The aim of all training in every Martial Art is to understand how to control our body in an unexpected environment, Knee Sau takes us there.
Hey Guys,
Here is a short video on what we accidentally discovered while looking for new ways to spice up training and help to help us develop a better feeling of what it is to be in contact with and control our mass.
As whacky as this appears it is astonishing at helping us feel what is needed to power our body with our CORE.
Which is, of course, the ultimate goal of Biu Gee.
What is really amazing is the way we can transfer the IDEA from a kneeling position to a standing position.
Check it out.
This may at first look like a crazy thing to do, even a waste of valuable training time.
But once we consider that nothing we ever do in training is anything like being involved in a genuine violent encounter, that what we train is a long way from reality, and even your favourite Youtube Wing Chun poser is doing nothing that would work in a real encounter, we may as well have fun while we are at it.
Training being nothing remotely like the real thing is not just a Wing Chun issue, it is every style of Martial Art and it is even worse for an untrained Bad Guy, so we do not need to panic, if we are training we are miles ahead of the curve.
Whatever that curve might be.
The aim of all training in every Martial Art is to understand how to control our body in an unexpected environment, Knee Sau takes us there in Spades.
It may be difficult to think that the guy with the knife in the video was defending himself, but I am willing to bet that he thought he was.
HEY TRIBE.
In light of our ongoing Whatsapp chap about the video that shows that fatal stabbing, I just wanted to get this out there.
I have spoken of this so often to so many students both past and present, but it really needs repeating, because it is still so grossly misunderstood.
In the Martial Arts Community, there is great disagreement about what style is good for fighting and what style is not good for fighting.
And then there are conflicting opinions about what style is a fighting art and what style is a self-defence system.
This is blown out of all proportion by the fact that most people do not fully understand the difference between fighting and self-defence.
Especially when it comes to understanding {and admitting that we are training in}, a self-defence system.
I grew up in post-war Britain, every grown-up in my world potentially suffered from P.T.S.D. All had experienced the horror of war in one way or another and it shaped their worldview.
As a 5 to 7-year-old boy the advice I was given was that if you get into an disagreement, scuffle, or argument hit the other guy before he hits you.
This, was self-defence in the 1950s.
And it worked for me.
This was pretty much how things carried on deep into the 1990s.
And it still worked for me.
Now, 30 years on in the 2020s, we are a society that is better informed and more connected, we understand that hitting someone first may be a savvy tactical decision, but it is not Self-Defence, right-here right-now, it is, in fact, assault.
Later on it can be argued in court.
We all recently viewed that tragic -48 second video were a young mans life ended in a S.N.A.F.U. of a shit fight before a punch had landed.
I have been in this kind of standoff, in a situation like this both sides see this as a self-defence situation.
We cannot be sure how the agro in the video kicked off because we do not witness the build-up, but it is safe to assume that words were exchanged, that is usually the case, and then both sides felt the need to defend their assumed position.
Their ethnicity, their territory or even just their football team.
In many ways, it was ignorance that led to this tragic outcome.
A few of you have asked if we can look at this in training, and I am sure that there are many students of multiple styles of Martial Arts that are asking their teacher a similar thing.
We need to go deeper than “What would we as {insert chosen M.A. Style} practitioners do in this situation”?
To everyone out there and not just our mob, what do you think your chosen style is teaching you?
Is it teaching you to fight people, or is it teaching you to defend yourself?
It may be difficult to think that the guy with the knife in the video was defending himself, but I am willing to bet that he thought he was.
Over the years I have asked every student to imagine a situation where they would be called upon to use their training.
To a man {generic} it is always a situation where an argument or some other anti-social behaviour turns physical.
It is usually described this way… ‘we were arguing and then he {generic} suddenly thew a punch, my training kicked in and I just reacted.’
Is this self-defence?
This is such a grey area, it is nothing short of a slippy slope on a foggy night. Excuse the poetic viewpoint.
Despite the oft-used cliche´, ‘always expect the unexpected’ in truth we all know that we cannotexpect the unexpected, so if we can react to a sudden attack without surprise then on some level we were expecting it.
