PIC
Of all the people that post videos in Woing Chun I have the utmost respect for Alan Orr.
Here is a recent video that hits the nail right on the head.
This gentleman is a real teacher.
ALAN ORR TELLS IT LIKE IT IS.
Author: The "D" Man
Wing Chun Instructor and all around nice guy.
IT’S DATA COLLECTING, NOT DANCING.
NO MAN STEPS IN THE SAME RIVER TWICE.
This video as is up on YouTube, we desperately need new blood so I am breaking with my own advice and posting it there, it is a thin hope at best because the people who use YouTube are either looking for entertainment or do not live anywhere near us.
There are some excellent points to listen to in this talk, even though you have heard me say these things for as long as you have trained with me, it is good to be reminded of the core elements.
BECAUSE IT IS NOT THE SAME RIVER,
AND HE IS NOT THE SAME MAN.
THE ONE-INCH PUNCH IS JUST A CONCEPT.
“What would need to happen for me to be able to use this thing out in the wild”?
This is another YouTube video, but it is an important conversation so read on.
Sooner or later we all fall for the Kung Fu fantasy of astonishing deeds for no effort, and the prime example is the One Inch Punch.
Like a great many things in Wing Chun, this is an exercise about the whole IDEA behind our thing, that at its heart is about every time we make contact, with any strike, from attack or defence, it is about understanding the dynamic of force and what is needed to manifest it.
My Sifu was amazing at this, and I have been on the receiving end and it is very, very real, at least in the non-chaotic, passive interaction that is a demonstration event.
But like everything we do, or see, we should ask…
“What would need to happen for me to be able to use this thing out in the wild”?
We soon realise that this training exercise has very little to do with performing a one-inch punch.
But if we can ignore the Circus, this is an excellent exercise with meaningful learning objectives.
But unfortunately most Wing Chun students just love the Circus.
If ever we had a contender for the best example of the “Finger pointing at the moon”, this will have my vote.
NATURE OF NURTURE.
It was performance anxiety.
This is a post I have put up on YouTube, hopefully, to get new people to come and play with us.
Somethings are never fully explained during training, there is only so much we can cram in our heads, but this is a subject that we should all find space for.
Back in the day I was a Senior Grading Instructor at my Sifu’s school, I would oversee the first Senior grading, which for us was from the open grades up to level 1.
I did this for 4 years before my sifus passing.
When I first agreed to do this Sifu Jim told me to mark them honestly as he wanted to get a fair IDEA of how his school was travelling, but also that no matter what I did he was going to pass all but the truly hopeless.
As requested I did mark them honestly, and most of them failed the grading exam.
Due to this, we established a 13-week prep course that was just about passing the grading, which I also supervised.
The results were better, but not special, at least %50 still failed on paper, this was not due to them being poor at Wing Chun, most had decent skills, it was due to them being poor at being tested.
It was performance anxiety.
Because the sub-school I ran was 40 klm out of the city I was allowed to run my own gradings at the branch for the early grades, after seeing everyone struggle at the grading I ran in the city i began to pass students before the grading, and i would tell them this at least a week in advance, as a result most students were more relaxed and did reasonably well.
When these students reached the level 1 stage they also did well there, by now they had no fear of the grading experience.
I think we can all agree that being amid a “Shit Storm” that is a violent altercation is much more stressful than a grading exam, but how often do we work on this side of the coin.
Training is nothing like the real thing because we will not be the same person that did the training.
NO BATTLE PLAN SURVIVES CONTACT WITH THE ENEMY.
THIS THING WE DO.
“The only wrong move is not to move”.
I’m back.
Not that I have been anywhere, just be busy doing more interesting stuff and forgetting my role as chronicler of the Everlasting Springtime Fist.
For the last few months, training has just been the senior guys and this style of training is more non-physical and not very video worthy, hence no posts, but I have reactivated my YouTube channel and I will try to add some content there, so I will also post it here, we desperately need some new blood to join us so even my dislike of youTube must be put aside.
