomes about overcoming our own perceived disadvantages, and how we can improve our perceived disability.     

We lose sight of it being how we can avoid things being done to us.

But somewhere inside we know that everything is about dealing with the other person’s advantages.

So as we improve somehow the threat we think we will face escalates.

Mysteriously Man #2 has also been training, the unknown threat becomes greater so that Man #2 is always better than us.

As long as we are thinking about our own lack of ability we are not working with a reference that has relevance in any potential reality.

A question we should ponder is ‘If we do not know the ability of Man #1 how can we avoid it’?

Without some level of understanding of this conundrum, it is quite possible that we are about to spend 20 years becoming the best in the world at the wrong thing.

We could be the world’s best grappler and get knocked out by the first punch.

We could be the world’s best striker and be immediately taken to the floor and choked out.

We could be the world’s best grappler and striker only to be hit in the back of the head with a stick.

When we become our own frame of reference, focusing on only our own ability all we do is feed our fear.

After all, if we have no IDEA of what Man #2 will do we are always stepping into the unknown.

That is the one thing everyone fears.

No matter why we began training in Martial Arts, or why we continue to train in Martial Arts the Martial Arts themselves have just one purpose, one desired outcome. 

This ‘OUTCOME’, is the IDEA we are trying to understand through our training.

But we can get lost and begin to think that training is all about the method of achieving that ‘OUTCOME’.

This approach to training becomes a trap.

Can we avoid this in training?

For one thing, we could change how we describe to ourselves what we are planning to do and learn to avoid, not defend, the most common attack that we think there is.

Even when I do use a technique to defend myself If I engage Man #2s incoming strike I am avoiding being hit.

We will all have our own thought about what this attack may be, but there is always one that we worry about, one that tests our confidence.

Here is the hard bit.

Then we must give our training partners permission to do it to us, a complete free pass, at first within comfortable speed and force parameters but it must be done in a way that if we do not avoid it will making contact we will be hit.

When we play the agonist, the attacker, we do the same thing for our partner.

This is BEING A GOOD BAD GUY.

If both partners are of similar skill levels, and both commit to BEING A GOOD BAD GUY, the action/reaction of attack/defence will be the same from both sides.

The training objective and what we are trying to observe and understand in this exercise is how difficult it is, even when we try our best, to land a blow on someone with our type of training, even at our current level of training.

As I said at the beginning, seniors and juniors do the same thing, seniors just do it better, so our current level is always good enough.

This is inside-out training in many ways.

Here we are, the Bad Guy, trying our best to succeed but all the same failing miserably.

This is the aim of this exercise.

 The harder we try, the more we fail, the better the proof that what we do has merit.

Think about it, if I try to land a true strike on my partner and he can prevent it then it stands as proof positive that the training works.

To be of value we cannot go easy on each other, it must always be as real as it can safely be, there should be a little uneasiness, a level of doubt.

A proper punch, even at half speed and half force, will have the correct shape and correct alignment, and more importantly, the correct intention and only the correct defence will stop it.

We must abandon any idea of going easy on our partners as they will with us.

What all training is really about is navigating risk.

We do not help our training partners by not putting them at risk, and in return they do not help us.

This next IDEA may sound contradictory, but once we are capable of dealing with these training attacks, situations that we can deal with, we need to deliberately pick it up to a point where we cannot deal with the attack.

In this instance BEING A GOOD BAD GUY translates to working faster, but still within acceptable force parameters than our partner can cope with.

Yes, squeaky bum time.

In this aspect of the exercise, as defenders we let our emotions run the show.

No false bravado.

Not standing our ground against our better judgement because we know it is only training and we know our partner does not want to hurt us.

If our partner is BEING A GOOD BAD GUY and going all in this will be the easiest part of that evening’s training.

We may flinch, we may duck or even try to get away under the onslaught but if we are both still in the same moment what we feel happening to ourselves under the attack will also happen to our partner when we attack them when it is our turn.

The training objective and what we are trying to observe and understand in this exercise is how our training method affects someone that is not ready for it.