DUH!!!
I am not trying to take some moral stance here with this post, if this was me 30 years ago I would have already hit the guy first and asked questions later.
But it is not 30 years ago.
Can we claim self-defence if we are waiting for the attack?
If we are not trying to de-escalate the situation, even if it is not our intention, we are allowing it to escalate.
We are now preparing to fight this person and not defend ourselves.
I can almost hear the young offender from the video saying ‘it was a slippy slope on a foggy night, your honour’.
The most important aspect of Martial Art is to try to understand violence, not to learn how to use violence, and not to learn how to choose violence.
At least not as a first choice.
In the original Karate Kid movie, Mr. Miyagi says “best defence, don’t be there”.
If we see it coming and do not avoid it, are we defending ourselves?
Or are we waiting to join in?
If I am arguing with someone and I sense that it might kick off why am I still there?
Yes, there are most definitely times when we will not expect it, this is self-defence, how to go from the ‘Oh Shit” moment of just sticking our arms out and into something that can make good our escape.
We will work on this, the ‘Oh Shit” moment, and not on how to defend against a knife.
I just wanted to get this out there, especially as we were all talking about the stabbing.
NO ONE WINS A FIGHT, ONE PERSON JUST LOSES A BIT LESS THAN THE OTHER.
Once seen, these movements cannot be unseen, the thing is CAN YOU SEE IT?
Hey Tribe and friendly visitors, something to ponder during yet another deluge.
All Forms are dancing until we make them singularly important and decide that they are something else, something meaningful, something uniquely special.
If we extend this to its logical conclusion if all Forms are dancing then all dancing is a Form and they are also are something else, something meaningful, something uniquely special.
In the exceptional video that I have chosen watch it with the sound as low as you can make it and still keep the rhythm then see if you can identify some very obvious Wing Chun movements.
If, as we claim, Wing Chun is made up of ‘normal everyday human movement’ and that there is ‘only one movement, only one shape, only one body’ Wing Chun should be, and is, everywhere.
Watching how dancers create complex movements from essentially simple shapes can help us understand, expand, and empower our Forms training.
Like them or not, Bollywood films have exceptional movements, and usually movements that come directly from the Martial Tradition.
Once seen, these movements cannot be unseen, the thing is CAN YOU SEE IT?
It is being the best of ourselves, that makes Wing Chun, or any Art, work.
I AM NOT BEING STILL. I AM JUST NOT MOVING.
This is not semantics, this is something we need to get our head around, to understand the language, understand the thinking, and then understand the functionality before we can get our body to comply.
Do not try to be still, this is not a natural state for human beings we are built to move.
I have seen many students doing the S.L.T. and trying to be still.
What we should be doing, and trying to think about, is not making unnecessary movement.
Moving anything except our arms when playing the S.L.T. Form isunnecessary movement.
If this results in stillness, all is well and good, but being still is not the goal.
If we are called on to use our training, what good will being still be?
What we think Wing Chun is at the beginning of our training, {and being what most outsiders think Wing Chun is}, ends up being just 10% Wing Chun and 90% being a human being.
Everything we do in Wing Chun training is essentially just theatre, the Forms, Chi Sau the whole kit and caboodle.
Smoke and mirrors, dancing.
The rest, the 90% simply helps the advanced student reache a place in their life where they are in control of themselves enough to almost seem in control of the world around them.
We are not Alchemists of course, we have not discovered the philosophers stone, but when you can effortlessly do what others put great effort into and fail, their only answer is that we must know Magic.
It is being the best of ourselves, that makes Wing Chun, or any Art, work.
This is in no way pooh-poohng the training, on the contrary, if we are a “Perfect {generic} Man” but have no “IDEA” how to get out of trouble…
…we do not get out of trouble.
So it would be prudent to do our best that to compliment our Wing Chun training we work to become and understand what it means to be, a better human being.
Here is a video presentation from a group of guys that have a Youtube Channel called Functional Patterns, as you all know, my bias is and has always been towards functionality, so it should come as no surprise to you that I like a lot of what these guys do.