If you are one of my lost tribe then you know well that I teach the physical aspects of Wing Chun as, at best, the third most important aspect to understand, not the main reason, and that I try to teach people how to successfully and powerfully defend themselves, as opposed to the mainstream approach of just being good at Wing Chun stuff.
This is the first posting to YouTube, I hope it helps someone.
WILL THE REAL WING CHUN PLEASE STAND UP?
Wing Chun is in danger of becoming a dinosaur or worse yet a religion.
This is a reposting of something from 2021, I think it is well worth revisiting.
Who did what, where, when and why?
Back in the mid-1850s, Leung Jan of Foshan {the creator of Wing Chun} was a doctor, herbalist and bonesetter working with the Red Boat Opera Troupe in Guangdong Province.
From his experiences with the Martial Arts actors of the Red Boat Troupe, he formulated a new Martial System that he called Wing Chun.
As a bonesetter, he would have been conscious of anatomically correct movement, and of course, would have avoided any of the injury-causing movements that he would have been treating the Red Boats Martial Artists for.
If we relate his situation/position then to what occurs today he would have been akin to a modern-day Physical Therapist working through a CrossFit Gym.
Perhaps along the lines of T.R.S’s Kelly Starret or Smashwerx’s Trevor Bachmeyer.
He was coming from a position of avoiding injury but more importantly doing things better than before.
Fast forwards to 1950, Hong Kong, Ip Man opens a school that would ultimately bring Wing Chun to the world.
It is doubtful that Ip Mans Wing Chun was remotely similar to Leung Jan’s, his knowledge came from a variety of sources and from the outset his ideas reflected the living experiences he had as an undercover policeman and intelligence officer.
Dark alleys, multiple attackers.
It is well documented that Ip Man deliberately removed many of the traditional Chinese elements from his Wing Chun, such as the Bagua and 5 elements, to appeal to the more modern thinking young people of post-civil-war Hong Kong.
Three times Ip Man changed the presentation and content of his Wing Chun to the point that when his sons joined him in Hong Kong in the early 1960s they did not recognise the art he was teaching compared to the art he taught them in Foshan.
Ip Man was feeling the pulse of the times and quite possibly created a new Martial Art.
Just like Dr Jan of Foshan, he was coming from a position of doing things better than before.
Two of Ip Mans more famous students, Wong Shun Leung and Chu Shong Tin, went on to make severe departures to what Ip Man had taught them, interestingly their changes were in contrary directions to each other.
Their reason for the change was more an update than a reinvention, they were coming from the same position of doing things better than before.
Ip man passed in 1972, Wong Shun Leung passed in 1997, Chu Shong Tin passed in 2014.
If we look around the Wing Chun world, everyone is ideologically stuck in the late 20th century Hong Kong.
Wing Chun is in danger of becoming a dinosaur or worse yet a religion.
Surely it is time for someone to be coming from a position of doing things better than before.
The old torches have long since burnt out.
WHEN YOU UNDERSTAND, THINGS ARE JUST THE WAY THEY ARE.
WHEN YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND, THINGS ARE JUST THE WAY THEY ARE.
THE IMPORTANCE OF BASELINES.
Doing any Form is a kind of dancing, without a goal it is pointless, when we know what we are looking for we will instinctively find it in any Form, in every Form.
It was 17 years ago this month that my Sifu shuffled off to the great Kwoon in the sky, a great loss of a great man.
He is missed.
Something he would often ask me as I was standing doing the S.L.T. Form was “What are your Ankles doing at this moment”?
At first this really baffled me but after many conversations it became clear that he was reminding me not to be in any one part of my body at any one time, but to aim to be in all of my body all of the time.
This of course is an aspect of the “IDEA”, and a component of Sil Lim Tao training.
A trap I would fall into when he asked me this was to change my focus to my Ankles and as such be making the same error.
Since his passing, and the creation of my own school, this is something I try to pass on to you guys, and, just like my Sifu with me, I have no easy answers for you, no shortcuts or hints.
Only the FORM.
But do you know how to use the Form to improve capability?
