If this is the case, which it could be, I would recommend immediately activating the “Nike Defence”, you know, run like hell.
Hi Guys,
You may wonder about the title of this piece and its relevance to self-defence, and believe me, it is relevant.
It stems from a conversation I held with our senior students Sam and Costas about the desire to develop more power, or simply put, ‘hitting harder’.
We have all noticed that lately there is a preponderance of videos on YouTube to this end, “How to hit harder”.
My position on this is that for Wing Chun students this type of video is not only of no value but holds the potential to undo all of our good work, let me try to explain.
The essence of Wing Chun, and many other “Soft Style” Martial Arts, is that we develop hitting power by naturally transferring “Body Mass” into a single point of our body and then onto a single point of a chosen target, not by physically trying to impart force by making a “Big Hit”.
No one in my Martial Arts community is lighter than 60kg, as you all know I have always only taught adults. Here in Australia, a bag of pre-mixed concrete is 20 kg, so anyone that weighs 60 kg has the equivalent “Body Mass” of 3 bags of Concrete.
If we think that a 60kg guy cannot naturally hit hard enough, we are saying that dropping 3 bags of concrete onto an opponent will not get the job done?
If this is the case, which it could be, I would recommend immediately activating the “Nike Defence”, you know, run like hell.
Hitting someone shares the same science as any collision, and as such the force created is the sum of both forces involved, so if we are 60kg and the Bad Guy is 80kg {Bullies tend to be bigger than their chosen target}, the impact created will be the summation of both forces and closer to 140kg.
Which is of course 7 bags of concrete.
How is that not enough?
And again if that is the case, and it could be, here for sure, we use the Nike Defence.
To fully cover this topic we need to bring in some different concepts, which can end up in a bloated and somewhat confusing video, so I will break it down into smaller, bite-sized chunks.
This video is essentially just an intro.
Despite this there is a way for a 60kg person to drop 120kg onto an opponent without any extra training, yes you get it, hit them twice.
Which to me sounds a lot like what we train to do.
The first video of 2024, and the question is how do we get what we think we got.
This is a very important topic, and not just for our Wing Chun, if you can do some research of your own.
Every new year our training should involve a new approach, if we need to cover old ground again, in the same way, what on earth were we doing last year?
After training on Saturday, I asked the question of us all…
‘Why was it that the most talented of Kung Fu Masters came from either the Buddhist Shaolin Temple or the Taoist retreat of “Wudang Mountain”?
This connection has for hundreds of years been pounced upon by the Right Wing, New-Age Charlatans claiming that Martial Arts leads us to the light.
That meditation and spirituality, not effort and conditioning, deserve to be regarded as the true secret to effective Kung Fu, and why it is so suited to the higher man as opposed to the thug.
That it is not about violence.
This has always been the selling point, even back in the time of ip Man.
Initially, it was an attempt to clean up the image of Kung Fu in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion.
But soon, as it sadly is today, it became a con to deceive unfit, physically challenged, lazy people into thinking that progress comes from good thoughts and relaxation, not, as is the actual way, through commitment and toil.
One thing that greatly aided the Monks and the Hermits to become highly capable was an abundance of time in which to train, and the inescapable fact that in their society if you could not effectively defend yourself you were soon eaten up by those lower men who coveted everything you owned, and cared not how they got their hands on it.
The Bandits ran amok through the Pearl River Delta.
Need does what needs must, even for Holy Men.
If we could put ourselves in the shoes of the Shaolin Monks, or, especially with regards to Wing Chun, the Wudang Mountain Ascetics, there was obviously something besides just time to train that helped them excel.
Every action in their lives was an action that only dealt with the immediacy of the moment they were in.
In Wudang Taoism in particular, the essence of everything they did was mental focus and deliberation on the ‘WAY’.
This was reflected equally in everything they did and was not somehow specific to their Kung Fu as some would infer.
This adherence to the “WAY” is usually described as Taoist Alchemy.
But what we in this modern time think of as Alchemy, which has been so vilified by the world’s religions that it is considered to be a type of ‘Black Magic’ was not anything like what the Taoist Ascetics thought of themselves.
