Not Using Strength

I know from Years of Teaching that Students get confused about the whole "Do not use Strength" idea, firstly we should realise that it should be described as "Do not use too much Physical Strength" because we all use Strength, using a Strong Structure is in fact still using Strength, just like a strong Focus, so we need to separate Physical Strength, also we all know that if we do not use some Physical Strength then we will not be able to move at all, we will always use a certain percentage of Physical Strength but our aim should be to use less and less Physical Strength as we continue on our Wing Chun Journey, there are a number of reasons for not using Physical Strength, but the most important is that using Physical Strength activates your Muscles, and an activated Muscle does not work as well as a Relaxed Muscle, so using Strength prevents our Muscles from doing the job that we want them to do, and ironically that is the reason we tense our Muscles in the first place, to do a Job that we believe needs Strength, we just tend to use way too much to get the Job done. When we strive to remove the use of Physical Strength what we are trying to do is find out the minimum amount of Strength needed to perform whatever it is we are attempting, this is usually a great deal less than we are willing to believe and so we spend Years and Years taking away a bit at a time.
And then there are some people that immediately stop using all Strength and then they have nothing to defend themselves with, if your Arms have no Structure, and no Natural Strength then they will just become Spaghetti, and if you try to defend your self against someone with Spaghetti Arms they will just have you for Dinner. We must never forget the Wing Chun has a specific task to undertake, to stop us being Hit, deep down we all know this of course and this is one of the reasons we have difficulty taking Physical Strength out of our Arms and our Wing Chun.
The best way to begin to reduce Strength without loosing the ability to keep the Dogs at Bay is to pick one exercise that you are willing to do every time you train for at least the next Year and consciously use less and less Strength / Effort, it is only when you do the same exercise that you can tell if you are really reducing the Strength. The biggest trap and the worst practice is to use Strength in Chi Sau, because Chi Sau is in contact with another Person it is a bit more "Real" than other training and is more affected by your nerves, if you are mentally tense when doing Chi Sau this will result in Physical Tension that will prevent your Muscles from working efficiently and cause you to use Strength. It is really, really important that you do not hit each other in Chi Sau, just Roll.

Wearing Protection when training!!

Last week at a training group session I noticed that someone had leg Protectors in their Bag, they did not get them out but it does prompt me to Blog this.

I am against any type of Protectors {Mouth Guards excepted} in training, this is not because I am so tough I do not need them, but because as far as I am concerned they promote an environment of unreality, I have expressed my opinion many times that we gain confidence in the functional ability of  Wing Chun more from the perspective of the Bad Guy that does not successfully land his strikes or find any way through our Training Partners Wing Chun set up than by being the Good Guy that stops our partner who may just be throwing Half Arsed generic attacks.  Pads prevent you from realising that it is painful to make contact with Good Structure, that this contact can be debilitating and actually take away any chance of a good follow up to the present attack, and this can work at deep levels upon you to stop you having the confidence to offer “Structure” instead of “Strength” in your defence.

From the perspective of a Wing Chun Man attacking a padded Partner, when our Partner can just keep throwing Punches and Kicks without stopping due to injury it can lead to us to believe that we do not have enough “Fire Power’ and this again can lead to the use of Strength and loss of belief in our Wing Chun. I also believe that it takes a far greater amount of “Be Here Now” to strike softly than it does to just go off, and a great big piece of our Relaxation is in the “Be Here Now” and in not loosing our Emotions / Head. 

Lastly, it is only training, do we really need to hurt each other?