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the poet, the author of The Little Prince, a hero fighter pilot who perished in World War II had this to say to us.
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks or to do work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”
Doing any Form is a kind of dancing, without a goal it is pointless, when we know what we are looking for we will instinctively find it in any Form, in every Form.
Do not waste your time and effort building ships, instead, yearn for the open sea, our incredible brain will then set about building ships.
In the video with this post may be difficult to see the point of what we are doing, after all effortless power is easy so it does not clearly show up, with this in mind watch how little everybody is effected when they do stuff.
Effortless power is achieved by transferring as much of our body mass/kinetic force as possible into the target, any kind of recoil effect that results from an action is a sharing of that body mass/kinetic force, no recoil is a sign that all of the body mass/kinetic force was transferred into the target.
Moving at speed increases momentum that in turn increases the force applied, moving slowly is simply the first of many baselines that can be scaled up.
The first baseline, i.e.moving slowly, if performed correctly will transfer the static body weight of the person punching, all of these guys are over 80kg, so these slow punches are the equivalent of being hit with 4 bags of concrete.
“A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment we contemplate it bearing within us the image of a Cathedral”.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
EFFORTLESS POWER.
The closest we come to controlling any action our body makes is in formulating the intention.
More old man stuff.
Concepts are abstract thoughts, as such they can, and do, mean very different things to different people, everything depends on how well we can navigate abstract thoughts.
The crux of this problem lies with intention.
If, for instance, I ask someone to move a knee, in general terms most people will move their hip to raise their leg so that their knee moves, and they believe that they have a measure of success in the objective.
But I did not ask them to move their hip, I asked them to move their knee.
Biomechanically it is not possible to move our knee without moving the hip so that can confuse people that are not very mentally adroit.
I am pretty sure that if we had a sensitive enough scanner we would find that we do in fact move everything when we try to move just our knee, so how do we understand this.
There exists a fundamental difference between what we think we are doing, about to do or have already done from what our Brain instructed our body to do.
We begin with a thought, in this case raise our knee, this becomes an intention which our brain turns into a chemical signal that instructs a myriad of body systems to do individual, unconnected actions that culminate in the raising off the knee.
The closest we come to controlling any action our body makes is in formulating the intention.
Everything after that is not us, it is not under our control, it is as if we are governed by an outside operator, which is what our nervous system is.
I have experienced students that get embarrassed ,even angry, at the idea that they are not in control of their own bodies, which in no way helps them to understand the complexity of even the most simple actions.
If we can reach a level of acceptance that we are not in control it becomes clear that the best we can do is to send accurate thoughts to our brain and hope it does what we want.
If I am vague and my intention is to finish with a raised knee my Brain – Nervous System – Body team will do what ever gets the job done, and it may be done in a different way every time.
Raising my knee requires that I also understand what I do not want to do, like rotate my hip, or lift my foot, both of these actions will raise my knee.
This is truly weird stuff at first, but once we get it we see that it is not weird, or difficult or anything except being mentally deliberate and thinking clearly.
We all experience situations that frustrate us in training, we may even get a bit precious, but out of nowhere we do the thing as asked, almost without thinking and then we cannot understand how we did not see it in the first place.
This has happened to me many times and not just in Wing Chun, do not get me started about Golf.
If we stick with moving the knee, it is not enough for me to think about just moving the knee, I must actively be involved in bringing in other actions, my Brain – Nervous System – Body team take care of that even if I do not want them to.
Mentally paint a green dot on your knee and in your intention only move that.
Some things move, and some things get moved, understand which is which.
A final observation that I frequently remind you guys of is that what we do in training is only of any use at all in training, this is another somewhat abstract thought.
We all know that if we get in trouble we will do something inspired or influenced buy our training, because we will never be in the exact same place doing the exact same thing.
What we do out in the wild will be different.
In the same vein as “How long is a piece of string”?
How different does an action need to be before it becomes a different action?
What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.
The vision in the following video came from 2 separate training instances, There was so much more than what I have shown, so much great stuff but length wise the video would have done Scorcesi proud.
