There’s a great story about Ayoob creating his stress-fire combat shooting programs. Traditional shooting approaches required a complex 9-point body alignment that didn’t hold up under the stress conditions typically faced in lethal encounters. i.e. trained shooters would miss even at incredibly short range because their arms would shake, adrenalin would dump, and they couldn’t produce consistent, reliable application.

Ayoob simplified things down to a 3-point alignment, using alignment mechanics that were far more reliable under stress. The results looked very impressive.

Flashback – Kano, when vying for the position as instructor to the police forces, had to ready his team to compete against many other jujitsu coaches in Japan. Instead of teaching them “deadly” techniques they could never practice on each other with any degree of realistic resistance, he simplified. He removed anything that couldn’t be trained safely, yet repeatedly and applied against an unwilling, skilled, resistive opponent.

Rather than making the art “less deadly” due to missing so-called death techniques (or whatever), they attained similarly impressive results.

Flashback – Did the red junk boat actors, having to use their art to survive, attain a similar realization about simplicity and realistic, progressive, systematic training? Is that why WCK geometry is what it is? If we remove the mystic mumbo marketing jumbo and try to sweep away the return-to-complexity succeeding generations of humans often find necessary to re-impose on martial arts as they become further removed, is it possible? I think so.

Fundamentals aren’t martial arts specific, nor are they specific to martial arts. Stepping back, there seems to be readily discernible patterns to those who “discovered” how to teach functional skill to large groups of people (individuals don’t count — natural ability is too easy a distraction).

When I look for a coach, I seldom if ever care what story they have or even how good they are. I look to how efficiently they can make me good. The best coaches I’ve found make improvement almost immediate, and can get you doing what they can do very quickly. And they all tend to use the same or at least very similar methods to do it.

I demonstrate a movement for the group to work on. They break up into pairs to try it out. And they end up doing anything but.

Sure, they may go through the motions once or twice, but inevitably, they want to immediately know how to counter the move they just learned, and how to counter the counter, and “what-if” this and “yeah-but” that. They want to do everything but train the move.

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What’s the bio mechanics involved with using the Yee Ji kim Yeung Ma as moving horse (yee ma)?

Yee ma, like all other horses, is derived from and extends YJKYM, so the body mechanics are the same, only used for propulsion rather than stabilization.

When doing yee ma, you propel your body by pushing off the rear foot? Or do you step with the front foot then drag the rear foot up?

My understanding is that the Kim in Kim Yeung Ma represents clamping or compression, so if we imagine two equal stabilizers being drawn together, the moment stability is changed in one, it is equalized again by the other.

Likewise, I lift one leg, the released compression propels me, and then the other leg is drawn after (though it would admittedly be funnier if the first leg merely snapped back, rubber band style, like it would in some cartoon world!)

How does the YJKYM best generate/ delivers power for the hit?

“Best” depends on the individual, I use it as a way to hold the hammer of my body before I drive the nail of my fist.

Nope.

Why isn’t Wing Chun like other Chinese martial arts. In other arts, the sets teach combinations of techniques–good forms are really chains of related techniques. It may be a chain of 2, 3,4 or more postures that are designed to deal with an opponent’s counterattack. Why isn’t Wing Chun like that?

Yes, Wing Chun forms don’t do combinations in the sense of earlier Chinese martial development. If we look at Changquan or even Hung Kuen as poetry, Wing Chun forms translate closer to an alphabet and grammar guide.

It’s basically a decomposition of core movements, tokenized, indexed, and presented in a bare-bones progressive training system.

This means you can’t rely on combination memory burned into you through simple set repetition, but gives the advantage that, since there will always be near-infinite combinations in application, it forces you to transcend pattern much earlier along the learning curve.

Harder to learn, but time-saving if you can learn it.

How long does it take to become a sifu? I want to be one.

If you take a student (someone asks to learn from you), you’re a sifu. Whether you’re a good sifu or not is an entirely different matter, but either way you’re a sifu.

It’s like having a child. You may be an experienced individual with decades of child-care behind you before you have a child, or you could be barely more than a kid yourself with no idea how to care for anyone, but either way, you’re a parent.

Fighting doesn’t really matter. Some people never studied WCK, some never studied any martial art, and can fight incredibly well. Teaching quality also doesn’t matter. It’s a completely separate skill set that requires specific and dedicated training all its own.

So you could find a clueless sifu who fights up a storm but can’t teach worth a d@mn. Or one who knows some, can fight some, but can teach you really well. Or one who knows a ton, can’t fight out of a paper bag, and struggles to pass things on. One in a million might actually know it, use it, and be able to pass it on to wide range of students with differing needs and learning styles. Grab those when you can, or grab the best total package you can get to consistently enough for it to matter (if Yim Wingchun herself offered to teach you but only for 15 min. every second decade, your progress might be slow).

Sifu is just a word, a martial/religious embodiment of the mentor/teacher/parent relationship, or an honorific applied to anyone with any kind of skill (driving, cooking, chess, etc.)

Best to look beyond the skill to the person behind it. Are they someone who can teach what you need, are willing to teach it, are able to teach it in a way you can pick up, and is consistent enough for you to make progress (bonus points if they’re decent human being as well).

You’re a modern combat athlete. You go to the gym. You spar. You train on the bags. You sprint. And you likely do some type of attribute development, and more than likely that attribute development is systematic, progressive, and designed to get your from point A (your current state) to point B (where you need to get).

While personal training methods, equipment, and protocols have certainly changed over the years, the need to train certainly hasn’t.

What does this have to do with forms like Siu Lien Tao, Chum Kiu, etc.? Good God y’all, absolutely everything!

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Buried here beneath record-setting snowfalls, whole houses and buildings hidden behind new mountains created merely by cold and crystal and plow and plight, its all but impossible to imagine the hardy plum flower blossoming defiantly in the face of harshest winter.  

Which, I guess, is the point.

Happy springtime everyone. Yes, even those of you upside-downers rushing towards the fall (we’re on Foshan standard seasons here!)

May your Wing Chun Kuen understanding and application likewise burst forth rejuvenated and renewed.

I am quite certain my sifu is the most awesome of all sifu’s, yet I never see him mentioned on the message boards. Are people really unaware of my sifu’s supreme awesomeness?

Yes, but don’t let it stress you.

Everyone loves their sifu and loves to see their sifu acknowledged and loved by others. Only natural. And everyone thinks their sifu is the bee’s knees, Yip Man’s nephew or son or first or last or super special, or Sum Nung’s son or uncle or teacher’s son, or best technician or fighter or whatever, or inside the Fung family, or inheritor of the Cho legacy, and it goes on and on.

And hey, maybe there’s a little ancient man in Chinatown repairing bikes who never says a word but was the last student of 400 year old Ng Mui?

The internet is the biggest sea there is, and even the largest blue whale has plenty of room to swim around.Best to just read, share, exchange, learn, relax, and ride them waves.

A bad rep is no fun at all. It wastes time, it wastes effort, and it gives a false sense of accomplishment.

We’re talking about repetitions, of course (not reputations, you salacious gossipmongers!)

Let’s make punches our straw man (or straw technique, if you will). It’s sounds good (and mass macho!) to brag about banging out 1000x punches (or sets of 1000x), but is it? What do you gain by large numbers? Muscle fatigue? Mind wonder? Are you getting better at Wing Chun or just worse at math?

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