Sports Psychologists are often engaged to address the Sef-Talk of the player.
Hi Guys,
The Sil Lim Tao is like a three-legged stool, and like a three-legged stool if we remove one of the legs the stool fails.
The area that is the third leg is the area that in sports is the realm of Sports Psychology, and this is an area we would all do well to research.
Sports Psychologists are often engaged to address the Sef-Talk of the player.
We are no different, that is part of my job as a teacher.
Self-Talk may appear to be a minor part of learning a Martial Art, but once we can ‘clearly’ see the BIG PICTURE, we come to the conclusion that it is, in fact, the most important part of our training.
You have heard me say over and over that the most important aspect for a Martial Artist to develop is honesty.
A genuine plus here is that this aspect of our training delivers a major positive effect on our everyday life.
Positive, honest Self-Talk firstly benefits our training and then leaks into our all-around behaviour making us more reliable and more responsible people, better people, speaking the truth to ourselves leads to speaking the truth to others and by extension living the truth.
Living the truth leads to good decision making not just in a violent confrontation but in every interaction that we get involved in.
The first and most important step is, to be honest about our training.
Honest about ourselves and why we are training.
Honest about what it is we are training and where and why we would need it.
On the whole Wing Chun people are not aggressive people, we would prefer to avoid confrontation than engage it, we choose to be good citizens.
But this is not a description of the person attacking us.
There is a fair amount of political correctness in Martial Arts training, very few students are comfortable to admit that we are learning to be violent, to be better at violence than the person being { not attempting to be } violent to us, but this is the core of what we do.
Violence is rarely the answer, but when it is the answer, it is the only answer.
TIM LARKIN.
A large part of the ‘Third Leg’, our Psychology or as I call it our ‘FIST LOGIC’ is becoming comfortable with this proposition.
Every sports team of any merit has a sports psychologist on their staff, the difference between ‘Elite’ teams and just very good teams is frequently down to their psychology.
The difference between going home or going to the hospital could be down to our psychology.
WHEN IT IS GO-TIME THERE IS NO CHOICE EXCEPT TO BE BE ALL IN.
Force summation of a rower. (source: sportsmedbiotech, 2009)
Up goes the cry ‘Wing Chun does not use strength”.
Guess what? Conditioning and fitness are not just about strength!
This is a reposting from 18 months ago, but this is a vital piece of the puzzle. Rule #1 if you wish to win a blue, be a better human.
I want to spend a few weeks looking at various types of and approaches to conditioning to make the most of our training, this may sound off-key but there is a great deal more to being effective at Wing Chun than just learning Wing Chun.
Fighting is a physical experience, so surely there needs to be a physical element to the training.
It makes no difference what so ever if we do ‘Internal’ or ‘External’ Wing Chun.If we depend on ‘Thought Force’ or ‘Physical Force’
If our body is not up to the task of performing as the blunt instrument needed to deliver our force of choice we could be in serious trouble the day we need to use it.
Hands break when they hit faces, this is the real reason Boxers wear gloves.
Talking to certain sections of the Wing Chun community about the need to introduce strength and fitness is as difficult and fruitless as talking to an Australian Liberal politician about the need to phase out coal.
Up goes the cry ‘Wing Chun does not use strength”.
Guess what? Conditioning and fitness are not just about strength!
It is just as much about building mobility to get out of the way, improving our VO2 Max so we do not gas out in 5 seconds or developing the resilience to not fall in a heap if we fail to get out of the way and get hit in the head.
Wing Chun very strangely does not have specialised training regimes such as Chi Kung of other T.C.M.A.
I have no idea why this is, it makes no sense.
But perhaps it does, perhaps we have just stopped identifying them as such, upgraded them to something else, helped of course by the post-war Hong Kong entertainment industry.
If we had not all fallen the romanticised exploitation of Chi Kung and Kung Fu that was perpetrated by the Shaw Brothers beginning in the early 1950s perhaps we would have realised that Chi Kung was a precursor of today’s sports science and maybe, just maybe Kung Fu would not have slipped into obscurity and disregard compared to Modern Combat Sports.
The idea of a genteel scholar defeating thugs was such a breadwinner for the Shaw Studios it was pretty much the theme of every movie, perhaps unintentionally it allowed weak unfit people to think they could compete if they just played Kung Fu.
Many still do.
Many are still wrong.
What conditioning do I think we need?
This is a very difficult question to answer, it all depends on what type of trouble we think we will get into.
I am sure we all think different things.
Do we need to be steady, stable and strong?
Do we need to be mobile, quick and adaptive?
Can we be both?