They were simply seekers of knowledge, seekers after the truth of what they saw around themselves, Life, the Universe, and Everything.
Which of course included their Kung Fu.
It was not so much that they were trying to learn Kung Fu fighting, but rather trying to understand this thing they did on the deepest possible level, as just another method to follow ‘the Way’ even in the most chaotic moments and situations.
In many ways the physical aspect of Kung Fu fighting was not part of the process at all, it was just a way to engage with the subject of the study.
And this is very much mirrored in Wing Chun.
Wing Chun is about how to think about fighting, which has the happy result of us becoming extremely proficient at it.
Because there was never the pursuit of the fighting skill there is not a finishing point as such, there is never a moment where we can say.
I am a Master.
There is always more.
Or at least the potential for more.
Those now referred to as Alchemists would have thought of themselves as Philosophers involved in understanding the Natural World, which all men are part of.
Natural Philosopher was the term in use before the coining of the term Scientist.
Plato was an Alchemist, and Pythagoras was an Alchemist.
The Church of Rome claimed that Leonardo De Vinci was an Alchemist and condemned him to death for his thinking.
Alchemical thinking is not anti-religion but it is accused of this by every religion.
We all harbor personal biases, that were planted into us at a very young age, which may make it tricky to engage with this IDEA, the IDEA of understanding the thinking of Alchemists as a way to understand Wing Chun, but it was this thinking that created it.
The thinking of the Alchemists was just that, thinking, it was never intended or envisioned as a replacement belief system
Anything we do intending to improve ourselves is the core of what we call Hermetic Alchemy.
Once we know the moves of Wing Chun this is the only way forward.
Etymology… The occult (from the Latin word ‘occultus’; lit. ‘clandestine’, ‘hidden’, ‘secret’) is “knowledge of the hidden”.
Hey guys, let me start by saying that there is no side to be taken with this post, no need to agree or disagree, it is just thinking out loud, and thinking should always be free to wander where it wishes to wander, and land wherever it wishes to land.
If you have done even the lightest study of Sacred Geometry you will see Wing Chun in the diagram at the head of the post, and as such there is nothing more for me to say.
If not read on.
This post has taken me more than 30 years to write.
And to be completely honest it has only crystallised in the last few years with my re-engagement with drawing and building sculpture.
If it does not make any sense at this time that is perfectly fine, just do not discount it out of hand because you do not understand it.
Something that I have told you all, in one way or another, is that we cannot hope to understand Wing Chun if we only use Wing Chun to try to understand it by.
In Neuroscience there is something called Gödel’s theorem.
This IDEA states quite clearly that no system is able to comprehend itself fully.
In short.. the brain cannot understand the brain.
As deep, nerdy, and perhaps even fluffy as this sounds it colours everything we see and think.
Which on the other side of the coin colours everything we think we see.
Wing Chun is a ‘CONCEPT’ driven martial art.
A concept is essentially an IDEA.
An Idea is a fundament of the ‘MIND’.
It is THINKING.
If we hope to understand Wing Chun as it was meant to be at its inception, surely we should start by trying to appreciate how Dr Leung Jan saw his place in the world.
To get some measure of understanding of the science and philosophy that permeated the society that Dr. Leung Jan was a part of.
Wing Chun was not a unique creation, it was a deviation from normal Kung Fu, a different type of thinking, a modernisation if we would like to think that way.
But its roots came from and cannot escape from the classical IDEA of Kung Fu, which itself was influenced by the philosophical cornerstones of Chinese upper society.
This strata of society possessed knowledge that was not common knowledge.
To the general population, it was looked upon as hidden knowledge, even secret knowledge.
When these IDEAS are translated into Latin-based languages they are termed as OCCULT.
Etymology… The occult (from the Latin word ‘occultus’; lit. ‘clandestine’, ‘hidden’, ‘secret’) is “knowledge of the hidden”.
In today’s common usage, occult refers to “knowledge of the paranormal”, which of course leads in the direction of ‘magical thinking’, as opposed to “knowledge of the measurable”, usually referred to as science.