This video presentation is about “Breathwork”, the presenter is a bit hyper but the info is, at the very least, Food for Thought.
As always, if this post brings up questions, which I hope it does, then bring them in, and I will try my best to answer them.
To visitors, if this post spikes your curiosity, you know, you ask yourself W.T.F?
If you have any questions, hit me up in the comments, I will try to explain W.T.F?, Or at least point you in a direction that may help.
“There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.”
Look it up on Youtube., someone there will explain it better than I will here.
If you talk with a sports psychologist they will tell you that all training is task-specific.
They will tell you that all training needs to be task-specific for our brains to be able to store it in the correct place so that we can access the information easily and quickly.
Our brain is not just lust like a computer, it is a computer, and data stored incorrectly rapidly degrades and becomes garbage
G.I.G.O.
Garbage in, garbage out.
Information is a language.
And like any language, we need more than just an alphabet to be able to use it effectively.
Especially if that language is context-specific like a Kung Fu Form, is context-specific.
But the language needs to be clear and correct.
And the instruction needs to be clear and correct, and if possible scientifically verifiable.
How often do we hear Teachers talking about the ‘Mind – Body’ connection?
I get what they are going on about, but there is a giant fly in their ointment.
‘Mind’ does not exist.
You cannot point to a part of the Cerebral Cortex and say this is the ‘Mind’.
This is where ‘Mind’ lives.
Because what gets referred to as Mind exists everywhere in our Brain, it is the collective of our synapses acting together.
Mind itself is a concept.
And more often than not it is ‘Mind’ that is making the mistakes, doing everything wrong when we attempt a new Form or a new movement.
How often do you hear me say that “Our brain is a self-organising pattern maker’ that is only concerned about the pattern and not so concerned about the pros or cons of that pattern?
In general psychology, there is a process that is called the Schmidt Schema Theory.
The theory attempts to explain how and why we store general motor programs that we, later on, adapt to suit our needs.
It describes the theory as having 4 stages.
Initial Conditions; where am I?
Response specifications; what is expected from me in this position? {PERFORM SKILL / RUN MOTOR PROGRAMME}.
Sensory consequences; A feedback loop that allows us to quantify what we did, how did it look and feel?
Response Outcome; The hoped-for objective, did it work.
Here is a WIKI-gab from …. about Schema theory.
R.A. Schmidt developed the “schema theory” of motor learning
Schmidt argued, partly against J.A. Adams'(1971) closed loop theory, that people don’t learn specific movements. Instead, they construct “generalized motor programs.” They do this by exploring programming rules, learning the ways in which certain classes of movement are related. Then they learn how to produce different movements within a class by varying the parameters that determine the way in which movements are constructed.
Parameters are features of a movement, for instance, its duration or overall time, or the level of force that develops in the muscles that contribute to the movement. By scaling these parameters up or down (vertical axis), people produce variations (horizontal axis) among a class of movements.
As people practice a movement, like throwing a ball various distances or in various directions, or climbing stairs of various dimensions, they learn the relationship between the parameters and the outcome. By collecting “data points” like the ones in the figure (adapted from Schmidt, 1988, Fig. 14-7), they improve their understanding of the relationship between a movement outcome and their control of the movement’s parameters (the “best-fitting straight line” in the figure).
An important prediction of the theory is that people will more quickly learn the relationship between manipulating parameters and achieving a desired movement outcome if they practice a task in wide variety of sitations, and experience errors in the process. To use the figure as an illustration, the theory predicts that people will more quickly appreciate the underlying “best-fitting line” (the rules by which a generalized motor program produces a class of movements) when they accumulate a large and broad scatter of data points (a varied experience of movement).
Practice that lacks variety, but is instead precise or repetitious, will not (from Schmidt’s perspective) provide enough information for a learner to fathom the rules that underlie the generalized motor program.
In Schmidt’s theory, this relationship betweeen the parameters and outcomes are collected in two “schemes” or “schema,” hence the name by which his theory is known.
If we add this to col. John Boyds’s O.O.D.A. Loop we can transition from not only knowing and understanding how we move to how and why we will use it.
