I ask myself, does my IDEA that Wing Chun has only ‘one move’ transfer to the blades?
I finished my training this morning {Monday 23 / 08}, outside in that glorious sunshine, and I decided to do a little cleaning/maintenance of my sword collection, of course, once you take a sword from its scabbard, ‘Mars, the God of War’ decrees, it must be swung.
Like it or not, every Martial Artist is a Priest of Mars.
2 European ‘Hand and a Half’ swords, a Japanese Samurai Katana, a Pearl River Pirate Wakizashi, a Chinese Jian, an Indonesian Kris, and also, even though it is technically a Dagger, a Tanto.
I am always amazed, even though I should not be, how each sword feels so different.
As a Chef of 50 years, I am well aware and comfortable in the knowledge {the IDEA} that every blade has a different purpose, and that if you treat them poorly, or use them for a lesser purpose… they will bite you.
I have the scars to prove this.
The length, the weight, and the balance of each weapon lend themselves to very different visualisations.
The European Swords ask us to pierce aggressively, to smash and wield almost as a hammer.
The Katana is ‘so’ obviously built for cutting, slashing, slicing and dicing. Quick, lethal.
The Wakizashi conjurs up images of leaping from ships hacking anyone that stands in the way. A tool for strong men.
The Jian and the Kris both talk of mobility and elegance, of footwork and quick thinking. Of noble men and tribal princes.
Finally, the Tanto, close-quartered and possibly sneaky, to the point, if you will excuse the pun. An assassins choice.
I did not use any recognised FORM for my play, I let the blade decide what to do, and they all chose something different yet apt for my imagining.
Was it really the swords making these choices or were my actions the result of the movie I was playing in my head?
I ask myself, does my IDEA that Wing Chun has only ‘one move’ transfer to the blades?
Why not?
One thing I do know is that every time you play with a bladed weapon, be it a sword, a dagger, or a war axe, there is always a real purpose in that play.
A purpose that does not end well.
Later on, sitting quietly, absorbing, internalising what I had acted, how I had moved, and what was my intention, I could see the IDEA, the Sil Lim Tao, in my actions.
But is it really there, or am I trying to force a square peg into a round hole?
If it is there, as I believe it is, how do we manifest it into our everyday work?
There are only two forces in the world, the sword, and the spirit. In the long run, the sword will always be conquered by the spirit.
Playing Chi Sau is great fun, but it is not good training, Chi Sau is only preparing us to do Chi Sau.
I have unfortunately had a lot of surgery in my life, as a result, I have had a lot of experience with Physio Therapists and other medical specialists helping me to regain strength and mobility.
I have also had a lifelong involvement in sport at a better than social competitive level.
As a result, my approach to Wing Chun is a lot more physical and performance-oriented than most of my contemporaries in the Wing Chun community.
From my very one-eyed position, I think Chi Sau is not presented in its best light.
In most Wing Chun Schools all over the planet, a Chi Sau session is usually accompanied by laughter and mutual entertainment.
To many, this is one of the best things about Chi Sau.
However, if we find ourselves in a place that requires us to use our training to save our skin, laughter and mutual entertainment will be pretty low on our to-do list.
When we set in for a Chi Sau session if we hope to get any training benefit it is of great importance that we have a pre-dictated agenda that we are hoping to prosecute.
Chi Sau, like most things, has a long list of pros and cons.
There are some aspects of Chi Sau that on the one hand put us in a strong position of dominance whilst at the same time in a different situation that could well spell out disaster.
In the somewhat basic position of face to face, Bong Sau to Fook Sau where we can both hit each other, this is a good position if we are attacking but turn the tables and we are already on the wrong side of a beating in defence.
This is not a problem if we are aware of these things, but if we ignore them we do so at our peril.
Social Chi Sau has the potential to teach us things that any sane person would avoid like the plague in a violent encounter.
If we are unattentive it can teach us to be in places and try things that would pretty much ensure our failure.
If we just roll with a partner with no overriding objective to be focused on what are the chances of anything we discover, repurpose or even come up with for the first time remaining in the Toolbox?
Chi Sau covers a lot of ground and most bases, it can be used for conditioning, for co-ordination, to develop reflex, for learning how to entangle an opponent as well as how to escape attempted entanglement, to control, to redirect, to press, to borrow force, to lead or to follow the list is almost endless.
Our brain is a self-organising pattern maker, it just loves to stick things away in little boxes, any box it likes.
The odds of it sticking a reflex action in the reflex box, a borrowing action in the borrowing box or a conditioning action in the conditioning box are slim to none.