Which will be everybody, think about it, no one chooses to attack someone else expecting to be battered.

At first, we will not be able to observe how our body and nervous system are usurping control, as we react without thinking, but once we review what just happened can pay attention to how we feel, we can get a first-hand experience of how a human being, any human being, all human beings respond to violent shock.

Underneath all of our training we are just ordinary people, and ordinary people are driven more by results than by methods.

Too many students spend their limited training time focusing on producing a movement via a prescribed method, instead of focusing on what that movement produces.

The most valuable use of training time comes from learning to improve something we already know. 

The least valuable use of training time comes from trying to learn something new.

The ‘D’ MAN.

 Before we can do “our thing” we must accept “this thing”.

This post is essentially working from where I left off in last week’s post, about the wisdom of ‘stepping back’ as opposed to the perceived advice of the Kuen Kuit which is the opposite.

To anyone reading this in Sydney N.S.W. If you fancy checking us out, to get a handle on exactly what we are going on about, the best time to do it is now, call me.

You guys have heard me say many times that Wing Chun is back to front.

That we are not trying to learn the things we practice in training.

Rather we are trying to learn a method or methods of how to achieve the results of this practice.

From this perspective, all Martial Arts are the same.

All Martial Arts are a way of retelling  the parable of  “The finger pointing at the Moon”

As “out there” as this might sound, when ”it” hits the fan, the last thing we need, and the last thing we should reach for, is our Kung Fu skill.

But we will reach for it, sooner or later.

The most important thing to bed down first is self-control, or at least an understanding of the things that cannot be controlled.

This is as much a management thing as it is a frontline worker thing, and as such we need good management skills more than we need Kung Fu skills.

And the most important thing to manage is preparation.

It may sound like crazy talk to say we must be prepared for this unknown and potentially unknowable happening.

But we can be.

 By being the best version of ourselves before the shit happens.

Enough sleep, enough hydration, decent nutrition and the minimum of stress from any outside source.

However, dealing with “IT” when and where “IT” happens comes down to “emotional self-regulation”.

Learning to manage our ego, our self-talk and emotional responses to counter the negative effects of being in the middle of this thing we would much rather not be in at all.

Anger, anxiety, fear, and even panic will pass within a few short moments if we can get control of our breathing and score a little bit of time and space.

This can often be achieved with something as simple as an apology.

There is no need to mean this apology, but it will buy us time.

And time breeds space.

A quick caveat regarding space.

Space is being in touch or out of touch, if the Bad Guy can reach us with an extended leg, we are too close, if the Bad Guy cannot touch with a folded arm, we are too far away.

The point of practicing our FORMS is to create a calm, balanced and objective state of mind that we can readily assume whenever we find ourselfvesunder pressure. 

When we suddenly realise that here “IT” is.

Now is the time.

 Confusion will be natural, chances are high that we will not know why this is happening.

 Before we can do “our thing” we must accept “this thing”.

We must accept the uncertainty of the situation.

Only then can we make things happen.

It is only now that we can hold any hope of our training kicking in.

That is the Ace up our sleeve.

Our training kicking in.

The first fight we need to win is against our negative self.

After we win that fight the ‘Bad Guy’ will be a push-over.

Often literally.

A violent shove and a loud yell can turn the largest of foes into a Bunny Rabbit.

Knock ‘em down, stick ‘em in the pot. 

Not literally, of course, this is a Poetic license.

THE “D” MAN.

This is not fighting advice, this is behavioural advice.

This post has been inspired by some of the comments over the last few weeks while working with knives and then finding ways to transfer the work to a practical/violent situation. 

We have been putting in the hard yards on the physical-dynamic side of training, so I thought a change of pace may be called for, and give our little grey cells a turn.

Wing Chun does not have a universally recognised theoretical approach, this is part and parcel of it being a ‘Concept’ driven style, and because of this the closest we come to an operating manual is the Kuen Kuit, which is a collection of training hints passed down from days gone by.