If we work on this stuff it will give us everything we need, and do it in just a couple of years not some decade down the road.
Courage, above all things, is the first quality of a warrior.
HOW TO FIGHT LIKE AN OLD MAN.
It is the “Holy Grail”…
… it is “Effortless Power”
The late great Hélio Gracie one quipped, “Learn to fight like an Old Man, because one day you will be”.
What does it mean to ‘Fight like an Old Man’?
Perhaps we should ask one.
As hard as it is for me to get my head around it, I am a 70 year OLD MAN.
Fighting like an OLD MAN boils down to not relying on all of the stuff that young men rely on.
Things like fitness, speed of motion, and strength, in short, brute force and effort.
Which is just as well for I am no longer fit, fast, or strong.
But despite this, in a ‘self-defence situation’ I would still back myself against anybody, be they 30, 40, or even 50 years younger than me.
However, in a Mano-a-Mano stand-up fight against someone 30, 40, or 50 years younger, even I would put my money on the other guy.
But self-defence is a different beast altogether, the opening minute is always up for grabs, first in best served.
I do not B.S. myself, even if it is a self-defence situation, every second after that opening minute my chances of success would sink dramatically.
An OLD MAN must rely on skill, luck, and old-fashioned Bastardry.
Old-fashioned Bastardry is the second aspect of “Fighting like an OLD MAN”.
The first aspect is using skill as opposed to effort, and of having enough trust in oneself and one’s skill set to stick to using skill and correct application even when things go south.
Trusting a skill set is a highly degradable commodity, if we do not keep up the training, and keep close company with the skill set, this trust vanishes as quick as V.B. turns to piss.
It goes without saying that an important component of fighting like an OLD MAN is to still be training when you are an OLD MAN.
The second aspect is to get the job done and dusted in under a minute.
To achieve this we need an element of deliberate brutality, or as I prefer to call it, ‘Old fashioned Bastardry’.
Whenever we make contact with an attacker, especially in defence, we must always hurt them, so the question becomes “How do we hurt people while we are trying to stop them from hurting us”?
We do it by developing a frame that hurts people who make contact with it, even when we are a little bit lost and do not exactly know what is going on.
An unbreakable exoskeleton that is appears hard, yet flexible, as if made of solid rubber.
The best place to start, the spot where the “rubber” meets the road so to speak…
… is Lan Sau.
Like so much if not all of Wing Chun, Lan Sau is presented as a single shape, or movement, but it is, in reality, the final rung of a long ladder.
The cosmologist Carl Sagan had an Apple Pie recipe that went like this…
…step 1. Create the Universe.
As humorous as this is without the Universe there will be no planets, no environments, no trees, no fruit and so on.
So when I talk of Lan Sau it is in the mode of Carl Sagan’s apple pie recipe.
For Lan Sau to even exist there is a chain of supporting structures that must be developed first.
For starters, we must engage Crazy Horse, which in itself is a grouping of concepts such as Head-up – Body down, Shaolin Archer, and the totality of Y.G.K.Y.M.
The shape or posture that we train as Lan Sau is elementary stuff, as useful and effective as can be in a violent situation, in training it is just an exercise for us to isolate the concept so that we can explore it.
Lan Sau translates to the Bar Arm, or sometimes Obstructing Arm, and in its first showing it helps maintain or regain our distance from an attack, and if this is all you learn it will serve you well, but there is more, much more.
If we choose to retranslate Lan Sau into ‘the Unbending Arm’ and think of all the ways that having an arm that does not bend under force is useful, we can begin to see that unlocking this concept for use everywhere is an absolute game changer.
In an earlier video I referred to moving as if we had a prosthetic arm to clear the way, this is how I see Lan Sau, as an unbending, somewhat neutral, but extremely sturdy, prosthetic arm.
As you all know, I do not think that striking ability is any kind of magic sauce, even without training we all know how to hit someone, and if we cannot hit very hard we will just hit multiple times.
But the potential to not be hit, surely that IS some kind of magic, developing an unbending arm gives us a major advantage in any violent situation.
