More on "What are you Training"?

I am sure you aew well aware by now that a pet theme of mine is

 “Do you know what you are training, and why you are training it”? 

  In 17 years helping with peoples Wing Chun training it has become very obvious that few people do. 

Most people completely miss the point.

I watch Students hitting Bags and Pads as hard as they can and then not even making contact in normal training, I watch people posing Bong Sau or Tarn Sau and still getting hit. I see Students with absolutely no Structure in their Arms and when questioned they say they are working on “Softness” and not using force.

Q. What are you training?

A. Wing Chun Kung Fu, a Martial Art.

Q. When we Strike someone what are we trying to do?

A. Hit them, Duh.

Q. When I intercept an opponents Attack what am I trying to do?

A. Prevent him from hitting me!!

This is what we are training, to hit and to not be hit, everything else is just how we do it, and there is always more than one way, that is why we have so many ways to do it.

So when you are training any Strike you need to be really aware of the intended objective, which is usually to drop your Body weight through the contact into the opponents Body/Face/Leg. 

If you have been doing Wing Chun for more than 6 months then you should be well aware that we aim to hit the same Target multiple times in rapid succession, the reason for this is that trauma is cumulative,  it builds up, when someone tries to hit something really hard what they are trying to do is get more weight to land on the Target at the first chance, so let us say that a really hard Punch is 40Kg. Punching really hard is almost impossible to do simultaneously with your defensive posture, it is always just coming from one side, it usually requires Strength, Strength creates Tension, and Tension prevents us from dropping our Body weight through our Frame, it also requires a huge commitment and is unsuited to a follow up Strike, but lets pretend it lands, bang 40KG {that is of course if our opponent has not stopped it because they are also often telegraphed}, on the other hand a fast 10Kg strike can be done simultaneously with our defence, and can be easily followed up with 7 or 8 more strikes, so I can in fact deliver twice the payload for a fraction of the effort and with a far greater success rate.

When you are training your defensive postures, lets use Bong Sau as an example, the objective is to avoid being hit and not to make a good Bong Sau, and remember that Bong Sau is a movement not a shape, so the rotation up from Tarn Sau to Forward Guard {Man Sau the Asking Hand, and very important and often overlooked position} is Bong Sau, and the rotation down from the shape many refer to as Bong Sau down to Forward Guard is also Bong Sau. Any Strike is a Force Vector from my opponent to myself, my objective is to change this Force Vector so that the Strike misses, Bong Sau will change the Vector by rolling it out and away from the Target in the Tarn Sau upward rotation and inward and away from the Target if I use the downward rotation.

I am sure we have all heard of “Mind Power” or “Nim Lik” in Wing Chun, my Sifu used to call it “The Power of Intent”. We must be aware of what we intend to do, we must be aware of our objective in both attack and defence. In many ways Wing Chun is just a Tool we use to achieve our intention.

Focusing on the Mechanics will help you understand better how to use these Tools but without the intention of achieving the objective it becomes just an academic study and is no longer a Martial Art.

I hope this post raises some questions in your Mind, write them down and bring them into training.