To my knowledge, the ‘Kuen Kuit’ was never set down at any one time or at any one place by any one Master or practitioner, so it is very much just a collection of suggestions from a collection of senior students describing things as they saw it at that time.

And it was a very different time than today with very different problems.

My own view of Wing Chun today, after 30 years of training, is completely different than it was 10 years ago after 20 years of training, and I am sure this is true of all senior practitioners.

The blokes that put down the ‘Kuen Kuit’ were no different from any of us mob, today’s senior practitioners and the IDEAS in the Kuen Kuit are best seen as just opinions.

This post is my opinion.

Good or Bad, it is up to each one of us to decide the value of any opinions.

My main concern about considering the Kuen Kuit as a FIST LOGIC BLUEPRINT is the style in which it is written, the IDEAS and advice presented are cryptic and open to many different translations and interpretations.

This post’s title stemmed from a quote you can find in the ‘Kuen Kuit’ that runs a somewhat controversial flag up the flagpole with the IDEA that WING CHUN never takes a backward step.

What do we think this means?

In my Sifu’s school, this IDEA implied that Wing Chun relentlessly pressed forward, and to this extent that was exactly how it was trained.

I was looked upon as a spoiler when I voiced disagreement and pointed out that having the awareness to adequately respond to what is happening in the chaos of a random attack, which is Wing Chun’s area of operation, is difficult enough and that trying to force a pre-planned agenda is pretty much impossible.

This only led to a circular argument about reaction or response that solved nothing.

At the end of the day we stand or fall by the decisions we make ‘in the moment’ much more than by any strategy or agenda we believe in. Good decisions grow from good information much more than intense training.

And of course, self-knowledge, the goal of all training in all styles.

While there are without doubt some individuals that willingly walk towards danger, the majority of us will always choose to walk away from it.

Incidentally, once our nervous system senses danger this choice will be made for us on a subconscious level and not by any kind of wishful thinking on our part developed during training.

I have always considered Wing Chun to be a clever and insightful Martial Style, deliberately training to work against our base instincts is neither of these things, but this is just my opinion.

When we are talking about information and data collection, the bigger the picture is the more information we can gather.

The genesis of Wing Chun was during the Taiping Rebellion in the late 1800’s, a particularly violent period of S.E. China’s history that lasted for 15 years and is estimated to have cost 30,000,000 lives.

During the Taiping Rebellion social order had broken down and it became every man for themselves.

Decisions that people faced were often life or death.

Try to put yourself in their shoes for a moment, do we walk in and take our chances, or do we use caution and aim for safety?

We may never find ourselves in such a predicament as the Cantonese of the late 1800s but this was the thinking that forged Wing Chun.

I have another issue with this IDEA of relentlessly, physically, pushing forward.

As a young teenage boxer, I soon found out that walking into punches hurts just as much as being hit by an advancing opponent.

Relentlessly, physically, pushing forward automatically adopts an attacking win-at-all-costs mindset, it leaves no space for readjustment if things go pear-shaped.

And when things do go pear-shaped they do it in an instant.

A deeply recognised part of our FIST LOGIC is Counter-Attacking, our philosophy is that we have a better chance to defeat an opponent that is committed to an attack than we do by attacking ourselves.

Following this last thread puts us in danger of drifting away from the question here, so let’s claw our way back.

To what does ‘Wing Chun never takes a backward step‘ refer?

Like the guys that wrote the ‘Kuen Kuit’ this is just my opinion, but it is an opinion that I have reached through lived experiences, and not me renting someone else’s opinion.

This is not fighting advice, this is behavioural advice.

The most valuable commodity in a physical altercation is time, time to think, time to make good decisions, and time to act.

The best way to earn more time is to create more space between ourselves and the attacker.

The best way to create more space is to move out of reach.

The most effective way to move out of reach is to take a backward step.

If we understand that the only reason we would be using our training is to get out of what is a serious and dangerous situation, not taking a backward step refers to never giving up.

It is about heart, it is about courage, it is about determination.

In the moment we may need to step away to evade, to step back in to attack, only to find the attacker is clued up and we need to step away again.

