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”
Wing Chun Sydney, Australia 