If we can begin to see all of the Forms as being conditioning exercises, at least at a base level, we are at least starting from a sound base.
By all means, keep seeing them as ways to circulate Chi if that is your approach but first let them be simply physical.
In my last post, I mentioned the ‘Stretch Reflex’ and how in some situations it can have a negative impact on our actions.
That does not mean that the ‘Stretch Reflex’ is always negative, there are many situations where it can be used to our advantage.
Understanding the ‘Stretch Reflex’ and how we condition our body and our thinking to work with it, and of great importance understanding that we cannot influence it in any way.
No matter what some people may say or even claim, we cannot train a reflex. Training is a conscious action, reflexes are unconscious actions.
To think otherwise is to pursue a fantasy.
But once we identify, understand and can predict the effect of a Stretch Reflex we can adapt our training so that it has less of a chance of working against us.
So that we have less of a chance of working against ourselves.
There are a lot of people that say Wing Chun does not work on account of some very sad YouTube fights, the simple truth is that a hobbyist, a weekend warrior, no matter how skilled or capable will always loose to a full-time combat athlete.
Survival of the fittest is not a cliche, neither in the ring or on the street.
If we wish to do better we must become more athletic, more dynamic, more physical, the whole IDEA behind the do not use strength argument is a misrepresentation, it should be “do not depend on strength”, which really is just another way of saying trust your skill first, however, if your attacker is smaller and weaker there is nothing wrong with using strength, it will work.
The popular sales pitch representation that doing Wing Chun will “level the playing field” against a stronger, bigger, faster, fitter opponent only works if the opponent has no skill, only brute strength.
Being faster, fitter, stronger does not guarantee a win, but it helps.
Get fitter, get stronger, get faster, get conditioned, and of course, keep improving your skill.
Once we change Wing Chun it is no longer Wing Chun.
At the heart of my own training is the practice of ‘Deconstruct – Reconstruct’.
During ‘Lockdown’ this has been elevated to a much higher level.
Instead of being a weekly practice, it is now more often daily.
Whenever I deconstruct what I know and then reconstruct the components there are always a few bits that I realise are not needed, so they get discarded, and my training becomes streamlined, more compact, more concise.
Occam’s Razor.
I am at a very different place than where I was before COVID 19.
Something that I have always known is that training is training and nothing more.
Nothing we do in training will be usable in an environment that is different than the one we train in.
A violent encounter is a ‘VERY’ different environment than our training environment.
The usual response to this statement by most people is that when needed we will just adapt our training to the new environment.
Really?
Are we to become some kind of Kung Fu Flying Fish.
To adapt means to change from one state of being to another.
Once we change Wing Chun it is no longer Wing Chun.
If what we depend on to get us out of a dangerous situation is not Wing Chun why are we training Wing Chun?
The most obvious example of this is Chi Sau.
Chi Sau has no connection to reality, in fact, Chi Sau only works when playing Chi Sau.
These geometric concepts of Wing Chun are presented in relatively fixed positions and shapes congruent with their respective Forms but they need to translate to all Forms
We had a great nights training on Monday, it was very theory-heavy but all the guys were up for it so it was a real eye-opener and very enjoyable as the teacher.
This post is, on the whole, a memory aid for my guys to go back and refresh their thinking because there was way too much information to take in in one evening.
Theory can be dry, and it is always tricky because only people with genuine fighting experience understand that theory and reality are in no way related, so we mixed it up with a lot of live contacts to feel the IDEA.
Of equal importance, we worked hard on creating a language to describe the work that we could all understand.
One of if not the first theory we encounter is “Centreline Theory”.
What is a centreline?
The definition of a Centreline is a line that bisects a plane.
The Wing Chun Centreline bisects the Coronal or Frontal plane of our body dividing us into left and right sides.
An imaginary line connecting ourselves to an opponent is not a centre-line, this is a common misunderstanding that leads people down the wrong path, in theory, our Centreline acts like a plane {Sagitalplane} extending forwards so it is easy to see how this confusion arises.
The use of the term Centre-line for a line from person to person is a misnomer it would be easier to grasp if we called it centre plane.
If this is confusing ask yourself “If a line from myself to my opponent is a centreline, what plane is it the centre of? What and where are the two halves”?
This may seem like a triviality but if we do not understand what a Centreline is how can we understand Centreline Theory?
This line that our perception creates that we think links us to an opponent can be anything we want it to be because it does not exist, I like to think of it as the line of mass, this IDEA can tie into other aspects of our strategy and theory.
Line of Mass is just a name we came up with on the night, if it does not work for you pick a different name, just not Centreline.