Lan Sau may not be a ‘Magic Bullet’, but it is not far off.
It is worth noting that Lan Sau does not get introduced until Chum Kiu, certain fundamental IDEAS/Concepts such as ‘Do not fight force’ or “Do not cary your opponents weight’ need to be understood before working on Lan Sau, plus there exists some subtle differences between ‘Accepting Force and Issuing Force’ that we need to align with.
The following video is some footage from a one-on-one session I had with Sam, as always it was unplanned and as such it may jump around or be hard to follow, if this happens just observe how little either of us is disturbed as we experiment with Lan Sau against deliberate force.
You all know that while I never make it extremely difficult to achieve the training objective, you also know that I never make it easy, when Sam physically moves me, even when it appears that he is doing very little, he is really moving me and as such would move anyone.
There is one spot in the video where Sam gets it spot on and shunts me away with almost zero force, the look on his face was priceless.
What is “Fighting like and Old Man”?
It is the “Holy Grail”…
… it is “Effortless Power”
SIMULTANEOUS ATTACK AND DEFENCE, what is it?
It is highly unlikely that the Bad Guy has a plan, so any plan we have is a step up from them.
The video footage with this post is of the senior guys working on developing an understanding of the ‘Concept’ of Simultaneous Attack and Defence.
Apart from ‘Simplicity’, it is this concept that is paramount to functionality.
The body text of this post is another way of ‘EXPLORING’ the ‘BIG PICTURE”.
Wing Chun, in its purest representation, has no techniques, no patterns, and no set strategies, to non Wing Chun people this is its biggest weakness, but to those of us that understand…
… it is its greatest strength.
But like so much of Wing Chun’s Fist Logic, this is so counter intuitive that very few students give it enough time to sink in.
The above statement does not mean that we go in eyes closed and Brain on pause, it is more that we care little about what the Bad Guy wants to do, and focus mainly on what we want to do.
To start this thought experiment let’s open with two questions.
Q. 1. Why is it that highly skilled, highly trained martial artists with many years of experience get their asses handed to them by “Punks in Pubs”?
Q. 2. Why is it that completely untrained people can be so effective when it comes to fighting?
The majority of non-competetive martial artists tend to overthink the situation, underestimate their own ability, and go way to soft with their opening , while untrained people just do not know enough to be worried and so go in full bore without fear of reply.
The default position for Wing Chun is that we are being attacked, as a result we are always starting in second place, so we cannot afford to hesitate when it comes to ‘Go Time’, we need clear plan, and we need to implement it with extreme prejudice.
Now you may ask “How can we have a clear plan if we do not know what is happening”?
And that would appear to be a fair question, except we do know what is happening, we are being fronted by someone that wishes to hurt us, and we also have a plan, counter-attacking using simultaneous attack and defence.
This may sound like a vague even half baked plan, but it is enough.
Something many people struggle to understand is that no plan ever works, whatever we plan to do will need to be changed, on the fly, so we can go in with anything, and the simpler that anything is the better.
It is highly unlikely that the Bad Guy has a plan, so any plan we have is a step up from them.
If we have set ourselves up correctly, physically, mentally, and emotionally, our attackers options are far fewer than they think, and even though we may think we are starting in second place, if we have a correct Wing Chun set up, such as CRAZY HORSE, we are pretty much in pole position.
I cannot express strongly enough how important our state of mind is when we are navigating a violent situation.
Something to be wary of is if we loose our ability to think on our feet we will rapidly become overwhelmed.
If we become overwhelmed we will at the very least hesitate, quite possibly just shut down, no more movement, then it is curtains.
If being overwhelmed prevents us from moving, then the reverse should also be true, that moving will prevent being overwhelmed.
A positive state of mind and a clear plan of action, and free and easay movement is all that is required to prevent ourselves being overwhelmed.
This is what our training should be focused on and what we want it to provide.
OVERTHINKING: THE ART OF CREATING PROBLEMS OUT OF SOMETHING THAT WAS NEVER THERE.
BATMAN.
Wing Chun Sydney, Australia 