I am feeling a bit lazy today so here is another link O.O.D.A.LOOP.
This type of low to mid-level research can not only help us understand, but more importantly it can help us understand what it means to understand.
It takes FORMS practice out of the W.T.F. basket and puts it into the “Got It” basket, but only once you understand.
WHEN YOU UNDERSTAND, THINGS ARE JUST THE WAY THEY ARE.
WHEN YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND, THINGS ARE JUST THE WAY THEY ARE.
Ability is gained through trust, trusting the knowledge enough to use it when things get nasty.
Saturday mornings are most often just me and the seniors, Sam, Costas, and George. This Saturday was a little bit exceptional because I recognised their training effort and awarded them a level 6 Certificate. So what does that mean? I follow the same progression as my own Sifu did with his school and treat each of the Forms as a level. Level 6 equates to having finished the training that comes with each Form. Which, as you know for me, means that they have completed the first circuit of the completed Sil Lim Tao Form. So what now? Easy. Rinse and repeat. In terms of organisation, they are now officially Junior Masters {how I hate that term} and are beginning the descent into becoming Masters.
Descent why not ascent?
To teach others how to fly, we must start back at the airfield. The requirements needed to safely make this landing, and to claim the right to call oneself a Master, are earned by developing enough understanding of the 6 Forms to teach someone else how to get to Level 6. When a person reaches J. M. Level, there is nothing new physically to learn, ironically this is where the going gets tough, the training wheels come off and we go headlong into turbulence. We must chart our flight path to develop our IDEA of Wing Chun. This is very hard, it is easy to get lost and drift off course. All of us have our EGO as a co-pilot, yes, we could, with a certain level of honesty, say that now we know all there is about Wing Chun. But knowledge is not the same as ability. Not even close. There is a misconception that being a Kung Fu Master equates to being able to fight like Iron Mike, and we see the results of this thinking every time a Kung Fu Master engages a Professional Fighter. However, ability is a lot easier to develop once we have knowledge. Ability is gained through trust, trusting the knowledge enough to use it when things get nasty. Trust comes through understanding. The next step in the 3 Sixes training is to understand what they know. Most of this training happens in quiet moments of contemplation.
Congratulation guys. You earned it.
In the video above we are exploring and mostly talking about the FORMS and tying them into actions, from the outside, this may not look very advanced, but hey, street fights are not very advanced.
The real value in this training is what we talk about, what we question, and what answers we come up with, this is the real stuff if you can listen more than watch.
And watch what is happening away from the conversation that I am having, don’t watch me watch the guys.
Watch how effortlessly people are being thrown around, thrown away.
If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.
The above picture is the image from a recent blog post at Kung Fu Tea.
As you all know I have great respect for the research work of people like Ben Judkins and Paul Bowman, if you are not following their work I advise you start now.
This is a recent post that is on a subject that I discuss time and time again with my students and contemporaries.
Here is a glimpse of last Monday’s training, the camera was in a dreadful position and so the framing is dead-set crap, but the info is good.
At 15 minutes it is more than a cup of coffee, as always this is to tie in with this weeks training. If it looks like fun then turn up on Saturday morning.
The IDEA we ran with was that once we make the actions bigger, like in this case we used a spear and sword IDEA, it is easy to see that they are in all our FORMS in a smaller more compressed state.
The best way to approach this is that you are peeping over a fence at someone’s training, there is good info here if you can find it.
Watch, question and train it up.
If we talk to modern day Sports Physiologists and Sports Psychologist and they will tell us that all training is sports-specific, our training must reflect the thing we are going to do or it will have very little practical use.
Everything will work to a certain extent, and everything will fail to a certain extent.
It is about 3 things.
Understanding how our body works
Understanding our Fist logic
Understanding how to build a bridge between the two.
Because if we ever do get into a fight it will be on that bridge.
We are not people learning Wing Chun, we are people using WingChun to learn about ourselves.
Asking me “will my Martial art work”? Is a little bit like asking will this stick work?
It will work if you know how to use it and are willing to use it.
There is a joke here in Oz.
Question, What do you call a boomerang that does not come back?
Answer, A stick.