The reason I chose Line of mass is that irrespective of what type of movement is being used the opponent’s body mass follows this line, and as for ourselves, this is how we promote our body mass toward an attacker even as we appear to be avoiding an attack or moving away.
Then there is the attack- line, this is a line that runs fro the shoulder or the hip of an attacker in toward us.
An opponents attack aways finishes at a point on this line, even from a wildly swinging punch or kick, redirecting this line, and not the arm/fist/weapon using this line is the purpose of our defensive manoeuvres.
Intercepting the attack line and not the arm/leg is the most effective way to defend.
Chi Sau helps us identify and understand this and it also shows us how to create diagonal movement by the use of circular arm motion and curved arm paths.
The proximal to distal {in to out} direction of our action is always in a straight line even from a curved movement, i.e. Bong Sau travels in a straight line.
Try to not confuse straight with being parallel or perpendicular to an external reference point.
Single Arm Chi Sau essentially moves or redirects an intercepted attack-line up and down on our centre-line.
Double Arm Chi Sau moves or redirects an attack-line from the “inside gate” out to the periphery of our structure or from the outside of our structure into our centre effectively breaking both the attack-line and the line of mass of our attacker.
In a real-world application, we would combine a little of both IDEAs, for example in toward the CL and down or out away from the CL and up.
In a poorly trained person, the attack-line is rarely separated from the line of mass.
As a Wing Chun fighter on the attack, we cannot maximise our output if we do not understand the geometry and how to combine the line of mass with the attack-line while at the same time creating torque through “muscular” rotation.
These geometric concepts of Wing Chun are presented in relatively fixed positions and shapes congruent with their respective Forms but they need to translate to all Forms, all planes and directions of action, this is the heart of the work.
This is one of the principal learning objectives of Chum Ku, understanding how to support the actions {arm shapes} with our body mass as we make contact with an opponent.
Anything that makes contact with an opponent in any way, either defending or attacking creates a bridge and as such is Chum Kiu.
The following video is not the best I have ever done if you are a visitor I apologise, for us INCas it is a fairly accurate representation of what we worked on all week, I will repost it to the BODYWORK page so you can revisit easily.
If you start correctly and finish correctly it is just not possible to go wrong in the middle.
After my Spinal Fusion surgery in 1996, I decided to try a new career path so I studied to be a Ceramic Artist, part of the three-year course was reading up on the history of Ceramics and Ceramic Artists from all around the globe.
It should be no surprise that the approach of many of the Japanese Potters was very closely connected to Zen Buddhism, it was impossible to read about a period or pottery area without deviating into Ikebana, Rock Gardens, the Tea Ceremony and even the Martial Arts.
Everything was interrelated, positions for fighting were used in flower arranging, advice for throwing clay was used in fighting.
One particular thing from pottery that has had a deep influence on my training and teaching of Kung Fu is that when making a vase or teacup only the footring and lip are of importance, and these must be correct and as near perfect as possible.
The IDEA is that when the footring and lip are perfect, nothing in between can be wrong.
When my students get to Chum Kiu this is when I introduce them to this thinking, start perfect, end perfect ignore the middle.
When I have a guest or casual students from other schools I notice that they tend to put most if not all of their attention on the movement in the middle, as a result, they struggle to perform or properly understand Chum Kiu.
So many students think that it is about the moving of the body that they ignore the simplicity of knowing what shape we are in now, and what shape we wish to be next.
If you start correctly and finish correctly it is just not possible to go wrong in the middle.
If the Footring and Lip are in the correct alignment and relationship to each other the pot pretty much shapes itself and does so perfectly. if they are out of synch the pot will throw itself from the wheel.
Our eyes may not see it but our senses feel that when the footring and lip are in harmony the pot breathes, it comes alive and we can feel its practicality.
When the foot ring and lip are out of synch the pot may well be very beautiful, but we see it in a sculptural way, solid but stationary and ever so slightly dead.
This is true of any movement set.
If we start correctly and finish correctly by default with no effort on our part the middle becomes perfect.
If the middle was not perfect we would struggle to finish at all let alone finish correctly.
Bringing this into line with my posts on conditioning I would like to offer a quote from a book I am reading…
“Correct human movement is not open to debate. Technique is not some theoretical idea about the best way to move; it provides the means to fully express movement potential in the most stable positions possible’.
“Becoming a Supple Leopard”. Kelly Starrett.
We should work hard to keep this attitude, things either work because they are correct or they fail because they are not, the result is usually injury and not just failure to fire, this is not a critique of your Sifu or Lineage.
Wing Chun Sydney, Australia 