It will simply stick everything in the Chi Sau box, and it will only ever retrieve that information when playing Chi Sau.
In a violent situation, no one plays Chi Sau.
The only way we can hope that our brain will allow the things we learned, created or discovered in Chi Sau to be used if we are in need is if we have directed it to store different specific information in different specific locations.
If we do not pre-program our brain to recognise these actions in the same way we create them, following the function we believe them to be best suited to, it will have no reason to choose them.
The first step is to stop “playing” Chi Sau.
Chi Sau is training and all training is task-specific, at the very least the aim of Chi Sau training should be to become better at dealing with non-compliant opponents.
This is pretty much the opposite of what we do, even in Chi Sau sparring the overriding attitude is play, we loose contact with the specifics of what we are doing in the face of what we wish to achieve.
It is hard to get Ego out of Chi Sau.
Playing Chi Sau is great fun, but it is not good training, Chi Sau is only preparing us to do Chi Sau.
We need to spend quality time understanding how to translate Chi Sau actions into genuine fighting applications.
The Sporting World approach would be to push it ’til it breaks then fix it, pretty much treat it like pre-season training.
If we are in any way serious about Wing Chun as a useable method of ‘Self-Defence’ or fighting in general then we would do well to regard Chi Sau the way professional sportsmen regard the weight room or the gym.
A place to reinforce the mechanics, techniques and principals.
Using Chi Sau as just Chi Sau does not prepare us for the ‘Big Dance’.
There is nothing wrong with approaching Chi Sau work from the stand-point of strength and conditioning, not brute strength to be sure, but normal, healthy, conditioned human strength.
Fighting is physical much more than spiritual, forget Tai Gung and awaken your muscles.
In some instances, we benefit from working under loads that lead to some kind of structural failure, getting our partner to apply unrealistic levels of force, exaggerated upward force and downforce, especially bigger partners, and then working back to address the problem areas.
The most obvious failure to pay attention to is our loss of balance and unity.
From a conditioning point of view, this will point us in the right direction to do some work on co-ordinating the 3 body segments to bring full-body pressure to the actions we are using.
I am very aware that in a real-world situation, the last thing we would choose to do is stand our ground and carry our opponent’s weight, but fighting is a 2 man event with 2 very different agendas, it may not be our choice, we would do well to prepare for that possibility.
Fighting is not a static activity, stances are important, but it is moving out of them and back into them that we should work on, not just standing still.
It is hard to move left if our feet are weighted to the wrong side, hard to move in control if our balance is compromised, hard to issue or accept force if our unity is disconnected.
Reference the balance position under pressure, instead of feeling that we are standing on the centre of the foot become aware of placing equal pressure on the ball and heel and equal pressure on each foot from side to side.
Correct alignment begins at the feet, not the other way around.
Stack everything on top in the right order and then get someone to apply force.
Especially with a larger partner, it can help us condition our capacity for axial loading of the body which in turn can help us understand how to better handle uneven loads.
Then take what we discover into Chum Kiu.
Here is a great video from K. Star talking about various training regimes for his athletes, it could easily be overlaid onto Wing Chun training morphing through to self-defence reality. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T90H4-UvmB8
Towards the end of the piece he talks about not confusing one level of training with another or how we could use it, if you do watch it think Chi Sau to fighting, this is so important for a Martial Artist, it is 10 minutes long but well worth the time, the guy is probably the most highly regarded P.T. guy in the world at present.
From my perspective, this talks to the heart of any system or sport.
One great quote from it that could easily be from Martial Arts is…
“It is really about taking a shape and challenging that shape because we think that this shape makes a better more robust, agile human being to go out into the world”... Kelly Starret.
If we can connect this thinking to our level of training, if we can remove some of the “Mumbo Jumbo’ about the Forms and see them as Range of Movement Exercises, which at first might seem like a big ask, we can step up, step forwards and step into the “big dance” with confidence.
Yet another Kung Fu Master has been humbled by an M.M.A. Fighter in China, here is a LINK to a video commentary on the event by the China-based professional fighter and trainer Ramsey Dewey, it is well worth watching, Ramsey never just puts people down, he is polite, knowledgable and impartial.
One thing that always sticks out like Doggy Meat Bags to me is the almost complete absence of anything like dynamic or just plain old strategic movement by these Masters, this one just stood still while the M.M.A. Guy picked his spot, stepped in and turned his lights out.
Over the years I have had many conversations with Martial Artists who believe Wing Chun has no footwork, I would play with them and at least hold my own only for them to claim that I was using my old Boxing training and not Wing Chun.