The moral of this tale is knowing the right stick.
Everything we do must end up with us hitting someone.
If we find ourselves in a violent situation either we did not see it coming, if we had we would have avoided it completely, or we started it ourselves. Think about that.
if you look closely you will find gold amongst the debris.
Guys, let me be honest, the main reason for this post is to remind you that above all else training is easy and it is fun.
So where the hell are you?
But as for the post itself, we started the day with a Sword and Spear IDEA of how to see the FORM in everything we do, there is no reason to do anything, it is just THERE.
The camera was just running, and that is why the framing has you looking more at my garden litter than the Wing Chun, but if you look closely you will find gold amongst the debris.
This was toward the end of the day where we brought that IDEA into closer focus, most Wing Chun students fail to see that Chi Sau is about creating the space and opportunity to simply smack the Bad Guy, but to be honest we all need to be reminded of this.
As you are all well aware I consider everything from all of the Forms, to Chi Sau, to Headbutts to scratching your Arse as components of the Sil Lim Tao.
Videos can only show shapes and movements, to get any value from this or anyone else’s videos the learning objective must be “can you identify the shapes and movements, can you relate them to your own skill”?
We had a really great morning on Public Holiday Monday, but in reality, this was just what happens every Saturday morning.
Get your shit together and come join us, yes, all the senior tribe Members are there but Wing Chun is just Wing Chun.
So our first aim should be to understand how to compromise an attacker’s stability while dissipating incoming force without compromising our own stability.
This past Saturday we spent the whole session putting meat on the bones of the last post, All is One.
For any that have not met him yet, Rick is a fairly new member of the Tribe who usually trains with me one-on-one, having him join us on a Saturday was great because it gave us all an excuse to do some much-needed revision.
So that I do not need to cover the same ground twice we can substitute Chi Sau with the Dummy if you are at that level.
As I have mentioned my Sifu would say that Chi Sau is a ‘means to an end and not an end in itself’.
What this means, is that what we think we are doing and practising is notthe learning objective.
So what is?
Firstly let us consider this…
…If we get attacked the problem we face comes from the Bad Guy’s thinking, not his actions because it is the thinking that drives the actions.
Shut down the thinking and we shut down the actions.
There are a few tried and tested ways to shut down an opponent’s capacity to think.
Knock them out.
Always successful but very difficult to pull off, especially in the first exchanges of an attack.
Causing them serious pain.
This one is in the ‘kind of’ category because if the attacker is highly adrenalised, drunk or on something like ‘meth’ their response to pain may not be what we need.
Compromising their balance.
An absolute winner, even drunks try to regain their stability if it is compromised, the brain simply turns all of its attention to righting the ship and stops everything else.
What we are studying in Chi Sau is the functionality of balance and stability in a dynamic situation.
Chi Sau simulates making contact with an incoming force.
Chi Sau’s practise teaches us how to turn that first contact into a destabilising event for the attacker.
Because contact is a two-way street this has the potential to destabilise us at the same time so Chi Sau also allows us to work on maintaining our own balance and stability in a chaotic situation.
After all, we do not want our own thinking to be ‘turned-off’.
Chi Sau is Chum Kiu, and Chum Kiu is the defensive logic of Wing Chun.
So our first aim should be to understand how to compromise an attacker’s stability while dissipating incoming force without compromising our own stability.
Chi Sau training will teach us this even when we are unaware of what it is we are seeking, but we get there much quicker when we understand what we are looking for.
It is difficult, especially at the beginning, to not get lost in the ‘Arm Work’ of Chi Sau but these are really just smoke and mirrors that we use when playing the Chi Sau game, if we fall into this trap, even when we successfully dissipate incoming force, we fail to grasp that the important thing is the why and not the how.
Whether we are exploring Chum Kiu logic via Chi Sau or exploring Biu Gee logic through the Dummy, the ultimate learning objective, the real deal, is maintaining stability.
One extra spin-off of this is that now when we watch other people playing Chi Sau on Youtube or whatever we know what to look for before we make some ‘Foot in Mouth’ comments.
Wing Chun Sydney, Australia 