It is so important to not conflate the modern IDEA of ‘knowledge of the hidden’ which always slips into magical or spiritual connotations, with the IDEA of ‘knowledge of the hidden’ from 17th century China, which for its time was actually science.
The Geometry and Mathematics of Chinese Architecture would have been considered occult thinking.
Gunpowder was a product of occult thinking.
It was not possible for their language to avoid being cloaked in what is now looked upon as spiritual terminologies, and spiritual theorems.
Whether we are pro-spiritual thinking or anti-spiritual thinking it is detrimental to our progress because BOTH lead us in an unintended direction.
Our challenge is to be able to connect today’s training to the thinking of 17th-century China, ignoring ‘New-age’ explanations and bring it into normality.
An example of how the ancients could translate religious IDEAS into secular methodologies that resonate with Wing Chun can be found in the Buddhist Heart Sutra that reflects…
Form is no other than emptiness.
Emptiness no other than Form.
Form is only emptiness.
Emptiness only Form.
If we can step away from even the lightest religiosity, this statement could be about the Sil Lim Tao, which in one old-world translation becomes the ‘Way of the Shaolin’.
Spiritual people living in violent times would, without thinking, use spiritual language about non-spiritual things, because that was simply how they spoke.
We should work diligently to not be moved in the wrong direction by words.
What was hidden knowledge to the ancient people of our world, and was still thought of as almost sacred in the time of Dr. Leung Jan is now taught to schoolchildren as a part of basic education.
All of our knowledge, all of our training and pretty much our only hope is in the ZONE.
There is an obvious contradiction when we try to talk about what we could/should do in a dangerous, violent situation, and then use a safe, non-violent situation, i.e. training, to explore this.
As Sam said at the end of training “It is really just about composure”, and that is bang on the money.
But we must ask ourselves, ‘how can we practice regaining composure in a safe training environment where we are, if nothing else, composed’?
Even a style that uses full-contact sparring has this problem, we can always walk away if we are not having fun.
Believe me, being on the wrong end of a kicking is in no way fun.
Walking away is simply not on the table, running perhaps, but even then we need to engineer our escape.
And to do that we need as much composure as we can muster.
How do we develop composure?
How do we regain composure in a Shit-Fight?
Once regained how do we maintain composure?
No matter which style we train, it is just not possible to come close to the reality of this in training, there is no other choice but to imagine it, to set up scenarios where we can play-act what we think will go down.
This is not as bogus as it may first sound, reality only happens ‘in the moment’, and after that it is stored as memory.
Neuroscientists have shown us that the human brain sees memory and imagination as the same thing.
And all of the ancient wisdom traditions tell us that “We are what we think”.
Since the time of the Stoics in ancient Greece, the philosopher Epictetus told us that how we think changes how we feel, how we feel changes how we think, and that they both affect how we act/ behave.
In today’s psychology, this is the core of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy C.B.T.
As you know I am not a supporter of the notion of “Internal” Kung Fu, by which I refer to the act of generating a force from an unknown origin to power our attacks, to me, is just magical thinking.
But there is, beyond doubt, a non-physical side to training that should not be ignored.
Only a fool would say that fighting/violence is a purely physical experience.
There is a definite emotional aspect and a definite mental aspect, that we simply must find a way to accommodate.
For ease of explanation, I refer to this emotional/mental aspect as “Mind Boxing”
I do not use the term Mind Boxing because I can somehow box with my mind, that is just as bad as any other kind of magical thinking, I call it Mind Boxing because I believe we need to observe, understand, and train our minds as a separate, yet inclusive, part of our {Chinese} Boxing.
I believe this topic to be so important that I have a stand-alone website CLICK HERE.
To paraphrase and contextualise Epictetus…
How we feel in a violent situation will influence how we think in a violent situation.
How we think in a violent situation will influence how we feel in a violent situation.
They will both, in their own way, influence what we do in a violent situation.
It is important to not only accept this but to also understand that the quantity/quality of the effect of how we think and the quantity/quality of the effect of how we feel when under pressure is a sliding scale.