Haters are going to hate no matter what we show them, but then during training at my Sifu’s school training partners would make the same accusations, I.M.O. this was just them trying to find excuses for not moving.
Wing Chun is loved by lazy students if we are honest.
Wing Chun is Boxing, that is what Kuen means.
Surely in the light of so many Kung Fu / Wing Chun hopefuls falling in a great big pile of doo-doo, we would do well to explore the similarities of what we do and what other styles or sports do?
Something we should all realise is that no part-time Martial Artist, living or dead, would last long against a full-time professional Combat Athlete and we do ourselves and our style a disservice when we pretend that they would.
The following 2 videos are part of what I teach my students, some if not most of the information you may recognise if you watched my posts on throwing the discus and Wing Chun.
I advise all of my guys to get on Youtube and watch some Olympic Level fencing, Ice hockey, Speed skating, even a few episodes of ‘Come Dancing’, pretty much anything lively and to try to recognise movements that they use that could easily be from one of our Forms.
Movement is just movement, if you are in trouble the only wrong move is to not move.
I am a firm believer that we cannot train for violence we can only train to control our own movement and our own decisions
To be expected I have a number of friends that are involved in the Martial Arts, a surprising number of them in Traditional Chinese Styles with traditional approaches, they often quiz me on why I put more stock in sports instruction than even the instruction from the very top teachersof my own lineage, especially now that I am at Master level and have my own school and students.
The first thing I ask them to consider is the position that modern sports are a ritualistic replacement for combat, people engage each other with a vigour as intense and desperate as any violent encounter, at elite level even non contact sports tend towards what is essentially full contact and can readily slip into actual physical violence.
Whilewe as Traditional Martial Artists on the other hand are involved in training that never engages an opponent in anger with a real outcome to prosecute and secure, much if not all of our training is a lot closer to imagination than reality so can we honestly say that there is any practical difference between the moves used in Ritualistic Combat vs the moves from Traditional Martial Arts Sources?
Once we begin to ask honest questions we eventually come head first into the ugly question that asks “if we never use our training in anger how do we know it will work in anger”?
We don’t, none of us do including myself, I am not trying to set myself above anyone here, it has been approaching 10 years since I used my skill set to its obvious conclusion.
Relating back to sports I am not sure I would put my money on a player that has been out of the game for 10 years no matter how hard he trained, or who he trained with.
From a personal perspective I have been in enough violent encounters to know that each encounter was different from all the previous encounters, over the yearsI have used numerous styles so the common denominator was not what I did, I did what I did in spite of my training not because of it, the only real common denominator was me as a person.
How I moved, how I reacted to stimulus how, how I read the play as the encounter unfolded.
I am a firm believer that we cannot train for violence we can only train to control our own movement and our own decisions, in the sports environment this could be advantageous positioning and intelligent shot selection, in a violent encounter it could be to get out of the Bad Guy’s way and hit him while he is not looking.
Some well knownissues in the M.A. training environment is that many students get a little too close to the target and try to hit it too hard, it is almost impossible to be aware of this as we do not have an accurate metric to measure it by, however if we are playing a ball sport, Tennis or perhaps BaseBall, being too close, even by as little as half an inch and trying to hit too hard always result in failure.
There is no practical difference between learning how to be in the right place at the right time using the correct timing and technique to hit a baseball or tennis ball as there is in hitting an opponent.
If we allow ourselves this freedom, and it is a case of allowance, blinding dogma is always a choice, we notice that at a base level all of the moves that create the impulse { Force times Time} to generate momentum are the same for every sport, every martial arts style every normal movement.
It is a Human Movement thing.
We Humans have a limited range of movements with which we perform all actions, as obvious as it is, it is of no matter what we may think we are doing we can only move in a human way so to that end all of our moves in any endeavourare the same thing from the same place, there is no special way of doing anything.
Once we see this it cannot be unseen and everything becomes the same, for instance the lateral body shift in the Chum Kiu Form is exactly the way a good baseball player hits a ball, baseball players practice in an environment that is a great deal closer to their sports reality than most of what we do in the Martial Arts.
Positional and structural ideas that Baseball Coaches think are important for hitting a base ball will crossover seamlessly into our practice of Chum Kiu, shot put and discus ideas crossover seamlessly into our Biu Gee practice, if we have the eyes to see without personal bias.
Below is the link I spoke of in the video, it is a bit long at 10 minutes but it is really well presented information.
Wing Chun Sydney, Australia 