Moving Quickly

Moving quickly is attained from moving smoothly, moving smoothly is attained by moving slowly!

In Wing Chun many Students just simply fail to connect the dots when it comes to how we generate our Hand speed in punching or our foot speed in kicking, they just try to move their Hands or Feet as quick as they can.

If you have been doing Wing Chun for more than 25 minutes then you already know that we define "Power" as being the result of "Mass times Velocity", and that the Mass we are referring to is our Body.

In easy terms weight moving in an accelerating way {not necessarily at high speed for instance 100 Kph. high speeds tend to reach their own maximum velocity and as such have no acceleration, just at a steady increase in acceleration for instance steadily moving from 1 Kph through to 6 Kph}, and we do this by connecting a series of separate movements that run simultaneously.

If we take "Stepping Punch", the movement of the Leg pushes the Hip {or Centre of Mass} this in turn moves the Shoulder area at the same speed, we then add the rotation of the Shoulder joint that moves the upper Arm and extends the elbow forward, we then add the rotation of the Elbow Joint that that extends the Wrist forward and then we add the rotation of the Wrist that extends the Fist forward.

Leg pushes {Hip} Shoulder, Shoulder pushes Elbow, Elbow pushes Wrist, Wrist pushes Fist.

If the Leg is moving at say  4 units of speed, Shoulder at 3 units, Elbow at 2 units, Wrist at 1 unit then the fist at the end is moving with the combined total of 10 units {it would actually be more due to the accelerating velocity but this is not a Maths blog} 2.5 times the speed of our Body movement.    

There is a Hierarchy in place here that must be strictly adhered to, the events in the Chain must flow from the previous to the next, and all events must be operating at the same time, so when the final rotation of the Wrist happens the first push from the Leg is still happening, and so are all the other movements, it should be obvious that for this to happen the speeds of each link in this chain must never surpass the link behind them or the Chain gets broken and simply no longer exists. If you move your Arm quicker than your Body then there is no way that your Body's weight can can flow into that Arm.

Imagine a Relay Race, you cannot pass on the Baton if the next Guy in the Relay is running faster than you!!

At one time or another all of us have pushed a shopping Trolley, our Body becomes the source of Power that moves the Trolley, we are the accelerator, suddenly we come to the ramp that leads to the Car Park and the Trolley begins to get away from us, at this point our body becomes the Brake, this is what happens when you just throw out your Arm, not only do you loose the possibility for your Body weight to increase the power of your strike, your Brake / Body actually causes the strike to decelerate.

So if you wish to improve your contact power, slow down that Arm, slow down that Leg and work on smoothing out the co-ordination of your Body connections, after all that is one of the primary objectives of all of our forms.