As such no one-size-fits-all solution.
The challenge becomes ‘Can we come up with a generic method that can provide value for all of us’?
We are not alone in this quest, every Elite Sportsman knows this search and luckily for us the Internet is awash with information from Sports Psychologists to aid in eliminating, what in less dangerous environments, might be referred to as ‘performance anxiety’.
To take a leaf from the book of Sports Psychology we need to create a template that we can slip into whenever we need to perform a specific task.
This is where a layman’s understanding of how our Mind works becomes essential to progress.
Everything happening to us ‘in the moment’, all stimuli, are processed by our short-term memory.
The short-term memory is our director, our captain, it calls the shots.
But the short-term memory has minimal storage capacity, by some estimates, short-term memory can only hold around seven items of information at one time.
Anything deemed not mission critical is shunted off into storage, into our long-term memory, where the brain permanently stores the information for future recall when necessary.
How we deal with what is happening right here, right now, right in front of us is the remit of our short-term memory.
But if we get in strife and hope to call on our training we need to access long-term memory.
While we are actively training all of our training information is stored in our short-term memory, but as soon as we leave to go home that info is moved to long-term storage.
When we think about an elite sportsman playing flawlessly, and effortlessly, we say that they are in the ZONE.
Being in the ZONE is being in unobstructed, unfettered contact with our Long-term memory.
How do we access the ZONE when we are in the middle of an active shitstorm?
Because this is more important than anything else.
All of our knowledge, all of our training and pretty much our only hope is in the ZONE.
And as the ‘Brown Becomes Airborne’, we are not.
If we return to the Sports world we see suggestions of setting up cues or triggers, single movements or thoughts that call up complex actions, and complex movements without complex thinking.
If we think about our computers, we click an icon or an alias to open a program.
Addressing the Ball in Golf, preparing to take a penalty in football, waiting for a delivery in cricket, taking a set position in a foot race, and waiting to return serve in tennis are examples many of us will have experience of from school if nothing else.
In these ready positions, the emphasis is as much on setting the tone of our emotions and settling into a pre-trained mindset, only once we are happy that we have adopted these positions do we engage in our trained skill.
Self-Defence Martial Arts are anticipating being surprised, but I think we all know that we cannot expect the unexpected.
The only thing we can expect is some level of surprise/shock.
Do we have any IDEA how to move into and adopt a ready position whilst in a state of surprise/shock?
Rule #1, move as well as a normal person can move when they are just being normal.
Hey Guys, picture this.
We are watching a sporting event, pick your favourite flavour on this, and one player catches our eye, they are not doing anything outrageously special, but everything they do is effortless, smooth, focused and uncluttered.
Our thought is that this person is an elite sportsperson.
Why?
Because they move so well.
This thought exercise holds true for any sport, so it is obviously not the movements themselves, after all, different sports use different actions.
Rule #1, move as well as a normal person can move when they are just being normal.
As I mentioned, different sports use different moves because they have different goals and agendas.
So do different martial arts.
But in their hearts, they are all just the same human movements.
The takeaway from this thought experiment is that nothing we do will be of any benefit to us if we do not move well as a person.
Despite the hype around Wing Chun Forms, they are just our IDEA of a normal movement that meets our specific needs.
like most of the posts on FaceBook this sounds good, but, it is actually Bullshit.
Hey Guys,
Just a quick post to keep in touch.
Sam, Costas and I were working on stuff on Saturday that I thought was quite important to share, we lost the sound early into the piece so there is no commentary on the practice, all the same I am posting a few frames of what we did, with a bit of Timo Mass playing, to seed the water so to speak.
We will revisit this on Thursday evening so if you can, be here, and get all the information instead of just about 5% which is all we really put in these videos.
The heart of this matter is a better understanding of the whole idea of being fast.
Mark Zuckerberg once stated that his motto for Facebook was “Move fast and break things”, like most of the posts on FaceBook this sounds good, but, it is actually Bullshit.
Wing Chun does not attack, Wing Chun counterattacks.