We will most certainly get hit, we may take damage and we may need to step away to regain our composure.

If we are teaching ourselves to step in, to press forward, how do we survive the curve ball?

I will end this by repeating myself…

… At the end of the day we stand or fall by the decisions we make ‘in the moment’ much more than by any strategy or agenda we believe in. Good decisions grow from good information much more than intense training.

What kind of day is it for you?

Even though I am one of the first to say that ‘training is not fighting’.

I also believe that ‘how we train is how we will fight’.

THE ‘D’ MAN.

When we land a punch we create a collision with the target and our punch.

As Instructors at my sifu’s school, we were all required to deliver the same definition of  Wing Chun power to our students, which was…

F = M x A.  

Force = Mass x Acceleration.

This is obviously correct, but due to how the English language uses the word acceleration, as in something going faster, this could, and did, lead to misunderstandings.

Acceleration is a change in velocity.

Slowing down is a change in velocity.

Therefore slowing down is also acceleration!

Thinking that acceleration was just going faster made it difficult for students to understand the many ways of bringing about a change of velocity and ultimately led to students trying to speed things up and using unneeded effort.

It is much easier to think of Power as a measurement of Work done over Time.

This may sound a bit cumbersome but it makes things clearer once we get it.

Wikipedia explains it this way…

…As a simple example, burning one kilogram of coal releases much more energy than detonating a kilogram of TNT  but because the TNT reaction releases energy much more quickly, it delivers far more power than the coal…

LINK TO PAGE HERE

Now we can approach the issue from the perspective of releasing energy.

When we land a punch we create a collision with the target and our punch.

The energy released in a collision is the sum of the mass of both parts, so the power generated is no longer just coming from our punch but from the combined mass of both people involved.

The first thing to consider is that to release 100% of our share of this total amount of energy our punch must land perfectly on our target.

For optimum power production, the accuracy of our technique is more important than our speed of delivery.

One way to help achieve this accuracy is to travel over the shortest possible distance.

And of course, shorter distances result in quicker travel times for the same energy investment.

If we can bring about a situation where everything is happening, not necessarily moving, quicker, for example allowing the attacker to move toward us, and delay our response until the last possible minute, we increase the chance of accurate contact while simultaneously shortening the time it takes to release the potential energy of the collision.

As complex and Nerdy as this may sound, this is a central IDEA in Wing Chun’s Fist Logic so all we need is to trust the training and perform the task, understanding is preferred but not needed for this approach to suceed.

The Hierarchy of Movements and the Summation of Forces.

The Hierarchy of Movements…The strongest and lowest body parts around the centre of gravity move first, followed by the weaker, lighter, and faster extremities.

e.g. We move our Pelvis, then our Pelvis moves our Chest/Shoulder, and then our Shoulder moves our Arms.

Summation of Force… Essentially this means that when multiple forces act upon the same object in the same direction these forces add together.

When we move our Pelvis as we do in Chum Kiu, and then rotate our torso as we do in Big Gee, and finally extend our Arm to strike as we do in S.L.T. these individual forces add up to create a much greater force.

All of the relevant body parts do not need to initiate at the same time but all of the relevant body parts do need to be moving together at the moment of contact for this to work.

There can be a minor disconnect between the step, the twist, and the punch at initiation as long as they are all moving toward the target as the strike lands.

When we look at the relative distances covered by each section of our body as we engage an attacker, the punch, which under ideal circumstances is only travelling 1 inch, the fabled “inch power”, needs to start later than the step and upper body twist to avoid landing too soon, and as a result, is always playing catch-up.

This natural catch-up creates yet more [positive/faster] acceleration to an already [positively/faster] accelerating body.

When we engage in FORM analysis the goal is not to learn the FORM, the goal is to maintain control of our body as it plays out movement.

In this way, every one of our FORMS is teaching the same lesson.

IT IS NOT SPEED THAT KILLS.

IT IS THE SUDDEN STOP.

SIGUNG ISAAC NEWTON.