I have mentioned before how intercepting an incoming strike is essentially a ‘Hard Block’, something that we do not do with Wing Chun, and a major misunderstanding about contact.
This is not just a stylistic interpretation, it is a fundamental aspect of what Wing Chun is.
To intercept an incoming strike we must firstly be aware of the event as it unfolds, and secondly, be moving towards the contact.
Moving in towards contact is off course an act of attacking.
Wing Chun does not attack, Wing Chun counter attacks.
Many students struggle to appreciate the true nature of a counter-attack and fail to grasp some very basic even bedrock IDEAS that result from operating from a counter-attacking perspective.
Everyone pays lip service to the notion that we cannot counter-attack unless an attack has happened.
But few join the dots and arrive at the conclusion that an attack has not happened until a strike lands.
Nor do they understand the implications.
If we are in a violent situation we are not bound to only use Wing Chun.
If I choose I can intercept or block an incoming strike or even initiate a preemptive strike of my own, options that may be the better choice in situ.
If I am using Wing Chun Fist Logic the situation has been taken out of my hands, I am already the victim of an attack.
I can only counter-attack after an attack.
After a strike has landed or is at the very least microseconds away from landing.
If the choice is mine {which it will not be anyway} my best option is to let the strike land and not try to prevent it from landing.
Before everyone loses their shit over this comment this is not advice on what to do, it is simply pointing out the conditions needed for counter-attack and as such the conditions needed for Wing Chun.
Letting the incoming strike make contact does not mean that I just stand there and take it, it is more that I control the time, place, and manner of contact.
This is a strategic approach that once understood aids us in being in the best place, at the best time and doing the best thing.
Although this is most definitely a strategic approach it is not about pre-planning or trying to force the attacker into moving how we wish them to move.
It is strategy from the perspective of knowing our options.
Like so much of Wing Chun this IDEA is counter-intuitive but once explored becomes the go to choice.
Sticks and Stones were the first weapons man ever used.
RANGES AND STICKS.
I always get bemused when people who claim to know things about violent physical interactions with other people start to talk about fighting ranges.
Anyone who does know about violence knows that there is only one range.
Contact.
When we consider the range that Wing Chun operates at as a self-defence-oriented martial art, what we are talking about is the other end of an attack.
Even if the initial strike is from what is sometimes called long-range, the follow-up is right down our throats so we should settle down and settle in.
Into being up close and personal.
Our very own Dai Sigung Isaac Newton and Sibak Albert Einstein made it very clear that time and space are two sides of the same coin.
When we are short of one we are short of both, so whatever we do it needs to be very quick, and very close.
There is a great deal of well-intentioned but misguided information kicking around the self-defence community, most of it can be blown away by basic high-school-level physics, and the rest by common sense.
We get out of bad situations by putting the bad guy down, it is not the best thought, but it is the truth.
Sticks and Stones were the first weapons man ever used.
And more than anything else, the only wrong move is not to move.
Concepts are IDEAS, seed IDEAS, that provide a departure point for exploration.
As a ‘Concept Driven’ Martial Art, we can and do, use training methods that are as much about understanding thought processes as they are about fighting.
Especially if we are digging deep into the theory of our FIST LOGIC.
Some of the more nuanced aspects such as INTENTION, which due to the peculiarities of the English language is always tricky to explain, and understanding what it means to release a strike and not push it are areas where a different approach can pay dividends.
Using IMAGINATION is one such tool.
It is important to come at this training with an open mind, but it is equally important to understand that this is just a TRAINING TOOL, a method to help us make a breakthrough that we can then work on with more familiar approaches.
As baby humans, “Play Acting” is how we learn all of our earliest lessons, it is something we all know how to do, and if we can allow ourselves to access this very old skill it can help us see things we would never see by other methods.
But as I say, this is just a training method, I am not suggesting that should be something we do in a dire situation.
All this kind of stuff is working on the conceptual aspect of Wing Chun, and as such we should not make the mistake of thinking that a “CONCEPT” is in any way real or what we are after.
Concepts are IDEAS, seed IDEAS, that provide a departure point for exploration.
Wing Chun Sydney, Australia 